This feeling is not new;
not to life, not to me.
I’ve carried it since seventeen,
waited to recognise it since nineteen.
By twenty-one, I’d had three chances,
yet its realisation kept slipping past me
the way moths char to ash
still wishing flames would spare them.
I’ve rehearsed it,
mapped it in elaborate detail —
every step, every exit.
I hoped it would embrace me
in moments of unplanned clarity
whenever my blueprinted dreams
flushed down the commode at dawn.
I have hoped for death
the way moths beg for life
as the blue flame gulps them whole.
I have held a dull blade
deep enough for bone to speak.
I have swallowed sleeping pills
enough to wake the afterlife.
I have slept beside a pistol,
willing my sleep to pull the trigger for me.
I have stared at ceiling-fan blades
wondering if the rope in my hands
believed in gravity more than I believed in myself.
I don’t do any of that anymore.
Time wears you down
and calls it ageing.
I’ve aged enough to stop planning my death,
but not enough
to trust the idea of life.
These days, I only hope
that every time I close my eyes,
it might quietly be the last.
A life spent negotiating deaths
deserves an anticlimax;
a soft ending,
a quiet disappearance,
poetic justice
lost in translation.
And I’m counting on it.
