What Follows
Distraction

When my mind gets the time to sigh, I think about how I decided to kill myself.

Like, why is it that I chose to bleed myself to death and not just jump off my balcony? Why did I slit my wrist instead of my femoral vein?

What would’ve been less painful? Taking a deadly fall, with blurry lights in my peripheral vision and abundant air rushing through my lungs (would it have felt like breathing in three hundred breaths at once?), before my head gets smashed into a beefy mush? Or watching myself tick-tock away to death as my body gets drained clean of its blood?

Which is faster, which is more beautiful?

And I wonder that because I worry that one day, in this hell of mine, I’d have to repeat my death over and over again. I worry if the way I chose to kill myself wasn’t the least painful.

And whenever I try to remember how dying felt like, I always fail.

Listen, I’m trying to tell you all this to distract you from the fact that I find it weird that the last day of my first cycle was at William’s place. I’m telling you this because I don’t know how else to start explaining how is it that I know that this was the last day.

I’m talk-talking because I can’t find a way to sugarcoat the fact that I’m writing this from my second cycle. And I thought it’d be unfair if I went into the memories I have of that last day without explaining a thing or two about myself.

I don’t know how to help you take this slow, but I’ll try.

Roseline isn’t my real name, which means that whether or not I existed will always remain a mystery. And I did this on purpose, so whether or not you choose to believe in my anonymous ‘existence’ is completely your choice. But now you know the risk it takes to try messing around with something beyond our mental capacity. Death.

Actually, almost all the names here are just false labels I gave to very real people.

Which brings us to Tobias, the only not real person, because he/she is dead and has been dead for several generations. When I revisited my memories of him/her, I imagined him/her as a tall, hazel-eyed, redheaded boy because that, in my opinion, suited his/her memories.

Tobias was the name of my book crush. Divergent.

Tobias never quite existed as you know him. He could’ve been a she. He could’ve been an Aaron or a Mark. He could’ve been short and bald. He could’ve been anything, anything at all, and I know that if I ever brushed past him I wouldn’t know him for the death of me, because all I have are stories. Just stories without context, without emotion.

I sometimes wonder if there are memories we had together that I completely forgot because I feel like they are less than thirty days worth. I sometimes also wonder if the feelings I imagined ‘I-must-have-felt’ in those memories are even close to real.

I sometimes think that maybe I’m a hopeless romantic and just added a lot of feeling than there ever was.

It’s maddening, you know? To not really understand the depth of something that you only remember as ‘profound’. It’s maddening to try to fill in huge, empty gaps with things that might’ve never existed to reach the level of profoundness that matches your memories’ ‘expectations’.

It’s maddening to add extra handholds, whispers, or eye locks to make sense of the jungle of events in my head.

You might ask yourself; how the hell am I reading this if it’s coming from another dimension? From a ghost?

Good question, but does it matter? Does it matter if I’ve managed to sit on Jacob’s laptop and typed it in, or scribbled it down on paper and left it on your table, or just enchanted a few selected ones to be able to read my message?

Does it really matter how you got this?

So before typing in/ writing/ enchanting you into reading about my very last day in my first cycle, I thought it was important to orient you into what is really happening behind the scenes.

I’ve been thinking/hoping lately. And by lately I mean the time it took you to read this.

I hope you find meaning to your life, even in the most ordinary, mundane things. I hope you love yourself enough to stand up for it and walk away from anything that could bring you down.

I hope you learn from your mistakes/ disappointments/ heartbreaks and not kill yourself for them. I hope you understand that we’re all programmed to just see our problems/ mistakes/ embarrassments to get so caught up in them that they consume our whole lives. That they kill us. If we let them.

I hope you understand that by this I mean that maybe I know why I killed myself. I killed myself because I was selfish. I allowed my problems, my every little thing to define me. It has always been about me. I lacked the empathy that could’ve saved me.

I hope you everything I couldn’t have. Life is already short and I should’ve realized this earlier (much, much earlier). I should’ve also realized that while I couldn’t solve/ control my problems alive, I should’ve helped others solve/ control theirs.

Because that’s where salvation can be found.

Maybe this all doesn’t make sense- I wasn’t known to make sense alive or dead. But listen, this universe wants you alive. It wants your heart to beat. And you just have to look for the littlest of signs (imagine ones if need be!) and the smallest of smiles.

You being you for you is the greatest gift you can grant yourself. It was a gift I never allowed myself to have. I constantly failed to understand that life is no more than a race with an eventual end. A race where people adapt to make it/ fake it to make it, and then there are people like me; drop-outs.

I should’ve never compared myself to others. Never compared my struggles. Never made it sound so so impossible for myself because ′no one’s going through what I’ve been through’. I should’ve held onto my soul. I should’ve pushed through.

This might sound like sappy bullshit, and well, it is. It is bullshit that is important. It is important bullshit. So please, go easy on your soul.

Go easy, go soft. Take your bad days one at a time. Sleep through them if you must. Do whatever it takes, whatever it takes, to stay alive. Your heart is beating/rooting for you. Your every cell thanks you for being alive every single day. They keep pushing and pushing through to keep you healthy, to make you you. So push through, love.

If I could, I’d mend every broken heart with my hands of dust, and whisper in everyone’s ears words I wished to hear when I was alive. I should’ve realized that I should’ve been my own ghost. I should’ve been the one telling me all those things to get me through it all.

There’s a tonne of broken hearts everywhere. Australian, Spanish, Egyptian and Pakistanian hearts are breaking left and right. Even penguins get heartbroken. You’re not special in your pain and thank God you’re not. You’re fighting a fight of billions. You aren’t an ordinary thing. You are extraordinary on a cellular level.

You’re a bunch of carbon and hydrogen atoms blessed with the magic of life. Your soul is magic.

And if that isn’t enough, I don’t know what is.

And before someone can find you and understand your soul’s worth, remember, that someone has to be you first. You have to be your favourite fan, your only fan if need be.

So live. Live as long as your lungs can heave in all that air. Live and have counted countless sunsets.

It’s never too late to start somewhere. I mean you can just start by sitting up on your bed and spoiling yourself with some sweet, sweet coffee (ruin your diet if need be!).

Okay, now, let me tell you how it was like to finally part with Tobias and Benji.

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