Dying is the Easiest Part

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

April 2021

Each and everyone of us have some things that they like about themselves and things that they don't. I like my eyes, a lot of people say that I have tantalizing, big, and round brown eyes that turn almost transparent whenever I'm under the sunlight.

But the thing that I don't like— no, despise—most about myself is that I'm still alive.

I don't even feel alive. It feels like I'm just existing.

And I never knew that even just breathing could hurt this much. Like the air that is passing through my lungs have sharp edges that leave thousands cut on my organs. It feels like I exist, but I'm not really living.

Like I've been submerged underwater for days, but for some reason I'm still not dying. It feels like I'm being tortured and right now, death might seem better than the feeling of endless drowning.

I stare at the painting hanging on my sky blue wall. It was an abstract painting of a man, with the color of red and yellow tears rolling down his cheek. I painted this when I was just sixteen and most artists say that they paint to express how they feel... but I'm not an artist. That was just an attempt to get rid of the boredom that I was feeling back when I was sixteen.

I feel my lips curling up into a bitter grin. I wasn't intending to add tears on the man's cheek, but I remember adding it because it felt incomplete... strange even.

And now I feel bad and I wanted to ask forgiveness from the man in my painting for making him sad, for stroking the brush to add tears on his cheek because now I know... now I know how it's like to feel dejected... depressed.

Now I know how it feels like when the sun rises but it doesn't really shine. Now I know how it feels to see in a perspective of a person who is colorblind. Now I know how it feels to be trapped inside a four-walled room with no door and windows.

Now I know how it feels to die as I live.

I always find people who are drug dependent, drunk, bitter and cynical as hopeless cases.

Drug addicts? They're the kind of pathetic people that I should avoid. Drunk? They're pathetic, too. And those people who are so bitter and cynical about everything? Seriously, they are the worst.

That was my mindset before... but now. Now I understand.

Now I understand that when you are in deep pain, you would do anything, anything to numb the pain and some people use drugs and alcohol as their escape. That's what they do to run away from the thoughts that are killing them second by second.

Now I understand why some people are bitter and cynical. It's because they have their heart broken tons of times, it's because their hope has been assaulted by countless disappointments and now they have no choice but to expect less and see all the worst possible scenarios in everything because that's how you do for survival.

You do everything, and anything in order for you to protect what's that little piece that's got left on you. Even if protecting it is throwing away your hope, building your walls, and giving up on your dreams. Because you know that risking it will make you end up with nothing.

That's why you try to protect the only thing that you got. That's why you push people away because if you don't let them in, you won't have to suffer for another loss.

Now I understand... Now I know all the things that I didn't before.

Because right at this moment, the people that I used to call pathetic are those people that I am with on this same page. Because just like them, I am desperate enough to do anything just to end the pain.