Everybody Dies

It’s not right. The glaring neon lights, the people rushing by. The world should stop. It should stop when pain rips through you so violently that you wonder how it’s not you lying on that hospital bed. There’s no oxygen. The hallway lurches sideways. Someone prods you to sit down, to take deep breaths. But all you hear is the mumbled muffles of a mirage. It can’t be real. This can’t be real. Denial is the first stage of grief your mind reminds you. But is this grief?
The expression, “it’s not the end of the world” fails to apply once you’re dead. That’s it. That’s the end of the world for you.
Death. It happens every day, all the time, but this time it hit too close to home and you wonder if you’ll ever stop crying. If the minutes will ever pass, if the hour will ever change. Time stopped.

It stopped.

And you want to collapse and scream and vomit all at the same time. You want to crawl out of your skin and become someone else, someone walking past you, because they’re not in this much pain. I feel like passing out. My heart screams in my ears and my flesh is cold and sweaty. The blood rushes from my face as I frantically dig through my purse and pour Xanax into my shaking hand. I didn’t count them. three. maybe four or five or six.

A nurse comes rushing towards me with a banana in her right hand a water in her left. She’s peeling it, pushing the water down my throat. Saying something with her mouth. My throat feels like it closed. I’m being force-fed a banana but can hardly swallow.

I wasn’t prepared for this. I had so much time to prepare and yet I wasn’t prepared at all and all of a sudden I feel like a fucking asshole dumbass shit head. I think of all the things I could’ve done more, and all the time I wasted and it makes my ribs feel like they’re snapping in half and my body won’t stop shaking my vision tilts and the nurses words sound like they’re descending into a tunnel.

I don’t want to be awake anymore. I don’t want to be awake anymore.

Ceiling tiles and blinding lights. That’s the last thing I saw before it all went black.