On Being a Dire Warning

I could die in my sleep tonight you know. People do.

Perhaps they've an undiagnosed heart condition or throw a pulmonary embolis, who knows? But I wonder, perhaps, if they just stopped wanting. Or, more likely, have tired of wanting. Wanting things they cannot have, love, friendship, acceptance, kindness. To mean something to someone who means something to them.

To matter.

Matter. Matter is anything that occupies space and has mass. And that's the crux of it, really. We want to occupy space and have mass. To have a place. A space. To be missed when we're gone. To be welcomed home. To be important. To be that thing that has space and occupies mass and without which someone cannot do.

I am not matter. I am ethereal. A mirage. I mean nothing. I am Nothing. And I am tired of wanting, and tired of pretending, and tired of being tired.

I probably won't die in my sleep tonight. I haven't looked it up but I am sure the odds are fantastically, depressingly against. Usually, this would be a comforting thing. Usually.

Not tonight. Tonight, I hurt and I want to be done hurting. I want it done, this life, and I no longer trust God to take it from me. Apparently, He doesn't answer that variety of prayer. Or perhaps only for the deserving. Those who have been Something.

Two things keep me here, tethered precariously to this life, hope, a fickle thing that comes and goes and for long streteches fails to come at all, and Bailey. Bailey who has learned more about life and how to live it in his 15 short years than I have in 42 and am likely to in 42000.

"If you can't set a good example, be a dire warning." And that is my Something. I am what not to do, what not to wear, what not to eat, how not to love. I am his dire warning.