Today I was washed over with overwhelming sadness. I walked into my empty house and felt it swelling from within. She wasn’t here. This was all wrong. And after a few moments I cascaded slowly into my routine. My false movements. My fake life. I sat down to write, but nothing came. Instead I listened to the last band she mentioned loving. I curled up in a ball and I listened to the forlorn words. I should have known. I should have been better. I should not be here.
I really am a dead man. This is not my life. I am not who I think I am. I am not who I tell myself I am. I’m just a shadow of someone that died almost two years ago. Just a fake nothing without purpose. And yet somehow I sat up on the bed and I wrote this. I fought the urge to drink my pain away again and I wrote this. I didn’t call out to anyone. I didn’t act like I was fine. And deep within my mind I think that maybe, I might have admitted that I am depressed. I might have acknowledged that the situation won’t ever get better and that nothing can be salvaged from it. The good that I do in this falsehood may not be worth all the bitterness and sorrow it brings me.
A fake smile and a fake life. An empty bottle and a growing desire to burn out my lungs with the death wish of my ancestors. I’m just a sad little liar with nothing to prove and nothing to gain.
Exactly what she said I was.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll be someone else. Maybe tomorrow I’ll really be dead. Or maybe, it could all be a dream. A lavish nightmare to beckon me from my Scrooged life and undo my mistakes before they happened. Before I ruined everything.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
And so I leave to sleep or not or to routine myself to death or not or to make some new excuse for swayed focus. Life goes on. Death goes on. I am death. I live dead. And I cannot change being dead. And in that death there is no chance to sleep. No chance to dream. There is only despair. And I am sure that in all my complaints and squabbles that I deserve it.
I truly do.
–Alan Venar
Alex Tisdale 