Keep yourself alive.

Dying is easy. I’m clever enough to successfully carry out several different and silent methods that take no time to prepare. I was thinking of some kind of a list of things that stopped me from dying. The list was pretty much blank. It’s a barren kind of powerful feeling, not having anything tying you to life.

Maybe I’m just fucked in the head, or maybe it’s just the way I am, but others’ love for me didn’t make the list. Not Mom’s, not Dad’s, not my friends, not Neesha’s, not Tania’s, not Sanjit’s. I could just die when I wanted to. With a lot of pushing, I can be made to believe that I’m special, but that’s artificial. I’m never gonna be Mozart or Picasso or Joyce or Ramanujan. Hell, I’d never even make it a millionth of the way there!

The reassuring fear that’s supposed to kick in, as I’ve heard, when one starts thinking about death too does not come to me. Everything I do, or ever did, seems so colossally pointless and uninteresting that it wouldn’t matter if they stopped. It wouldn’t matter to me at least. People would miss me, mourn me, but that’s childish and again, mostly artificial. Maybe a lot of good I could have done a lot of people would not exist anymore, but I’m actually too selfish to be affected by that. Life is boring, pointless and routine, and I’ve just been trying to fool myself into believing that it isn’t. I won’t anymore.

People have tried to make me see sense about this issue by telling me to look at the lives of the truly wretched people. Never worked. Their lives can be as wretched as they are, that doesn’t make me like mine any more. Truth be told, I’ve no idea why I dislike my life, and its not as much my life as living. So if I was to ask myself what I’d like to change so that I’d like to live, I wouldn’t have the answer.

Fact is, I’m tired of living. It’s been long enough and tiring enough. Someday, soon, I’ll be fed up enough. I’ll be called an escapist, but I’d like to ask, what is it that I did and they’re “brave enough not to” escape? It’s not as simple as Pink Floyd is it? I don’t believe in afterlife or suicide notes. Others’ reactions to my death do not bother me. I once heard a story about a youth called Narcissus who died because he’d only look at his own beauty and love himself, and that’s the closest thing I can sort of call on to show my side of the fence. Maybe life just isn’t what I want it to be, or thought it would be, and I’d rather not continue. Once I die, my body, a nice collection of chemicals, will decay, and I’d have gone permanently from the Earth, and in time, from people’s minds. Things would return to normal. I cannot imagine a better situation, for me. There are a lot of things I’ve kept unsaid, but I’m sure I could do it in bulk, with A4 sized papers folded up in neat white envelopes, addressed in red and gold ink, to be opened when needed.