dead alive

"All I want is to feel alive, but I'm dying on the inside
And I've wasted all my time just waiting..."
-Attack! Attack!, Honesty

"They're not dead exactly.  They're just...sort of rotting."
-Dead Alive

Does anyone ever become completely hollow?  Who ever reaches that point and what becomes of them afterward?  I often wonder what has become of me and if I still have some emptying out to do.  It feels like every time I have nothing left to lose, something comes around and takes more from me, whether it be my job situation, losing my looks and my faith or struggling to just feel good enough to mean something to someone.  Have I finally been hollowed out and if not, how much farther until I fall?

Lately, I've been vaguely away of something stirring inside me.  It's not quite a heartbeat but perhaps the hope for one.  It's a residual pumping of blood and better times that echo inside the wasteland of my ribcage.  It's a feeling of skin splitting from sinew, a separation of flesh.  It's an aching in the bones like something gestating.

Have you ever felt simultaneously dead and alive, like your heart is pumping mud and your lungs are housing stale air?  That's where I am.  There are days when I want nothing more than to complete my macabre metamorphosis and rest in the dirt and then there are days when I feel it's possible to come alive again.

And there are days I actually want to.

But all of this back and forth between bereavement and breathing makes me feel bipolar.  I'm tired of my body being blurred between the black and the brightness.  It's annoying and another testament to my indecisiveness.  I can't even decide if I'm dead or just depressed.

When I came out as a cadaver, I felt like I needed to make a statement, like I needed to do something drastic to make a proclamation of some sort, to let the world know my pain.  After I graduated and realized my post college plans weren't going to pan out, I gained sixty pounds and felt like garbage about myself and my life.  And so I said I was dead because it felt good to at least define my depression.  It was something I could label, something I could own and put away in a nice little box.  It wasn't messy like my situation was, like my head was.  Going undercover as a cadaver felt clean and sanitized like an embalming.  It was almost like a catch all clarification for my condition. 

I thought if I declared myself dead, it would help me get a handle on all the pain, that I could make some sense of it and possibly come to terms with it.  But that just wasn't the case.  I've been under the guise of a ghoul for about three years now and nothing has really changed.  If anything, prematurely declaring my demise has put a pause to any progression or putrification I might have otherwise endured.  Maybe in an effort to help myself, I only made things worse.  It's entirely possible.  I tend to do that often.

But the pain persisted so how dead could I have been?  As closed off as I was and as comfortable as I thought I was with it, there was the smallest part of me that still longed for life, for laughter, for feeling something else other than atrophy.  And I still felt pain, still felt the ache of life crumbling me through and through.

But there was something else.  When I looked inside myself, I could see past the collapsed veins and lethargic ligaments.  There was potential there.  There was good inside.  There was a boy who had taken the brunt of the world's beatings to protect a heart he felt was special enough to see the light of day once more.

I'm a mess and I'm often selfish and lazy and judgmental.  I'm stuck in a dead-end job and have to put up with people with bad attitudes and body odor on an almost daily basis.  I long for better people and places and they are all out of my reach.  I'm trapped by money restrictions and bad decisions.  But I have a different perspective on things and a mind that works uniquely from the people who surround me.  And that doesn't make me better.  It just let's me know I don't belong.  And it's frustrating because I feel like such an outcast but it's also encouraging because it reminds me that I am not like the closed-minded people who live here. 

As bitter as I am and as much as I dislike people in general, I still wish everyone would just get along.  I don't understand why people have to fight and be violent and feel the need to be right all the time.  Why is there racism and homophobia?  Why does one person need to have power over another, whether it be the power to tell someone else who to love or how to worship or that they have to worship at all? 

Although I mostly limped around lifeless, being dead did have its advantages.  I was able to step back from the living and observe them in all their idiocy.  I saw all the hatred and politics and bloodshed over oil and money and once again, power.  I saw the bullying and the self-harm and the cruelty to animals and the neglected children and the abused families.  I saw the rich and famous and indulgent throw away money while their neighbors starved.  I saw the addiction to sex and money and drugs and food.  I saw the inner pain that projected outward and manifested in violence toward anything.  I saw how people made themselves feel better by hurting others.  I saw synthetic solutions and temporary relief before suffering set in again.

I saw the people who used God as an excuse to hate and kill and oppress.  I saw the people who blamed the devil for their devious actions and I noticed they never once took any personal accountability for anything.  It was always another force or feeling that called them to action.  I saw God shake his head in sadness over those who perverted his teachings.  And I shook my head wondering how so many people could have gotten God's message so mixed up:  love every one, every where, all the time.  It wasn't that hard of a concept.

And that lack of love was partly how I ended up dead and floating outside the fringe of the world.  I have to also take credit for taking my life as well.  I prepared the noose and the world pushed me off the chair and consequently, I snapped.

But I'm close to coming back.

I always thought I'd resuscitate at some point.  I just wasn't sure how it would happen.  I always envisioned this grand epiphany, that suddenly I'd feel a surge of blood as my body was brought back from the brink of eternal entropy.  I thought I'd find a great job or a special someone who would help the heart beat again.  I thought I'd gain valuable knowledge or find an inner peace that would propel me back from expiration.   

Instead, it feels like I've quietly stepped back inside myself.  I always thought there would be more fanfare and less humming of a fan.  I always thought the moment would be bigger, special, joyous.  And it's not.  And I wonder if that's because I'm not entirely enthused to be back in the world of the living.  Maybe I wasn't ready to be bodily again.  In fact, there were days when I reveled in my rotting, days when I ran the gamut from believing I could breath again to wanting to finalize my death.

But for whatever reason, I'm mostly alive again, mostly because being dead just wasn't all that beneficial to me.  I think it's also because of everything I've witnessed and everything I've thought about and everything I've endured.  I'm no genius and I'm not even special but I have something to say, damn it, and more than ever, I have the tools to say those things and to share them with a wide variety of people. 

And maybe the only reason I came back is to share what I've seen and learned, to point out not only other people's flaws and ineptitude but my own as well, in hopes that calling it out will cause change.  I don't know if it's true but I'd like to believe I'm not so insignificant as to just burn out without leaving some kind of black mark somewhere. 

But I'm not ready to give up my ghost just yet.  I might be mostly alive but there's still a part of me that lingers near the limestone graveyard.  There's still a part of me that seeks to finalize my death.  There's still a part of me that feels meaningless.  There's still a part of me that's rotting. 

And I wonder if I'm any better off being alive.  I don't feel much different.  I don't feel connected to the world or people and I don't feel like I've learned much.  But maybe this is just the first step in a long process of integrating back into a population with a pulse.  Maybe that good job and/or good person will come around who will set off those sparks or maybe I'll be my own flint.  Maybe it'll take some recognition or accolades.  Maybe it'll just take someone telling me they love me.

I am not entirely here and I am not entirely there.  I just am.

"I am.  I am.  I am." 

But I am not out of the woods just yet.

The heart is still too dark to beat.