Mirror Mirror

I never thought myself a writer. In truth, I never thought myself expressive at all. In being alone I forgot, perhaps, what it was to have someone to whom a fleeting moment may be explained, to be understood. Pen and paper make poor substitute for the beloved, but they are all that is left to me here, and so I shall write. Not a week may go by without that awful thought. It plagues me day and night, an abyss that I should jump into by ever entertaining, and somehow a siren’s call that I long to follow to a watery tomb. A tomb, I suppose, is too grand for my sort. I have become a wretch. To wallow is unsavory, but I am here alone, and it is only for myself that I write, and thus why should I not permit myself to wallow? Perhaps in putting this terrible truth on paper I will finally be at ease, and it will be gone from me. I hope this to be true. Therefore here it is: I regret that I live still. Moreover, I regret that I did not have the fortitude and conviction to end my life while I still felt some hope and warmth remaining. There were days and nights, many of both, when an ending of it all felt so tangible and near that it would terrify me by its ease of access. Always something forbid me; though I felt despair and misery deeply, Faith’s countenance would restore peace to me, and when she could not do so, I struggled with myself to live. I knew not always for what I strove. Perhaps it was only a fear of pain that prevented it. Now that I have lived and have seen all I once hoped for come and then pass me by, I am haunted more and more by the specter of regret and sorrow. It is the cowardly sort which I hate to admit, but to myself, I must. By now I am quite certain that only I shall ever see these treacherous words, only I shall ever behold my own cowardice in all its wretched appearance, and that gives me some comfort at least. I wish more and more that I should have been spared all of this heartache. Nothing at all seems to await me as a future. When I thought most that I should be free of life and should extinguish the hope that rested on a distant horizon, I fell to a sort of melancholy like a daze at first. It seemed frightful. Death loomed like a monolith, and yet_ I found a peace with it. On accepting my death, I felt peace and then even joy and comfort that all was to come to an end. I bore no more responsibility, had no potential to cultivate, and no more did I have to retain my dignity. I would have the ultimate of calm. It gave me happiness. And then, as with many things, it was torn from me, for I was bid to live and to continue on, and I did. They told me I had been saved. That I had gone mad and been rescued from my madness by they, my saviors, my guardian angels. I entreat myself now to remember with the clarity of that moment that I was not mad. My reason was sound, my mind unclouded. I was gifted with that which I did not want and even recoiled from because they themselves wanted life and could not believe that any in possession of their wits should not. Day by day I feel the weariness of a life I have abdicated. There is nothing I want. There is nothing I hope for and nothing I may achieve. It is true ultimately that I am without purpose, that I am dead already in spirit and soul but forced to remain in my own body and in this world which proves again and again to me that it does not want me. Where, now, are those who bid me live? They did so out of pity and out of selfishness because they think it inhumane that a madmare should choose herself to die, and that it would be a stain on their consciousness to allow her to do so, yet once they are sure that I live, I find the truth. They bid me suffer. They have not saved me but condemned me instead to hell, to fire, to damnation. To life. When these thoughts come to me, it stirs in the coals of my heart a raging fire. I am consumed by anger and grief. I hate, hate those that stand by to my anguish and only leap in when I endeavor end this torture that is inflicted against my will. Perhaps I am mad. I must entertain that when I am lead to wonder if perhaps I did really die that day, and that this, this is the torment of eternity promised me for my sins. Perhaps this is the punishment for my meaningless existence, and it is meaningless, I say not to ask pity but because in all that I remember and can recount, I find myself to have been a bystander in this life, to have accomplished nothing and failed all that was expected of me. I live in mediocrity; worse, in failure. This is what I now believe wholeheartedly. It is twofold. First, that I was never inflicted with a madness to so wish for my own destruction, and second, that in dying I should have been happier than in life. And yet still I live. It is so, and for that, there must be purpose. Shall I yet become something besides a miserable creature? I have no drive or ambition to do so. Nothing seems to give me fire or purpose. I feel a shadow of myself, lost, only scarcely attached by a thread. Trapped as I am in my home, having lost all I hold dear, broken to a thousand pieces, I cannot imagine any future for myself. It is inevitable. I weary of the sound of destiny tick, tick, ticking ever nearer, saying in its sickly tone that I shall yet be the bringer of my own destruction and still refusing to release me from the iron grasp of life. I despair and reproach it. I am indignant, angry, even maddened by it. My mind feels ever smaller by the day until I fear I shall be suffocated by the crushing weight of my skull. Each thought is a struggle, each moment spent awake more dreamlike than the last. I dare not sleep, for fear that when I awake, many years will have elapsed, yet I long for the gentle embrace of unconsciousness like a cool pond on a hot summer’s day. I only wish it were summer, that I should be too aggrieved by the heat to spare a thought for my own miserableness. That a blade of light should pierce through the ever present night wrought by the intertwining of the branches above me… how I wish for the sight of a blue sky. A happy ending comes to those who know best when to cut a story short. Regrettably yours, M. M.