I Asked Death to Come for Me
I asked Death to come for me.
She looked upon me and said, No. There is still too much.
And now I wonder—
too much left for me to do, or too much left for life to do to me?
Because I have tried.
God knows, I have tried.
I have clawed my way upward with bleeding hands, only for Life to place its foot upon my chest and press me back into the earth as though the dirt remembered my name.
As though that is where I belong.
But do I?
Do I belong here—
or six feet beneath the world, where everyone stands above me pouring grief into soil that will never let their tears reach me?
I have bled.
I have bled.
I have bled for so long that pain no longer feels like injury.
It feels like inheritance.
And now I ask Death to reach out her hand, take me by the heart, and pull me toward the place I sometimes feel I should have reached long ago.
Because Life—
you released me into this realm only to devour me whole.
You swallowed the flesh first.
Then the laughter.
Then the hope.
Then every soft thing I ever tried to keep alive.
And now what remains is only skin stretched across bone,
a skeleton still walking, blackened by fires no one else can see.
My heart was not cut.
A cut can heal.
It was shattered.
Shattered dreams.
Shattered visions.
Shattered memories I beg my mind to bury,
yet they rise every morning like ghosts that refuse to understand they are dead.
The dreams I once dreamed have been crushed beneath the weight of living.
And now I ask myself—
were they ever mine?
Did I ever truly want them?
Or did I spend my whole life building houses from other people's blueprints,
calling their desires my destiny?
Life,
you have destroyed everything this childlike heart once imagined.
Every kingdom.
Every forever.
Every beautiful little lie I whispered to myself before I understood what the world was capable of.
So I look at you and ask—
Why?
Why?
Why?
Why keep me here when your twin stands waiting in the shadows?
Let her have me.
Let Death wrap me in whatever cloth she carries.
Let silence close around me like arms.
Because I have searched for love and found echoes.
I have searched for life and found survival.
And sorrow has entered me so completely that sometimes I cannot tell where it ends and I begin.
From my face falls something clear as crystal,
something almost beautiful,
water spilling from a soul that feels burned black.
And still—
I bleed.
I bleed in places no one can bandage.
I bleed from memories.
From absence.
From everything I became trying to become what everyone else needed.
I asked Death to come for me.
And still she said no.
Perhaps even Death knows there is something in me Life has not managed to destroy.
Or perhaps she is simply waiting.
Either way,
I remain—
bones beneath skin,
embers beneath ash,
standing in the ruins of everything I thought I would become,
asking Life one final question:
If you refuse to let me go, then tell me— what am I still here to become?