What It Would've Been To Stay Alive

"Now I know I have got a heart because it is breaking" - L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

There's something beautiful yet cunning about the fact that pain is untamed. It is a strange and dangerous concept. It starts knocking on the doors lightly and before you can open the door, it's a loud thump across the walls. It's pouring in from the roofs. It's defeaning to your ears.

And then, almost within a split of a second you realize, it does not want to leave through the door. Pain never gracefully leaves through the door, it ruins what it exists in. It breaks down the walls and the roof and creates a beautiful mess of what once was.

The melancholics call it poetry, this beautiful mess.

But, there's a thought that's tiptoeing across the chambers of my mind, it's asking me a question. What happens if the pain never leaves? What if? What if? What if?

And there's only one answer I have, the only befitting answer; then you wait for your soul to leave. Because perhaps the two are so closely intertwined that one does not exist without the other.

Pain is who you become.

But I would like to imagine that there's a moment of silence before your soul leaves the body. A moment when the thumping eases and you think to yourself inches before death, this is what it would've felt to stay alive.