Mental Mortician

You lay in a hospital bed, wheezing and staring at a ceiling, wishing you had stuck with weed or hell, even cocaine because nothing has hurt this bad before. Copper wires tighten around your lungs every time that you try to breathe, and you look around the room. The hospital over there probably lacks basic things, but you have enough resources to fight the virus off and still feel every painful blow you are dealt. I can see you getting weaker, becoming skin and bones, and dying of something so mundane. The bass comes into the song I was listening to and I am pulled back to the United States, back to my room, back to whatever I was doing before my brain took over.

People die daily in my head, perks of being someone I love. Though I can bear minutes, hours, or even weeks not talking to them (just ask my poor grandparents who have no idea where I am), the graves of the people I love have already been dug in my brain and their deaths plague my dreams. I like to pretend that it is all porn and high ass jokes, yet I always wake up to a teary pillow and a need to talk to someone. My legs have shaken endlessly since I was a child (and I have an Achilles heel of steel), and I began to map out an escape route for every situation in the middle of lectures in middle school and just never stopped.

I think you were just as perplexed that anxiety racks my brain as I was that you had never had Death stop for you and offer you a lift. No part of your childhood was spent crying in stalls for reasons that you can’t articulate. Your soul never choked on a fly’s spirit then spent the month lamenting the futility of life. You don’t get to experience death until it happens while I have been a funeral director since birth. Yet, the hardest part is that real death merely grazes me as it whizzes past. My hyperactive intuition always forgets to carry a number, and the calculation goes awry and the situation turns out better than I thought it would.

I can feel the cart coming though, collecting the bones of the people I love. The expiration date of my loved ones is speeding towards me in slow motion and I have no idea how to handle it. Delving into my interests just leads to word vomit, the world collapsing again, and earsplitting migraines. The pandemic only increased my irrational thoughts, and the hospital scene comes more aggressively, and the tears flow less and less which strikes fear into me. No logic can tell me you’re okay when I watch you flatline again. The phobia started well before the hiatus and will continue well after, but I didn’t want you to hurt. I don’t want you to cry and see the world through my twisted greyscale lenses.