The stars out of reach, their beauty a tease
Myriad lives unattainable, no chance to please
But not this life which is due to end
Amongst the dead, the place I will mend
I can’t explain why but I wanted to be amongst the dead before I joined them. It was late at night and the graveyard was quiet, even the sound of passing cars on the road could barely be heard, unable to cut through the unique atmosphere of the peaceful resting place, as though the tombstones absorbed all outside noise. I didn’t know anyone who had been buried there, so I found a spot between two large, ornate stones where I wouldn’t easily be found lying down by anyone else who had the strange inclination to visit graveyards at night.
I spent hours lying there, looking at the stars for one last time. I planned to kill myself the next day. I only knew a handful of the constellations but they all possessed a beauty which seemed so out of reach, like everything potentially positive in my life. I lost myself imagining a better life amongst the stars, on some distant planet where the rules of pain and suffering and mental anguish did not apply. I was stuck here with no rocket ship. But I did have a way out. I screamed my frustrations out to infinity, never hoping for a response.
I saw myself from a past death, he had it good
The reaper smiled, his hand he took
But that death was not for him
Witness of pain, a pain too grim
The ground around me started to shake, the gravestone to my left cracked and crumbled, it felt like the rumbling earth beneath me would swallow me up. I wanted it to. A familiar voice came from a hole in the grave, the epitaph now showed my name, my date of birth, and a date showing that I had died several years earlier. I’d become a beloved son and brother. The familiar voice was mine. I couldn’t move.
“You’ve put weight on,” the other me said. He had an awful, bushy beard, a much skinnier frame, and what looked like a tyre mark over half of his body. I remember loving that beard, it was my first one. Those times seemed so much better than now.
“Way to kick a man when he’s down,” I replied.
“You needed taking down a peg or two, you’ve got so much good going on and you don’t even see it,” he snapped, “try being in my shoes, it was misery.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, I’d lived his life, been in his shoes, I had so many good memories of times with friends, many of them new and exciting at the time. “You had it so good,” I said, “what happened?”
“Don’t you remember?” he asked, “I had no job, no future, I couldn’t believe it when I watched you find work, I missed out on all that. I made a quick decision when I saw that lorry speeding down the main road and took the opportunity. It was the worst decision I ever made. Nobody survives to be able to tell you that time slows down, that you have a chance to reflect on what you’re doing but no way to stop it. It felt good at first, I saw the Grim Reaper smiling at me, welcoming me into his arms, providing the relief I needed, the lack of future I wanted. Then I saw the wheels and I tried to move out of the way, I didn’t want it any more, I felt the pain for a lifetime and saw the faces of everyone I was hurting, I felt what they would feel and it was excruciating. You still have those people and you haven’t hurt them yet. If you are going to go through with this, don’t fucking take the dog with you, I’ll never stop regretting that. You still have her and she wishes she was with you now.”
Another me, one without love
Death for him, a drop from above
But love for him had been left behind
That final realisation, it crossed his mind
I was still trying to process what he’d just said when he disappeared. The headstone no longer had my name on it, the cracks had disappeared. That young me didn’t know that things could get better, though they also got worse. Then it happened again. The rumbling, the cracks, my name on the epitaph with a slightly later date.
The other me had shorter hair this time and looked just as miserable, insofar as his features could be made out. “How did you do it?” I asked.
“Do you remember that time when you were drunk and you wandered off into the woods in search of a bridge? You eventually turned home because you got lost in the dark. I made it.”
“But why? I don’t remember it being that bad.”
He responded, “I didn’t want to do it in the end. The alcohol didn’t help. I was unloved and unlovable, I was unattractive and unwanted, I was unpopular and unappealing.”
“But you had loads of friends,” I said, “you’d just been with some of them that night.”
“I know that now,” he retorted, “I’ve watched you go on to be loved by others, make new friends, be treated how I wanted to be treated. I could have had that too but I climbed up onto the side of that bridge. I wanted to die in that moment but I didn’t want to kill myself. Then I slipped. It took a lifetime to get to the bottom. I accepted my fate at first, as the ground sped towards me I welcomed it. But then I remembered the love that I’d felt, the love that I could have had waiting for me in the future, and I suffered knowing that I’d left it behind. You’re surrounded by that love every day and there’s more in your future, I’ve already felt it and it’s beautiful, even the painful bits. Don’t let that love die with you.”
I wanted to argue, tell him about the heartbreak and the future suffering, but he’d gone quicker than he’d appeared. He had things good, I was sure of it, so why had I felt like that?
Abandoned me, badly hurt
His death, no chance for rebirth
But so many futures killed that night
Possibilities, never to take flight
The next date on the epitaph was recent, just last year. He was a bit larger than me, he looked really sick, even for an animated corpse.
“Before you ask, pills,” he said.
“I don’t need to ask you why you did it, I remember that one clearly,” I said, “you felt abandoned by someone you loved who had already caused so much damage. And you’d been drinking. But it got better, I don’t need them any more, things do get better.”
“How are you telling me this when you’re screaming into the void about there being no way out of your suffering? You may as well be talking to yourself. It will get better, this will pass, you’ll lose people again but you’ll also love again. I didn’t know that when I took those pills, but as I felt their effects I found the truth – life is full of opportunities we could never fully imagine. Your mind might be able to explore a million potential futures but your brain is broken, it’s stuck in the wrong mode. As I laid there dying, a switch flipped in my head and I saw all that potential I was throwing away.”
“But I’m wasting my potential all the time,” I replied earnestly.
“We all waste some of our potential from time to time but we also outdo ourselves. I’ve watched you be there for other people, your life might not be on track but you’ve helped to stop others from losing themselves, that’s an amazing achievement. I wish I could have done that. And well done on losing that weight, you’re looking great, I wish I looked like that.”
A final me, recently dead
A dreamer, stuck inside his head
But shadows exist only with light
Hopes, like stars, brighten the night
I’d stopped trying to argue by this point, I knew that there could only be one more visitation, I’d save my energy for him. The date this time was very recent, just a few months ago. He looked almost exactly like me, except his hair and beard were a little shorter and he had marks around his neck.
“Hanging?” I asked.
“Yeah, I fell unconscious pretty quickly but that took an age. You probably know what I’m going to say.”
“You felt like you were doing the right thing but changed your mind after it was too late? Things will get better? And then you’ll point out something you envy about me?” I felt angry, this version of me was too close in time, he scared me, and how dare he lecture me when he near enough is me? But I knew he would be right.
“I only envy your life. You can do so much with it that I threw away, you can share it with others, including people you’ve not yet met. I won’t tell you that things will get better. Things will be worse sometimes. You’re going to try hard at so many things and end up failing, then you’re going to focus on those things so much that you won’t see your successes. And there will be successes. You’ll touch so many lives if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and take each day one at a time. You live so much in the future that you can’t see the gifts of the present, you only see fiction and you don’t want to look beyond the dystopian section. Try checking out something a bit more positive, maybe even a bit of romance. You live so much in the past but you only explore the shadows, the dark places, or you see the positives as part of some inaccessible world that you’ll never visit again. Our struggles are the same but you avoided my fate, you can get through tomorrow as well, just as you did that day, even if all you say is ‘maybe later’.”
I looked up at the stars as everything around me returned to normal. All of those stars I was looking at, and many more I could not see, had the potential to support life on some orbiting planet. They would all die eventually but snuffing them out prematurely suddenly seemed unfair, to rob the universe of even a small amount of potential for life would be a travesty. They appear so small up in the night sky yet they were giants, impacting lives light-years away, even if just for a moment. I made it through the next day and looked at the stars again. And again. And again. One day at a time. And began to hope again.
Shorts and Socks 