i think it was a tuesday.
or maybe a thursday. the days had stopped meaning much to me by then. they were all the same shade of grey, one long, endless corridor with doors that never opened. mornings became nights, nights became mornings, and somewhere in between i stopped bothering to tell the difference.
i remember the light, though.
it was too bright. horribly bright. it crawled across the walls and settled beneath my skin, like it had somewhere to be and i was in its way. i remember thinking that the sun was laughing at me. a ridiculous thought, really. the sun doesn’t laugh. it burns. it watches. it does what it has always done.
still, i pulled the curtains shut.
the room became quiet.
no, not quiet. there is a difference between silence and quietness, and i think i forgot how to experience the latter. silence is only the absence of sound. quietness is something you can rest inside. something warm. something that doesn’t make you feel as though the entire world is waiting for you to make a mistake.
i couldn’t find that place anymore.
people kept asking me how i was doing.
how are you?
what a strange question. how was i supposed to answer that? there were days when my thoughts ran in circles, tripping over one another, laughing at jokes i couldn’t understand. there were days when everything felt distant, as if my life belonged to somebody standing on the other side of a window. i could see them moving their mouth. i could see their hands shaking. but the glass was too thick, and i couldn’t hear a single word.
sometimes i laughed at the wrong things.
sometimes i forgot to laugh at all.
i think people found that frightening.
they wanted an explanation. a neat little sentence that could be folded and put away. something that would make sense of the way i spoke, the way i looked at them, the way my face seemed to belong to somebody who had forgotten what expressions were for.
i wanted to explain it, too.
i really did.
but how do you describe a mind that no longer feels like a place you can call home?
how do you tell somebody that your own thoughts have become strangers? that ordinary things have acquired strange meanings, that a passing sound can feel impossibly important, that sometimes you cannot tell whether you’re reacting to something happening around you or something happening entirely inside your head?
how do you say that you’re scared when even fear has started to feel like an object you can observe from a distance?
i never found the words.
so i smiled.
apparently, that was worse.
there is something almost funny about being misunderstood. not the kind of funny that makes you happy. the other kind. the kind that makes a laugh escape your mouth at a funeral, and suddenly everybody is looking at you as if you have committed some terrible crime.
i laughed at my own funeral long before anybody knew i was dead.
not literally, i suppose.
my heart was still beating. my lungs were still working. i could still walk from one room to another and forget why i had gone there. i could still hear people saying my name, although sometimes it sounded like the name of somebody i had never met.
but the person they were speaking to was becoming less and less familiar.
i watched myself disappear in small, unremarkable ways.
a message left unanswered.
a meal forgotten.
a conversation abandoned halfway through because the words had suddenly lost their order.
a memory that felt borrowed.
a mirror i stopped looking into because the face inside it seemed to know something i didn’t.
and then there was the exhaustion.
not the ordinary kind. not the kind that sleep can repair. it was the exhaustion of having to exist inside a mind that never seemed to agree with itself. the exhaustion of pretending that everything was understandable. the exhaustion of being asked to return to a version of myself that i could no longer remember how to be.
people talk about losing yourself as though it happens all at once.
it doesn’t.
sometimes it happens so slowly that you only notice when somebody asks where you’ve been, and you realise you don’t know how to answer.
i don’t remember the exact moment i died.
perhaps there wasn’t one.
perhaps death is not always a dramatic thing. perhaps sometimes it is a quiet departure, a gradual loosening of the threads that once connected you to everything. perhaps a person can remain standing in the same room, wearing the same clothes, answering to the same name, while something essential has already left.
i wonder whether anybody noticed.
i wonder whether they saw the difference between the person i was and the person i had become.
or perhaps they noticed everything and simply didn’t know what to do with it.
i can’t blame them for that.
i didn’t know what to do with it either.
there were still moments when something reached me. a familiar voice. the smell of rain on concrete. sunlight slipping beneath a curtain. somebody remembering a small detail about me that i had forgotten myself.
for a few seconds, the world would become almost real again.
i would think, there you are.
and then the feeling would disappear.
just like that.
i used to believe that if i could explain myself well enough, somebody would understand. that if i found the right words, the right sequence, the right combination of sounds, i could make another person see what i saw.
but words are fragile things.
they break apart when you need them most.
and sometimes the person listening is already afraid of what you might say.
so i stopped explaining.
i became quieter. stranger. harder to reach.
i watched the world continue without asking my permission. people fell in love. people argued about meaningless things. seasons changed. somebody somewhere complained about the weather, and somebody else laughed so hard that they couldn’t breathe.
how ordinary.
how impossibly ordinary.
i wanted to be part of it.
i think that is the part nobody understood.
beneath all the confusion, beneath the strange thoughts and the misplaced laughter and the terrible distance between me and everything i loved, there was still a person who wanted to belong somewhere.
a person who wanted to be understood without having to translate every broken piece of themselves.
a person who wanted to wake up one morning and recognise their own life.
i was still there.
at least, i think i was.
but it became harder to tell.
and on the day i died, if it really was a day at all, the light came through the curtains again.
i remember that much.
i remember the dust floating in the air, each tiny particle moving through the sunlight as though it had somewhere important to go.
i remember thinking that it must be nice.
to move without questioning the movement.
to exist without having to explain the existence.
to be something small and ordinary and temporary, without being frightened by what any of it meant.
then the light shifted.
the room changed colour.
and for one strange, beautiful second, i felt nothing at all.
no fear.
no confusion.
no need to understand.
just the room, the dust, the light.
and me.
or what remained of me.
i think it was a tuesday.
but nobody remembers the weather on the day a person disappears.
they remember the date.
they remember the things left behind.
they remember the last conversation, the last photograph, the last time somebody said i love you without knowing how much those words would eventually weigh.
they search for a moment when everything changed.
a warning they missed.
a sentence they should have taken seriously.
a door they should have opened.
they want death to have a beginning because beginnings can be traced. they want it to have a reason because reasons can be understood.
but i don’t think my death began on that day.
i think it began much earlier, in places nobody could see.
and perhaps the saddest thing is that some part of me was still trying to come home.
even then.
especially then.
i just couldn’t remember the way.
and now, i’m leaving this body.