Death

I find myself in an inescapable moment of death, stuck reliving the horrid unfortunate deaths following my life, real and fictitious both. It seems, I might add, that my entire life is falling apart, piece by piece, with each loss contributing to a loss of my self.

I'm sure you're quite aware at the loss of my job. It's hard. It really is. Even with the inspirational message from Darren Shan, and the subsequent blog post about it, I find it hard to cope. I should be in work tomorrow, but instead I'm meeting up with my colleagues, where we may very well mope together over tea and coffee. My professional life as a bookseller has suffered a terrible death in itself.

A small number of you might also be aware of the missing Jonny Havron in York. It shouldn't affect me like it, does, as I've never met the guy face to face, but it does. The Internet has that strange power, the power denied by the ignorant masses, to bring people together as friends. Jonny was one of the early members of the Literary Den. I can never forget the important role he played in the building of the group. Without the participation of everyone in the group in the early days it would all have been for nothing. I don't want to think about the idea that Jonny might not be okay, but every time the thought rises, I pray to God that he turns up okay. Relatively speaking, of course. Whatever the case, it's the representative of the death of my ability to function properly online - I keep thinking about poor Jonny, and how there's no way of knowing if he's safe or not. I keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, he might be able to come back to talk to us, but that it might not happen, and that no matter what it will never be the same. We can never forget this week gone past.

Most recently, and perhaps most selfishly on my part, I feel the death of my iPod. This one seems to affect me most, or maybe it's the fact that it broke during the trust I gave to my brother to use it, but I promise you I'm not being selfish in the materialistic sense of the word. That iPod, it's screen, it's face, now shattered, was my way of easily keeping in touch with people. It was my access to Twitter and to email accounts, to Googling things when I needed to without the hassle of setting up my laptop. It's not entirely the fact that the iPod itself is broken, but the sense of loss I'm feeling regarding its loss, the inability to check up on things like the Jonny Havron story, or the story of my job, to see if there are any new developments. I feel almost entirely helpless without it. And to make matters worse, I've lost my main way of listening to music, which serves, for the most part, as my method of escaping from the world around me. I can drown out all the sorrow, all the noise, all my thoughts, in the music of artists I've come to know and love.

And then there's my own death. I have a problem with this, in that it's a fear, perhaps irrational, though perhaps not. I don't fear the dying. The lack of being able to fulfil my dreams, yes, I fear that. But mainly it's the idea of my dying, in that its in my head and at my own hands, by my own will. I've faced this problem before. I can't escape it, but I think by finally telling someone, anyone, I can at least try get passed it.

I see myself jumping. It has to be from a cliff, right after I've apologised for doing it, in advance of the leap itself. There aren't sufficient tall buildings in Ireland - only a cliff would do. I fall, I fall so far, and then I stop. I'm gone. And it repeats. It's a dream, and a nightmare, and a stray thought of the otherwise consious mind. It's a haunting in my mind I can't escape, and something that scares the living daylights out of me. I feel it in my stomach, in my heart and in my head, the pounding of fear and nerves as everything closes in on me, time pouring from my hands. No matter how hard I try to hold on to it, I can't. I lose it every second of every minute, of the hours in the days of the weeks that go by without so much progress as I'd hoped, and even less time left than I started with.

But I can't jump, not really. I have too much to live for, too much to learn both in college and about myself. And I've begun a journey of life, chosen the lonely path of a writer, but it's a path I freely accepted, knowing that even with my friends at the other end of a text or a call, or even right across the table from me, I can be the loneliest person in the world.

My real tragedy is that I can't tell them. I can't tell them how I'm absolutely terrified of every single thing I submit for my continuous assessment, and that's the reason I don't get the results. I can't tell them that I don't want to go to the ball because I don't want a repeat of my debs, where I really was the loneliest person in the building. I can't tell them that the drama society has begun more pressure than I wanted, and about the pain in my stomach when I think about how I might ruin the entire thing for everyone. I can't admit to the fact that I have problems to my friends, because I still have the other fear that my lonely life as a writer will become the lonely life of a writer who really, really can't get along with friends.

And every day I die because of it. I've never been so honest in my life, mind you. I lie every second of every minute I'm in public. I wear my silly smile every day, and make my annoying cheer of greeting to my friends every time I see them. Okay, so I'm not faking my joy at seeing them, but I do keep up a higher mood than I'm really feeling. I've been doing it for years. I can never, never, let someone inside my head, to let them know that I am, in fact, a complete loony toon, desperately depressed sometimes, torn between crying and just running away. Except then there'd be questions asked of me, and I don't think I could answer them, any of them. Because, and this is what I tell the world, there's nothing wrong with me. I'm just sick. I'm just tired.

I've been acting for years, now, and yet that fecking drama society has me struggling. The problem is that I do two things in life - happy, sometimes to an annoying extent, and serious, sometimes to a scary extent. I can never be that domineering person I'm supposed to be in the play, the one who strikes fear in his pupil, because I'm the one who, every day, has to pretend I'm not afraid of failing to meet the expectations of the world around me. When I try to be someone else, someone no one knows me to be, then they see the real me, the terrified boy who doesn't know what to do and who's frozen with his terror, so he can't act on it.

These are the truths of my life; these are the deaths in my life; these are my worst kept secrets, posted to you, with my name freely attached. I'm not looking for anything out of this... okay, some comfort would be nice. It would be bloody wonderful, in fact, but that's not why I posted this. I just... I think I just had to get it all off my chest. It's been bothering me for far too long to keep it a secret any more.

That's... yeah, that's all I have to say about this subject. I think I might finally sleep on this knowledge, knowing the world can know, if it cares enough to know.