DEATH

DEATH CONQUERS ALL

Whenever I bring up death, people look at me funny. It may be a simple joke or just me declaring that I would like to perish in the most gruesome manner imaginable. My dread of dying was overcome by my desire to experience everything, especially the horrific things. There are worse things than death that I desire to go through. Because I've experienced so much death, it's all I think about these days. I am just unable to go a day without having thoughts of death consume my entire being. My heart beats solely in anticipation of death. I absolutely have no empathy for my own life.

When my mind was plagued with visions of ugliness, I screamed out in the name of my god, pleaded, and tried to tear my flesh apart. I wanted to rip my skin off in pieces and spill blood. I wanted to sit with every agonising, mind-numbing ache. A part of me thought that by praying to the deity who created all living things, I would feel more alive or that I could get rid of the maggots that were slowly consuming the rotting portions of my body.

I contemplated ending my life before realising I was no longer capable of doing so. I was nothing more than a vessel that needed to be filled.

I ate the maggots that were devouring my body, and they tasted just like me—gory, unsightly, and ashy. I was still within my decaying body; no deity descended from above, no angels wanted to carry my spirit to the next realm—simply trapped, just there. But death was there, eating my maggots with me.

My mother, who I believe was to blame for my demise. My beloved mother, who left her maggots on my body, she—who was the most gut-wrenching thing that has ever happened to me—asked me, "You look different today. What gives?"

"Perhaps because I'm dead,"

In light of the scientific evidence, I wasn't yet dead. There are numerous biological mechanisms at work in my body that battle death on a daily basis to keep me warm and alive, but in my mind and soul, there is only one thing that keeps me warm and alive—the desire to savour the entirety of existence. I have this strong want to consume everything around me with such fervour that I eventually lose all sense of who I am.

The maggots my lovely mother left on my body were the first thing I ever consumed. Perhaps because I liked it so much, the maggots broke me down to a molecular level before re-immersing me in something so repulsive. Something so vile and disturbing.

It is always coursing inside my veins, and maybe deeper than that, it constitutes the entirety of who I am. You can drain every last drop of my blood from my body, yet I will still be warm and still have the desire to consume. Consume everything until there is nothing left of the world; even the most heinous creatures would look down upon the things I would want to consume.

Perhaps I am death itself rather than someone who obsesses about it. The demise of everything around me—I am the only thing that remains of everything else that once was.