What is it when one hears oneself ask, please let this end? No, let’s be frank, it is more like putting in a request to die. Death as positive choice. An absolute no-no. We all know. Yet, some of us don’t care and take the leap – but off what ledge? Into which crater? And is it ever a leap of faith?
I am not going to debate suicide or when it is ever permissible to endorse ending one’s life willfully. I am not about to examine when is it killing oneself unlawfully or otherwise a merciful assisted suicide. I am putting under the microscope the very prompt to the thought that chooses death as the thing to do. It's a very small pin prick that causes one to wake up like that. It takes but a single lethal drop of this thought, to bring to a staggering halt the impetus to enjoy life and believe in one's strength to carry all and carry on till it is God's will to call it a day. It even feels like God has given you this lethal injection Himself!? Yikes. But that is what constant oppression, futile action, impotence in general, slavery to some inane and cruel System (another I invented for their own sake) does to you.
It is never the loneliness that is the killer. Isolation can create victims. Solitude can make for the setting of unbearable suffering, but it must not be confused with a suicidal mood. One person’s blissful serenity and endless time for misty musings and slow-motion Tai-chi sessions before counting grains of sand is another person’s incarceration within the skull-hall of horror mirrors.
As much as one is robbed of one’s freedom, one’s life loses its value incrementally.
It does your head in and crushes your morale and finally depletes your will to live. The guage wobbles a long while around the red letter E for empty, until it clunks to a dead drop below the mark. Nothing left. Self-worth fallen to zero. What’s worth living for without a self to live it?
The freedom to be the I that I am needs respect.
Return to me as I give to you. Review all I’ve done for you and find me worthy. Restore me after all my efforts. Regard me in high esteem. Respond in kind; RESPOND! REPLY! RELATE! Hit me! Smack me! Bite me! Acknowledge my presence, or I will cease to exist, already now, here alive, but unrewarded, unrecognised, unredeemed. No, don't hurt me. Of course not. I am not a sado-masochist but an esthete. Love me.
Re-Spect has to do with looking back and including on your vision for the future. Spectacle, spectacles, spectator, spectrum. Rewind, reconsider, remember, record, report.
In prison, I think I would not fear for my life; but use what is left of it to recover my freedom. The space to breathe as I want to breathe. Malodorous halitosis in ya face. The freedom to rant and rave and feed my canary in a cage. The freedom to paste my Piranesi nightmares on my walls and scare you awake.
Sometimes it feels like you could do more dead than alive. As if a change of location might be helpful. You know, in view of all that angels do for us. Only being dead is not being an angel, I well realise; then again what have angels done for you lately? Hence, my thoughts go out to the dead: might they do better. I promise I will try.
More imaginary prisons, like at top, by Piranesi here
