The Alive- and Dead-Man Thoughts

For two nights running, I'd wanted to die. Actually, not quite. What I wanted was for the very idea of cognitive existence to be completely obliterated from my consciousness. I strongly wished I'd never known life as a state of affairs, that my conception of it so far would wipe out and be replaced by a black gaping void the size of all the matter in the universe.

Only then - if whatever was left of me still perceived sensation - would my mind draw a blank. A blank that, at last, would exemplify my utter refusal to register or reflect upon any kind of alive-man thoughts anymore. 

Killing myself was an option. But frankly, in the short life I'd lived so far, I had come to lose faith even in death as a means to numbness. It was the inexperience to deal with life that had left me with an unassailable urge to un-experience life.

And so followed the death pangs.

I realised that the kind of therapeutic (as opposed to incendiary) non-existence I sought could only be achieved by never having been born, (the latter achievable through suicide). But that, again, was out of the question. It had never been in my hands to be born. Or had it? 

Was there some kind of silent plea our life forms constantly sent out asking to materialise, occupy, exist, experience?

Now I repented lacking knowledge in death as a state of affairs. 

If I'd never lived before being born, was I dead previously? If the dead, too, even in death, possessed some kind of supernatural sensory faculties - albeit on an oblique plane of their own - were they afraid of life? 

Did they ponder constantly about life, wonder how, at the end of their death, they'd come to live? Did they rush to hospitals in their world to prevent being born? Did they vaccinate their children regularly against diseases that could lead to life? 

Anyway, it would all come a full circle when after taking birth I'd die. Or after dying, again take birth. So then was I not merely a lump of matter myself, being tossed continuously back and forth in the universe between two opposite realms by mysterious entities that conjured this twofold affair? 

To them, I was a crazy ball erupting with energy - sprightly, stuporous - enthusiastically exploring two realms, alternately, that weren't too different from each other. Only to be hemmed in by the eccentricities of the entities themselves, and their wicked game.

This game they called Life and Death, played on a vast canvas of universal void.

I definitively discarded all thoughts of suicide. It no more seemed like the closest option to put an end to my existence. Besides, to think about traversing the monstrous volume of vacuum between the two realms gave me a sense of vertigo. 

By now I had decided that death would only add to my bevy of problems. What if at some point in the future I found a solution to a problem but couldn't resolve it just because I was dead? Assuming alive-man problems got carried forward into death, which I'm sure they did.

Add to that dead-man problems. I don't think I could take it.

So death wasn't the end of it all, then? Was it just a thing that paralysed the life within you? Even though there wasn't really a way to tell, one thing I knew - I wouldn't be happy in death either. It wasn't much different from life. The life I led now, at least.

All of those two nights, my muddled mind screamed out just one thought, the only words that, although fuzzy, reverberated within me all along:

Take me away to a timeless period of transit where each crazy ball silently waits for its turn to be sent shooting across the universe's orbit, miles away into a realm where the ways of land are the exact opposite. And let me remain suspended in that constant forever, a symmetrical round blob of matter melded with equal parts alive- and dead-man thoughts.

In that period of waiting, when you've established a middle ground between the realms, you'll see that from there, life and death are at perfectly equal distances. Then you'll want to begin to freeze so you never casually drift off into either realm.

And slowly the heft of space engulfs all of you in the sweet vastness of time. The universe draws a blank, losing track of the states of affairs. Smack in between death and life I lie, my way of existence without any real form or shape. Only an idea. Only a mood.

An existence never brought into being, an existence never wasted.

Just immortal-man thoughts.