I want y'all to know I tried my best to not die today. I know it comes to all of us anyway; it is inevitable. That's comforting in some ways. It's the single constant for every living thing on earth.
Except for water bears, but those things are wild and I don't enjoy pondering over them and their perpetual existence for too long.
I am scared, though. Sometimes dying doesn't seem that bad, like The Great Unknown doesn't have to be frightening. But then your heart palpitates and your mind goes fuzzy and you're pulled from your 11 a.m. journalism lecture into a dark abyss of pure and utter terror.
And then you come to and you know something is wrong with you. Your chest shouldn't hurt like that. Your vision shouldn't blur. Your hands shouldn't shake.
You call your mom, who already has so much on her plate and stress in her head.
You go to the clinic and they tell you that you should have gone to the ER. They give you a multitude of tests. They take an X-Ray; nothing abnormal there. They do an EKG; it comes out good. They take your blood pressure; it's near perfect. They take your blood; the levels are beautiful. They say your heart is normal; you don't feel normal.
And then you go home. And they call you later to tell you that, on second thought, your X-Rays don't look exactly right. You have an enlarged cardiac silhouette and you don't know what the fuck that means. So you look it up online and it tells you all these serious conditions but you've always been so healthy.
So you call your mom, who's been so worried all day and has been calling you every couple of hours to see if you've had another episode. And you tell her the tests no longer appear to be normal. She panics. You panic.
You fall asleep from the exhaustion of anxiety and the sheer weight of living. You miss your mom's call. She panics and calls your roommate, scared that your dead, that your heart gave out. So young, so young. Not even 21.
You're fine, but she's crying on the other side of the phone. You say you're sorry and she says it's not your fault, but it is.
The weight of existence is immense, but so is the weight of death.
As long as I live, I will never put my death on my mom's shoulders. She does not deserve it. I'll never do that to her. I can't.
I am scared to go back to the clinic tomorrow.
My heart hurts.