Dth

J Kim 

You look down at your legs.

The same old legs that once carried you everywhere, the legs that let you take large strides to wherever you wanted.

Now unused, probably never going to be used either.

After all, it’s been years since you last actually walked freely.

Back when you were still healthy.

Back when you didn’t have that forsaken tumor in your stomach.

Everyone tried.

As soon as it was discovered, you did everything to clear yourself from that curse.

Surgery after surgery, you could feel your life slip away, as gradually, you grow weaker as they cut out most of your stomach. You grow weaker as you can barely eat, and you struggle your daily life in pain, and and wrestling to do basic activities that you can’t do alone anymore.

Before you know it, you can’t leave the bed.

From the bed, you can see everything that goes around you.

You can hear that your family is struggling to keep you in the hospital, despite their greatest efforts to make sure you can’t hear.

You can see the arguments spark between your relatives.

You can see your sickness slowly creating a gap between everyone you loved.

Amidst that, you can feel your mind growing more hazy.

Days fly by, you blurt out things you don’t mean, yet it still hurts the people around you.

You are moved between hospitals, constantly being treated. After all, it is the doctor’s job to try to let at least one more patient live. But they know it’s futile. You know it’s futile. You know that you have not many days left to live.

No one says it out loud, but everyone has been preparing themselves for a goodbye.

But somewhere, from the back of your mind, you shout back.

You want to live.

I want to live, it screams, as your mind falls even deeper into the abyss. Your thoughts get sucked into the empty void, the void where nothing exists, where you would be nothing. You protests, scrambling to crawl out of the crater. But everything becomes clouded, devoid of light, as even that one protest fades away…

Earlier than the morning, far before the sun’s light had even shown on the sky, each of your relatives would get a call from the hospital.

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Yup, cancer’s a bitch.

I would say sudden death.

That was the only death I’ve seen in my life and frankly, I never want to see something like that ever again.

Whether it is a slow death in that it takes hours to die, or a slow death that takes years for the disease to take over, I don’t want to spend even the shortest amount of time knowing that I will die. That’s not how I want to spend my last moments.

At least in a sudden death, I wouldn’t need to be in pain, physically or emotionally.

Well this turned depressing real quick.