Coward

I am a coward. I keep yearning for Death. I am afraid to face up to my miserable life and so I speculate that with Death, comes freedom. I chose to believe that all suffering would end with Death. Yet I doubt my readiness to embrace Death.

Will I have the will to press down hard enough on the blade? Will to press hard enough to break skin...
Will I have the doggedness to swallow poison? Doggedness to fight the coughing and choking that my body will put up as it struggles to expel Death...
Will I have the guts to take the step into nothingness? Guts to experience the sense of intangibility as my body flails out into emptiness...

Perhaps that's why I got piercings. Maybe it isn't about changing or having a new image. Maybe it really isn't something that I've wanted to do for a long time. Maybe it just is an easy, cowardly, foolproof form of self-mutilation.

You know, I've always imagined Death to feel like childbirth. Do you remember the gut wrenching feeling that you have in your heart when the roller coaster cut a sharp turn? Or the feeling when you leap off the flying fox tower? Or the feeling you get at the end of a vacation? It's the low aching feeling that your heart experienced. To be more precise, it's a combination of the three experiences above.

The dread that you get on board the roller coaster. The feeling when you wished that something would end as soon as possible. Add that to the uncertainty and jitters as you steeled yourself for the huge leap into the air. The unsure-ness and cottonwool-ish feeling that seems to last forever. You know that everything will be alright straight after the jerk that'll pull you back from plummeting to earth, yet the jerk seems to take forever to come. I am talking about the precise frame of time before the jerk. Combine these two with the sigh-ish feeling you experience at the end of a good vacation. The unwillingness to leave a place, the "can't bear to leave it all behind" perpetual aching of your heart. Doesn't it make sense that birth feels exactly the same? The uncertainty, the unwillingness to face up to changes and the expectation of something new and unpredictable. Something new is bound to happen and you look forward to it, at the same time, you're refusing to change your current status. It's like you're floating in embryonic fluid. Surrounded by a warm empty void. You feel so intangible and insignificant.

Maybe Death is the beginning of a new beginning. The reset button in the cycle of existence.

Now, I'll just have to find the courage to press it sooner.