Until Death Comes for Me
Reflections from being a lover of death
I feel such a deep, piercing depression. It feels like a railroad spike pinning my chest to the tracks and feeling the ground beneath begin to tremble.
I’m going to die.
I don’t know when, or how.
This depression is a bitter my soul craves like I used to crave strong, black coffee. It’s waking me up.
Every time I cry lately, I feel more disillusioned. As in, less illusioned. More awake.
I wrote about death recently. How I’ve had a closer relationship with it than with life. How death and pleasure are intertwined.
I think at this point I’d call myself a hedonist—I live for pleasure. But not at the expense of pain. As Brené Brown somewhat famously said, “We cannot selectively numb emotions”. To deny pain is to deny pleasure. To seek pleasure exclusively is to deny pain.
There is a pleasure in simply being alive and embracing experience as it comes. There is a pleasure that walks hand-in-hand with this wrenching pain in my chest, the persistent ache in my throat, and the weight of an uncertain future sitting in my pelvis.
These feelings remind me I am alive, and that I have a chance. Even if nothing else, a chance to feel my lungs fill with air, and release. Just one more time. And then, graciously, again. And again. And again.
I don’t believe there is anything we are objectively “supposed” to do or be or become as humans. There is nothing wrong with the world. It is full of pain, and yes, it is (in my opinion) one of the greatest pleasures to alleviate that pain when we can. This is the vantage point from which I am learning to approach my life.
I make art because expressing my pain feels good. I do what I can to help others in pain because helping others feels good, even when it’s inconvenient. I am working on decolonizing my mind because dethroning the old white man, the cop, the wife-beater, the angry white-bearded god, the sexy white Jesus, and the compliant, selfish, weak white woman in my head feels good.
I don’t believe in good people and bad people. I believe in people who know how to find (and create) pleasure in anything, and people who know how to find (and create) misery in anything. I am both. But misery is nothing to live for. The part of me who obsessively miserifies my life is dying, leaving only the part of me who lives to find pleasure in everything.
Dying hurts a lot. It hurts to let go. It hurts to say goodbye to a version of myself, and realize it wasn’t me who left, but an illusion of me. I have died again and again, but I am still breathing. I am still alive. My body is now a garden full of sprouts poking through dead leaves and flowers. My body is a graveyard where the dead still talk at night. My body is a glass stained with wine from yesterday’s supper.
But death, and the emptiness on its heels, is only a season. The flowers will bloom again over gracefully forgotten graves, and the washing of the glass will only serve as a reminder of its purpose: to be filled, emptied, filled again, and emptied again, until it is no longer needed.
I choose to embrace death as pleasure, exhale, and orgasm: release.
After all, climax is pleasurable because it temporarily transcends our menial experience. It is temporal, and therefore limited. Value is almost always defined by limitation. Time is so valuable because we are only given so much of it. Life is valuable because of how quickly it can be over. Our bodies are valuable for how fragile they are.
Just as the entire body constricts before a climax, being human is so beautiful because of how wildly limited we are. And maybe, when the human ends, we will realize death is truly an orgasmic release, and we will know, even if only for a moment, what it is like to be truly unbounded.
Until then, Death, tease me every day like a lover. Kiss your way slowly down my neck, shoulders, and spine. Let me anticipate you, and taste you slowly. Let me savor you. Give me time to give you every part of myself. Even your lightest touch leaves me in the throes of ecstasy—I can only imagine what it will feel like when you finally come for me.