I’ve known about this subreddit for some time. I’ll say, I never really read anything off here myself. Mostly I just listened to other people narrate posts in podcasts and whatnot. Some of it is fun I think, like a friend telling you the crazy thing that happened to them the other day. But most of it is morbid. By and large, this seems to be a place where people come when it’s time for them to die. I won’t pretend like that isn’t the reason why I listened to these stories; it was interesting to me because they were the last thoughts of dead people. Isn’t there something to that? That the words you’re hearing belong to a corpse? For all I thought about it, I never imagined that I would be that corpse.
I’m not entirely sure why people write their dying thoughts here. What I think is that someone did it once, then someone else who saw that followed, and so on and so forth. I don’t think it’s about tradition though, or about feeding a curse. I think it’s about a sort of sense of community. I know what it is for me though.
It’s that an asshole like me is supposed to die alone.
My whole life I didn’t mind hurting other people to get what I wanted. It’s not out of malice. It’s just that in the end, I always thought that if it was between me and the happiness of someone else, I would choose myself. Someone called Elijah tried to love me despite that, and my deepest regret in life was having let him. He was fun, but he wasn’t just fun, he was so much more than that. He was the kind of person that when you were with him, you see the point of living. He just wasn’t meant for me, he was meant for someone so, so much better. But I kept him because I was, and am, an asshole.
I won’t drag it out, he took his own life. I had already had an idea that he was struggling with things before we started dating, but I just sort of ignored it. It bummed me out, so I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I kept that attitude even as our relationship progressed. He made it seem like it wasn’t that bad, and I just took that facade at face value. Not because I really believed it, but because I wanted to for my own sake. Sometimes at night he would ask me,
“Can I talk to you about something?”
And every time I would say,
“Maybe sometime else.”
Like I thought that if I pushed it back far enough, it would just go away. One night, I could feel him turn in bed to ask me, but then stop. The morning after, I found him in the bathtub. After he died, I did almost everything I was supposed to. I called the police, and after that they called his family. I didn’t go to his funeral though. There was no way I could’ve. For a few weeks I just stayed inside, lying down. It was while I was lying down like that one night that I finally noticed. There was something standing in the corner.
I could only see it in the dark, but even when the lights were on, I could feel it was still there, just obscured. It was like a shadow, a dark silhouette of a person, its edges were fuzzy but not shifting like static. It was a blot stamped on the space between two walls. I couldn’t sleep out of fear of what would happen should I let my guard down. I almost convinced myself it was a hallucination, until I turned on the lights and saw dark imprints of feet where it had been standing. Thinking that my place was haunted, I decided to sleep at a hotel. It followed me. Late at night, I asked it a question out of desperation,
“What do you want?”
“You”
From that moment on, I’ve been convinced that if I give it the opportunity, it’s going to kill me. It’s gotten worse too. At first it was silent, but recently it started making a terrible noise. It started breathing. It started breathing in this raspy, labored way, like someone dying, like someone in agony. In between those heaving breaths, I almost swore I heard it calling out my name. I know what you’re probably thinking, but it’s not him. He was the suns brilliant rays. He was the full moon and the twinkling stars. He was anything but dark in between.
This has been going on for a week now. I’m tired. I’m very, very tired. I haven’t slept since the night it appeared, and I don’t think that it’s going to go away. Either it’s going to kill me, or I’m going to die of sleep deprivation. I decided a few days ago then that since I’m going to die either way, I’m going to do it on my own terms and go to sleep when I’m ready. I started reflecting and writing this yesterday as a way of getting ready.
Someone like me is supposed to meet their end like this. At one point I accepted that, but then I got hope. Even though I messed up that one chance to change my fate, I’m still greedy because of him, I still want what I don’t deserve. Or maybe I don’t know what I want, maybe even to myself I’m a lying piece of shit. What I’m trying to say is that I’m posting here because I want you to be with me by seeing me. This corpse wants you to listen, because it’s selfish enough to want to die with company even though it doesn’t deserve it.
Update:
After I finished writing, I posted this and then went to sleep, expecting to die. Just now I woke up. Next to me on the bed, there’s a large dark imprint. There’s a marking on me too. It’s shaped like an arm, and it’s wrapped around my torso.