To Stare Death In the Face
Sometimes,
I think that The Storm brings calm.
Before it,
The clouds build and build in the sky
Until you can’t see the light anymore,
The clouds waiting and waiting to let go of the thousands
And thousands
Of pounds of rain.
You can’t always see when exactly the clouds will let go,
But you can feel it.
Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump.
The heart in your chest races.
Maybe if it beats faster,
Until you hear the pounding in your head,
You won’t be able to hear the voices
Telling you to make it stop.
It’s trying to keep going,
Making you feel like every beat is the last beat it will be able to do.
I had that feeling for 3 years.
The feeling of waiting,
And waiting,
For it to wash over me,
Like the hurricane that I knew was coming.
One day the weight of the rain finally,
Became too much for the cloud to hold.
I remember that day like it was yesterday.
At 10:11 I knew that the rain was coming.
By 10:50 I had contacted every single person I cared about,
Telling them how much they meant to me,
Some of which,
Writing back,
trying to stop The Storm from sweeping me away
For good.
That night, I got to meet Death.
He was welcoming at first.
What I didn’t know,
Was that Death,
Is a really good liar.
He said that letting the rain win would be easier than falling asleep,
That it wouldn’t hurt at all,
And I believed Him.
I waited and waited for it to hit me,
So I could become another number in a statistic.
But he lied.
My body woke up every hour after 4 am,
Coughing, throwing up, and hurting,
Trying to tell me that it wasn’t my time
To follow Death somewhere that is not on Earth,
And my mind realized,
At 2:18 pm,
The same thing that my body had realized 10 hours earlier.
I stared death in the face that day,
And 5 more days after that.
We sat in a room together,
Staring at each other,
Playing that game where whoever blinks first loses.
I laughed, and I cried,
Until I couldn’t cry anymore,
Doctors and psychiatrists helping me keep my eyes open,
And eventually,
Someone won.
Ever since that day,
I see Death from time to time when I’m completing normal tasks,
But now,
I don’t let The Storm take over me,
I am calm.
I know that everyone will die eventually,
That Death will win against all of us,
Eventually,
But for me,
I know that Death won’t take me anytime soon.
For me, the Calm was after the Storm.
Copyright © Gray Andrews | Year Posted 2022
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