Monday 18 April 2011

Dignity in Dying


It had taken almost a year. He had crossed a continent, passing over mountains and braving wild forests. He had made his way across seas, both calm and stormy. He had wandered the desert and sweated under the suns unrelenting heat, but finally, he had arrived. He stared up at the ancient pyramids, the wonders he had travelled so far to see, and felt... nothing. He knew then for certain, what until now he had only suspected: It was time to end it all.

He had never suffered much in his life. Never had he been a slave, nor had his family died in some tragedy. He had never been part of a great, intolerable war. But he wondered now if any of these things would have been worse than the life he had ended up with. At least those people knew the bleeding colours of life and death, rather than the monotonous grey that seemed to make up his existence. It sounded selfish, yet part of him knew it was true.

He knew the problem was his lonesomeness. All he had fared on his travels, all that he had seen was meaningless without companionship. But it was already too late for that. He knew the solitary life changed people in irreversible ways and knew that it had made him cold, made him insulated, made him see the world as abstract. No, it was time to end it.

He would wander back into the desert, the land that mirrored his present life more than any other place. There he would end it all with a quiet, drama-less dignity. There was nothing else left for him in the world.

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