When Nothing Was Beautiful and Everything Hurt

The burden of the moments leading up to violence

Image licensed from Canva

The best and most terrifying instances of life are when you stop being yourself while still conscious. Those sweet moments of ecstasy when your body and mind lose contact, and for a fleeting second that feels like a lifetime, your conscious and subconscious self becomes one.

Disconnecting from reality, checking out from consciousness with a lingering feeling of being halfway here and halfway nowhere: the wide-eyed clarity of the nanosecond before the orgasm of your life. The minute that blurs into eternity, right before your blackout on that Friday night after the 15th shot. The punch of adrenaline hitting you in the chest that you feel as you jump from an aeroplane with a parachute, the ground closing in on you inevitably, but the freedom is worth the fall, and even the crash.

This is how I imagine death — the moment before you slip away, a final moment of clarity before the unknown, not knowing everything that is too short to remember and too final to tell anyone about. A promise of bliss in the face of all horrors, that might or might not devour you.

This is also how I imagine drowning — weighed down by the things you love, the things that bring life. A final struggle of limbs and lungs and veins and…