Excruciate

Every day, the cursed thought rang. A singular piece of information troubled and doubled in intensity. Very few of what she thought actually mattered, and even fewer of what she did, affected, affection.

“Is it my job, or my dream, to help as much or help as little? Is it enough to help one miserable cell or a million?”

There was a sensation, when she slept and when she woke up that eventually, she will learn how to cope with the inevitable. After all, if she was to die, then no one will get to outlive her. She will close her eyes and the whole known universe will cease to be. She had had enough of pretending that something will come from her existence, that she will accomplish what she set out to do.

“After all, I wasn’t chosen to be born and I did not choose to be born, instead, I am worried all the time about things that have more do with my life than with my death.”

But she did not think of death as a relief either. If she needed at any point to do something of her life, it needed to be done before she died, but if the relief came after the failure, then there was no point in either honor or shame. Static struck through her body.

“No point in continuing. But in life or in death? Both seem equally irrelevant.”

But she was alive and she could not change that and she moved from place to place, she worked from job to job, and she walked wherever she felt like walking, in an effort to get that thought of her head. That she was useless and that she was the most worthwhile thing that had ever happened to her. She felt good in her body, she felt good in her mind, she felt good whenever she talked, but the smile she gave, the breaths she exhaled, always seemed a little fake, a front for her true self, the essence of her that cannot ever be satisfied.

She slowly came to her senses every time regret filled her mouth. Few things were as satisfying as that, a very brief moment where she could truly jump for joy or cry in rivers and let it out at all. The senselessness, after all, she did not know much, and she did not even know what it was that she was missing or thinking. If every moment of her life was to be like this, and every moment of her death was to be in another way, surely, she was to be destined to forget both, or remember either, and realize what a truly awful place the middle is. One way or the other, life was… and death was… and neither were and both were, at the same time, flipped, backwards, front.

She shrugged excruciatingly.

“Should I continue?”

She got up for some reason and thought again. She shrugged again and dreamed and sighed and laughed and tried to forget.

“A life like this, who wouldn’t want it? Who would want it if I ever gave it away?”