When It Doesn't Get Better

Chapter what is it like being dead

I was six years old when I had my first panic attack. My mom was in her room taking a nap after coming back from work. I was trying to pass the time by giving the pictures around our home a little story. I came across a picture of my grandparents and asked them what it was like being dead. I couldn't get the thought out of my head. They used to be here, but now they weren't. Not existing sounds terrifying but its inevitable, right. I know that being scared of death is pointless because it will happen. It has to be the first time I recognized that I was alive, but then I would be dead. This fear of death or afterlife scared me more and more as the years went by, as I figured my time was coming closer. Of course, I was aware someone could die at any moment, but that didn't really help my paranoia. And then I figured that it could be funny if I died from a heart attack after getting a panic attack about my fear of death.

I looked at my grandparents' picture, this picture of people I never met. These people who existed before me and then didn't before I did. My grandma was wearing a black dress and smiling, her lips colored with red lipstick. In all the pictures I saw of hers she always had red lipstick. Maybe she wore it all the time. Perhaps she never left the house without it on because she knew that when she died, she wanted to look beautiful. Or she wasn't like that at all. I didn't know her, and I don't think my mom really got to know her either. Yet, there I was, this picture in front of me and I dared to ask this piece of paper what it was like to not-exist. Then that is when it happened.

I remember looking at my grandpa's straw hat as I struggled to breath. I kept tugging at my shift hoping to somehow get more air or to get the weight of my chest. I even hit my head with the palm of my hands in order to get the thought out of head. Every part of my body felt imaginary. My instinct was to try to get away from myself. And what happened to that hat? Did my aunt keep it? Does she treasure it as a way to remember her dad?

I felt a lot of things and I felt nothing. I thought about my existence and how I was here and soon I would not be because life if short even if I got to live to be one hundred. Life is short.

Why me, I thought to myself. Of all the people that could have these thoughts and scary imaginations. Why me? I felt like my existence meant something else, but there was nothing special about me and it didn't matter because I would not exist. Then, if I'm lucky, my grandchildren will sit in front of my picture and ask me what it was like to not exist. It scared me that one day I will no longer exist and everything that I experienced and felt would not have even mattered.

The thought stayed in my head for days. Years even. Every time I tried to protect myself the same way. I learned to keep my nails short after this because of the scratches I left on my thighs and neck. I didn't even notice I did that until it started to pass. After it did, I should have told my mom about it. Maybe I could have saved myself from the loneliness, but I didn't. I went back to my room and opened up a book to distract myself until the thought of oblivion faded to the back of my mind for that night.

For the longest time I never understood how people could kill themselves. How could they face death and not give a fuck? People call those who commit suicide cowards but if death if better than life... Imagine looking at life and being like fuck no and then turning around seeing death and saying fuck it can't be worse than this. I get that. I'm scared of death, but I now know that it is the only thing keeping me alive because life scares me and has scarred me too much. Six-year old me didn't know what death was about and that sent me into a panic attack. Twenty-year old me still doesn't get death, but my panic attacks are shorter because I've craved it before. Yea... I've wanted to die. I tried to forget that death scared me, but when thinking about killing yourself you can't felt but think about death. I don't know why yet, but something is telling me that I'm going to do something amazing and I need to be alive to do it. I don't know what the fuck it is or why the universe chose me to feel this way and to be who I am, and it pisses me the fuck off. And it scares me. But I'm going to fucking do it and the only thing that will stop me will be my death. Hopefully I have enough time to complete whatever I'm supposed to do.