Dying To Live
Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver once said when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy her and snaps shut the purse, she wants to step through that door filled with curiosity — and I hope she did.
Death came for me one day, flat line screaming, but saved his bright coins. Snapped shut his purse and left me twitching, naked but alive, on a cold metal table as the paddles gave me back life and other gifts.
They say you see white light, but it wasn’t white so much as bright, like an overexposed photo on a sunny day. Devoid of eyes, hands or body, I drank light with my soul, before that door slammed shut.
Woke weeping for the light to see the doctor, face wet with tears. Hear his voice, ragged, say oh thank god. Slowly dawned on me he did not lose a patient that day. The loss was mine. I lost myself. Who I used to be.
There is a before me, and an after me. They look the same, laugh the same. Walk the same and talk the same. But they are not the same. And I? I am slowly becoming death. To all that was never really life in the first place.
Propriety and people pleasing, dead. Expectations and miseries. Dead. Fights over petty grievances, dead. This job, a relationship that should never have been, dead. I…
