Sometimes,
When I am lost or scared or sad,
I imagine my lifeless corpse,
Resting comfortably on a forest floor.
I find peace there.
I envision my hair entwined with the roots of the tree I lie beneath,
Moss and mushrooms and monkshood growing from my bare body,
Scars across my limbs dark against my skin,
So cold and pale,
Spiders crawling across the valleys between my ribs,
Hiding in the hollows of my collarbones,
Snakes slithering up my legs,
Around my neck,
Through my dreams.
I am all alone in the woods,
Bathed in moonlight and mist,
Decomposing in silence.
No one to see,
No proof of who I used to be.
I imagine melting back into the Earth,
Rain washing away what was once my soul,
Reduced to runoff,
Carried away by a violent river,
Pummeled once more by jagged rocks,
But that’s nothing new,
Sticks and stones I suppose.
There’s something so calming in the stillness of death,
Something so strangely attractive about its inevitability,
So thrilling in its inescapable grasp,
So alluring.
It’s the only thing to count on,
The only promise to be kept for all time,
The only absolute.
I think I am more afraid of life than death,
More afraid of myself than anything that could ever happen to me.
When I die I hope to find my peace lying on a forest floor.
I want to fall into eternal sleep staring at Orion and the Man in the Moon,
Their images distorted by a canopy of trees.
I want to listen to the lullaby sung by the owls and wind through the leaves.
I want to exist as whispers in the breeze and the lilies,
Haunting those who could never love me,
Immortalized by agony.