Stayin’ Alive

Author: Vaibhav Vijay

Everything was going wrong. Each day seemed to add on some new dreadful task I was too tired to take on and I was starting to lose things to look forward to. It just felt like an endless cycle of existing for nothing. This was it. There were no more reasons to go on. I had officially burned out.

I stared long and hard at the ceiling. Who was I even kidding, there wasn’t even a fan in this damn room. I looked over towards the curtain rod. Yeah, that shoddy stuff wasn’t going to hold a body up. Jumping off the first floor would end up in broken bones and a lot of pain, probably being branded as a mental case, but not death. And then again, it’s not like I wanted to go out in the most gruesome way possible. I just wanted to quit out of life, just as I would out of some horrible game, a game with no fun factor but some super realistic graphics and physics. What kind of life was this? No will to go on, no conviction to stop and yet, there was no escaping both of them. So it’d become another troublesome choice, and again, as I had done more times than I wanted to in a lifetime, I found myself weighing the outcomes. 

Quitting life sounded easy, but following through, not so much. I’d always grown up hearing that committing suicide was taking the easy way out, but was it really? Evidently, I couldn’t work up the courage to do even that. More importantly though, what of all the time I’d spent? My parents had invested their patience and money in me. I had a family that had seen me grow up and no matter how few friends I had made in my lifetime, surely I had done enough to nudge some of their lives in some slightly different direction. Thinking in my shoes, I know I’d feel weird if someone I’d gotten to know, someone I’d spent time with, through joy and sadness, were to just….disappear. 

With that shaky little hope, I made an empty promise to myself. A promise I had no clue if I could keep, but a promise nevertheless. In exchange, I had to keep living, no matter how pathetic I felt my life was.

Maybe, I’ll achieve something noteworthy.

Maybe, someone will be glad I once lived.

Maybe, I’ll make a difference.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll matter.