Anthropomorphic principle

 

I can’t even imagine what it must be to be normal. It’s been so long since I’ve lived anything close to the life of an average human being that I’ve forgotten what it felt like. I’m too different. It wears you down, trying to fit in knowing you never will, facing your problems knowing they’ll never end. Every day the burdens pile up and the weight get heavier. Well I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of suffering. I can’t take it anymore. Now I just want to rest.
Why did everything end up that way? Why did everything keep getting worse, with no end ever in sight? What relentless curse kept dragging out my torment, as if toying with my life? All I wanted was a way out. There comes a point when you’d accept anything to make the pain stop. And for someone like me, the only way is to end my life. Put an end to all of this bullshit. Leave this world where I never should have been.
I contemplated the bottle of pills that stood firmly on the table in front of me. It takes a lot of courage to fight your survival instinct. To make that final leap. Death is scary and terrible. But sometimes, the alternative is worse. A final effort to put an end to suffering. The last bit of pain ever. After this, there would be no turning back. The story would end.I poured some pills in the palm of my trembling hand.
But contemplating the medicine, I got scared. I heard far too many stories of such attempts failing, which kept replaying in my mind as I was trying to gather my courage. I didn’t want to spend all night puking, only to come back to my hell in the morning. The point was not to add more suffering. I decided to put the pills back in the bottle with a trembling hand. There had to be a safer way. I certainly envisioned a lot of things during the darkness of my days. I moved slowly through my apartment. Everything felt distant, like I was in a dream.		I took a deep breath and shoved the fistful of medicine in my mouth. I swallowed painfully. I really hoped that it would be enough, else it would have all been for naught. Just to be safe, I gulped down the rest of the bottle. Now there was nothing to do but wait. I lied down in my bed, crying softly, until sleep carried me off forever.
Finally, I reached the window. My building was only a couple of floors high, and dominated a highway. I often stared at the flow of life on the road, watching the pulsating bustling of a world foreign to me. Maybe it was time for them to do something for me. If the shock didn’t get me, certainly the traffic would. I yanked the window open. The fresh air from dusk came whipping my face, the rumbling of the cars at the end of rush hour filled my surroundings. Nobody noticed as I poked my head outside of the building. How fitting. Dizziness overcame me as I watched the ground far below. This would do nicely. I took a deep breath and prepared to command my legs to push me for a last time. I closed my eyes, and jumped. The wind lashed my body, as if to welcome me in its embrace. For a second that seemed like an eternity, I was falling down a vertiginous infinity. My soon-to-be-corpse kept tumbling and spinning disorderly.
I landed on my back, in a horrible cacophony of cracking sounds. I immediately lost consciousness.		My head hit the ground first. My skull exploded under the impact. And I was no more.
The screeching sounds of tires stopping abruptly resonated all around me. People were honking and getting out of their cars, panicked. They yelled at each other and to themselves, trying to make sense of what to do in this routine-breaking situation they had never imagined. Emergency services were called, and soon the strident siren of an ambulance tore through the chaos of the arguments. It fought its way to what was left of me. The medical staff came out and carefully moved my body to a stretcher. The vehicle started up again while the paramedics applied whatever first aid they could. An IV in my arm helped the body hold on until the hospital. They kept exchanging information in a lingo I couldn’t understand nor hear. In our trail, on the freeway, the disturbed human life was slowly taking back its course. The ambulance arrived at the hospital in a short time. The staff dragged my stretcher to the ER, through brightly lit immaculate hallways. Heads were turning on our way, but this was nothing out of the ordinary for this place. Medics were exchanging information in rushed but not panicked voices. We made our way straight to an operating room. Nurses and doctors started to probe and tend to whatever was left of my body, their chatter punctuated by the beeping noises of the medical equipment.
The surgery lasted for some time. Many bones were broken, internal bleeding needed stopping… All the while the various machines kept insisting on the precarity of my condition, letting everyone know how close to death I was. One false move would be the end of it. But there was none. After a long battle, the surgery staff put down their weapons and let out sighs of relief. I was stabilized. It would obviously take a while before I was in any decent shape, but my life was out of danger. They carried me to a room where I was left on my own until I regained consciousness.		The surgery staff kept fighting against the dreadful state this lump of flesh was in. The machines confirmed it was not looking good. The internal bleeding was too dire for them to do much. They tried their best and worked at it for a while, but in the end the steady noise of the flat line confirmed that I was beyond saving.
It happened gradually, and it was hard for me to come to my senses, numbed by the intense pain that bathed every inch of me as well as the heavy doses of anesthetics that made it all tolerable. It probably took hours for me to be lucid enough in any meaningful way. White lab coated people came and went every now and then. The rhythm of their visits was the only way for me to tell the passage of time. After a while, one of them talked to me and explained, in a bored and disapproving voice, that I would be here for long and that they’d have to do a full psych evaluation of me the next day to figure out exactly what would happen to me. I knew what it meant, and it wasn’t good. In fact, it was probably the worst case scenario. But my brain was still too confused to think about it and fully process the information. I slept for some time.
When I woke up, it was still night. The fog in my mind had lifted a little, replaced by a growing anxiety about what would come next. I gazed up at the starry sky through the window of the room, and felt an unexpected sense of serenity washing over me. After all that had happened, there was something especially magnificent about the view that unfolded in front of my eyes. “Maybe the universe just wants to be looked at.” For a short moment, I couldn’t help but accept the part of me that was in awe of this world, and lucky to have lived to tell the tale.