For All The Canaries
Longing for death is no weakness
Some of us are canaries in a coal mine. A mine of relationships that are leaking toxic fumes. Others die slowly, while the canaries die fast.
Some of our lives are warnings: this is a deadly way to live.
Others have learned to live with their souls writhing painfully on the floor.
Just don’t look down.
They tell the canaries, too: just don’t look down. Where else is there to look, when souls are writhing on the floor?
For a canary, the death of the body is better than the torture of a soulless existence.
Longing for death is no weakness.
The refusal to drink down poison and smile through it as brazen as the bright yellow sun. Do you not know that “I want to die” is also “I want to be free”?
When one cannot find their way out of an endless, gaseous cave, death seems to be the only logical ‘how’.
Some of us cannot lie, cannot numb, cannot repress, cannot fake enough to outrun the pain of pervasive toxicity.
We long to breathe the fresh air.
We live to live free.
In this one precious lifetime, do not all of us long to live free?
But what of the ones among us who would enter the cave with no canary at all, who curse her even being there, for daring to sing, for withering, for existing?
What of the ones who would blame her for her own demise, who would rather watch her die than acknowledge that her death means that they too are dying?
For all the canaries, I celebrate your survival. I rejoice in your flying.
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