A Series on Death Pt. 5

Electum Mortem

Life boils down to one simple idea at the core of humanity: choice.

Choose to practice guitar; 40 hours a week is decent, if only we had that in a day. The beautiful protective coating surrounding those steel strings tears away at the skin on your fingertips, hardening and disfiguring the thin layers protecting your soul from the world around; but your skin doesn’t leave easy. It tears the coating off the steel leaving behind bare metal to fight with your flesh for years to come. You resonate together in a bashful frequency, finding the pitch of euphoria that brings you both out of pain and into beauty.

Whether determined or not, your life is dependent entirely on the way you react to the choices that are presented to you.

Choose to work out your mind; writing physically enforced not electronically divorced. Avoid the keyboard and search for the first placed number 2. The graphite surrounded by a shield of wood hopes to save itself from the truth of what it writes, but it cannot protect you. The graphite crumbles at the touch, leaving behind a trail of truths at the heart of you both. Your soul bleeds through the number 2 joining the paper in an instant of beauty, yet the pain deep in your fingers only mimics the pain you can’t escape in your soul. Somehow, your number 2 always manages to quell the darkest embrace.

You choose, or are chosen, to walk down whichever of the paths that life deems deserving.

Choose to work out your body; building upon the already shaky framework that brought you into this world. Yet, unlike most architectural frameworks, the ripping and tearing of your insides proves to only strengthen the once shaky ground you held. Muscles pull and stretch and shred at the very seem with even the slightest bit of force. Growth is attained through relentless self-imposed suffering that leaves only the top of your frame shaking in the end.

Choose to be lonely; to isolate in a perpetual quarantine more than the world demands. You can’t party, you can’t celebrate, but you limit yourself even further in an attempt to understand the stress that’s brought out within a quarantined world falling apart. Insomnia screams at the heavens wishing for something more, but there is no reply except for the echo in your mind. You could walk outside, you could be one with nature, you could Facetime or call, yet your pre-existing loneliness proved too crippling at the start; now you’re forcing yourself into a never ending spiral of darkness and seclusion.

Lined with thorns and traps, you travel the road blind folded in hopes that your next leap might clear the path.

Choose to act; a last ditch attempt to regain some form of independence and power. Empty stores and empty streets tempt you into a gas pedal at your feet. The world cannot control you as you look down at your unbuckled seatbelt and think to yourself how it’s just one more choice taken and forced upon you in a world of closeted insanity. As you start the engine and notice the tire pressure light come on, you drive off thinking of how this world will no longer control you.