A moment of calm

I don’t want to die anymore. I mean really, honestly. I am not saying I have a sudden overwhelming rush for being alive, but calmly, quietly, seeping in through little cracks in the sides of my thoughts and conscience, is a desire to not be dead. I have a desire to distance myself from death, to walk away and to not go into its arms, not for decades at least. I have spent about 6 years of my life being overwhelmingly obsessed by death. When I see writing about grief, about people who they have lost, my head automatically connects me to the person who has gone. I have always felt like I am already gone, clinging onto a body and a beating heart but desperate to be elsewhere.

Now I don’t feel like I’m clinging to anything. I’m not swimming upstream anymore, instead I just feel like a person. I am lucky to be alive, lucky to be supported, lucky to be loved. When people talk about grief and death, for once, I feel like I am on the side of the person grieving. I am one of the millions of people left on this planet after the horrible impact of death taking away the people we love. I know life is really hard but for once, I don’t want to quit. I am sure I will cry, probably a lot. I will scream, I will feel totally helpless. I will dissociate, I will probably fail to recognise people I love, and I might even hurt myself. I am not ignoring my issues; I know that they are still there, and that I am not yet in control of them. That doesn’t mean I can’t accept them a little bit, and accept that life is going to sometimes feel impossible, but it is still my life. It’s the only one I am going to get, I can’t change my brain, but I can let myself survive it. On a possibly bigger scale, I can stop the people I care about from having to deal with losing someone. I may not understand why they would rather keep me around, but that part is not my choice to make.

I want this to go away, but I don’t want it to go because all of me is gone. I think part of me is worth an entire life.