preamble

What waits other than more cruel contagions, the busywork and yipyap while the world burns to ash? What is left other than begrudged platitudes and incentives towards murder. The little things give out one by one, following their bigger kin. Downward spirals turn to kissed canvas lives full of ill slept nights and bare light bulbs and their contemptuous kisses and the kick in the teeth. Conversations only had with walls and kinfolk paying nearly as much attention, despised by neighbor and stranger alike. If I can wait another month or so, it will be the shotgun. Otherwise, the belt and a gruesome reveal will have to do. 

It took all I had to take a shower, my heart crying havoc and beating down my ribs, a drifty dreamy sort of cloud settled in my head. Short of breath, arm and chest in an alarm of pain and weakness, while I get to discover the evening’s latest betrayal. It takes a spell, but the decrepitude goes hard once it gets started, and the world steps in swinging. It’s the sort of thing you don’t know until you feel it. Everything up to that point was make-believe, everything after epilogue. You take them at their word, they take you for a ride. Either ignored or toyed with, I’m cutting to the chase. 

Too many vital people have lost their lives, lives full of love and work and dreams rubbed out like so many typos. This precious chance, with all the brutality and joy and passion and pain it comes with. I don’t deserve to be here, and I can’t stop the chyron in my skull from running the reasons in a loop. I’m no longer up to the task of carrying out my duty, and am too beaten and cowardly to abandon my station. This has been my inner monologue the entire year, trying to find something to fix a safety line to, while mulling the available options for a successful exit. Now even my ups are down, and I am done with this beggar’s choice. Soon I will stop all my words, and likely delete every trace. My only answer for fifty years, for all this gnashing and weeping, has been silence. It is fitting that silence is all behind, slipping out so quietly no one will ever remember I was here at all.