Death is Easy.

Death is easy.  Peaceful even.  There's this quiet haze that falls all over your body and for the first time in your life you can't feel a thing.  You are truly numb and if you could smile, you would.  But you can't move your face.  You can't move at all.  It's not that scary kind of paralyzed either.  It's like when zonked out on tranquilizers, but more.  So much more.  Sleeping like the dead takes on a whole new meaning for you.  Your breathing slows.  You feel this letting go of everything.  Warm and tingly like your drunk.  But you're not. 

Usually when dreaming, you are still aware of the outside world.  This isn't like that.  All you have is yourself.  You feel like you're floating.  You can't hear anything else.  You can't feel the sheets on the bed or the IV pumping fluid into you.  You can't feel the pain after drinking the charcoal to stop the pills from doing irreversable damage to your liver.  Did anyone tell you before you took all that Tylenol that it is one of the slowest ways to die because it takes about 3 days for your system to fail, and you have to down the entire bottle on an empty stomach?  No, no one did.  It didn't occur to you that there was a right way to overdose.  You just felt like your mind was a freight train and you were just trying to get the train to slow down.  You can't feel the nurses hand on yours.  You can't hear your parents fighting and crying.

Floating feels nice.  Death is easy.  Life is hard.  Life is messy.  Life is complicated.  Life hurts.  Death is peaceful.  It doesn't hurt.  But living takes courage and strength you don't think you have.  When you finally wake up, they force you to drink some apple juice.  You want to go back to the floating.  You want to go back to the quiet but all you hear is your parents yelling.  Your father screams obscenities and then leaves the room in tears.  The first few days living after knowing what being so close to peace are hell.  But if you surrender to the quiet, you miss so much.  And even though death is easy and life is hard, life is worth it.  Checking out before your sixteenth birthday, before things get a lot better, is a crime.

Hold on.  Life is hard, but it is worth it.