Denial

“How could this happen to me
I made my mistakes
I’ve got no where to run
The night goes on
As I’m fading away…”
-Simple Plan

My life wasn’t supposed to end up this way. And it wasn’t supposed to end at all. Not yet, at least. Not like this.

Death is kind of peculiar in how it will come for you. For some, it makes itself known gradually in the form of a disease or old age. For others, it’s as quick and unexpected as a stray bullet to the head or a car crash. Existence is like a bulb that dims over time or blows out in a flash and blankets everything in darkness. Sometimes, death can come from behind, give you the ol' reach around and startle you into awareness and other times it stares you right in the face and you never notice.  You catch the glance of oblivion yet remain oblivious.  We'll never know how many times we've danced with death, been twirled by its twisted hand, only to be spun out of its sights and allowed to bust a move on our own for another day, unaware that a silent choreographer just crawled on the carpet past us.

As for me, I was the oblivious one, the car crash bullet boy. That’s about all I know. I couldn’t tell you when or where it happened exactly, only that it was some time between the end of my first year of college and the middle of my third. My demise disguised itself as the normal aches and pains of existence, except these were the aches and pains of expiration. There was a constant pain in my chest that I simply mistook for broken dreams. My head felt foggy but I still had work to do, classes to go to, papers to write, books to read and lab work until four in the morning. All the while, I hurt. But, I ignored it because it wasn’t really anything new. But it wasn’t typical chest pains. It was something harsher, something beyond the normal wear and tear of being alive. But, I kept going because what other option did I have? Meanwhile, my eyes blurred and needed to wear my glasses more. I was tired all the time and started taking naps any chance I got. I started closing my blinds to shut out the light. I lay in bed as the hurt splintered off in all directions. I would perspire despite being cold.  The symptoms sunk into me and spread out of me, pooling pain in all directions.  This went on and on for days until the crescendo of crushing agony eventually slid into a dull ache. I felt something slowly flowing out of me, thick and viscous like honey but not substantial enough to grasp onto to keep it from slipping away.

And then there was emptiness.

I convinced myself it was some freak occurrence, some stress-related spasm. I knew better but I tried to reason with myself because there was still some semblance of rationale within me, a residual trait of humanity. I feigned fatigue in front of people. “You know how finals are,” I’d say as I let out a heavy sigh. Saturday movie nights still continued and I still participated. I sat around my roommates, these people I had went to class with and lived with, and realized I was not a part of them anymore, if I ever was in the first place. I laughed at their jokes and I smiled when they walked into the room but I didn’t feel any of it. It was all so surface. Maybe I really was just tired, I tried to reason with myself. I had been “on” for so long, pretending to be normal in and out of class, that maybe my body had shut itself off involuntarily. It’s hard to keep up appearances all day, every day. I gotta act normal, gotta try to be funny and likeable. But it wasn’t me just being tired. It was me realizing I was completely incapable of understanding these people, these humans that could sit and talk and create connections but I no longer understood what connections were. How do you like someone? How can you make them like you? How do you fake affection when you realize affection is foreign?

They walked to class with me. They helped me with my projects. They sat and watched television with me, ate with me, played video games with me. But they didn’t know me. I didn't know myself. I had lost what I once was. Or maybe it was stolen from me. Like a thief in the night.

A yearning that led to desperation that led to pain that led to atrophy.

I tried to bury it in the back of my brain but the truth was coming out, oozing from my skull like Play-Doh between a child's fingers. Everything around me screamed that I was not normal, that no one would understand me because I was too messed up, too incapable of making friends, of being human. I cried quite a bit back then, hiding my sobs in loud music and my tears in the cases of my pillows, praying to God and asking Him to make me okay, to restore me. He never answered.

I was alone in a way that I hadn’t felt in years. I had spent so much time trying to turn myself into something acceptable to society, shaping and carving myself into someone who appeared normal to the outside, donning a disguise so I could trick people into befriending me before my internal mess manifested itself as it always did. But, I was starting to feel that all that subterfuge wasn’t working anymore, that the disease inside of me was squirming its way out of me, splitting my skin and dislocating my jaw. It was as if I had climbed a mountain and before I could appreciate the apex, I was shoved over and I toppled to the bottom. Beaten down and broken, I looked up and realized I couldn’t climb that again. I wasn’t strong enough. I was quite literally incapable of standing up and even trying. My motivations were missing, my life was extinguished and it all felt pointless.

I graduated. I moved back home. I became a recluse. The emptiness only expanded into a void that could not be ignored nor corrected. And I told no one of the change that had twisted me into a monster, a heartless, soulless shell of something that had long since passed.  Who would believe me?  Who would understand me?  People that I once cared about so much no longer mattered to me. Art didn’t matter to me.  Writing didn't matter to me. Nothing mattered to me. I cut people out and began to rot in my own private hell.

And that’s when I couldn’t deny it anymore.  My condition was beyond sadness, beyond bitterness. 

In my eyes, I was dead.

The question of why plagued my mind. How could this happen to me?  I thought I had done everything right.  I was good and decent and didn't deserve this.  I left home to start living, not to meet my death. How could it be that the one thing I thought would save me actually wound up killing me. The irony only made the deep hole inside of me expand into an anger that consumed what was left of me, driving my body into another state of existence until I had been pushed outside of humanity and into a world made of glass.  Cold.  Sharp.  Transparent.  Just like me...