small things
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Yesterday, I was walking on the overhead bridge at NUS High and I remember looking down and thinking, this is so easy. I remember thinking, what if my legs don’t want to work anymore and what if I just stopped walking and stopped moving forward.
But then, I told myself that I am the only person who keeps me walking so I guess as long as I want to keep walking, I’m good.
So I kept walking, just that I slowed down a bit because I was really really tired.
But y’know, in that moment my brain ran through the logical steps, and when it completed the loop I realised what I was doing so I walked on and walked away.
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All I had to do was climb over the railing and stand on the precipice. Try not to step on the bright purple bougainvillea that normally line the roads in their incessant thirst for sun. Try not to crush more lives in the quest to take one. Sit down and have my legs dangle over the expressway. Look at the cars and the speeds at which they drive by. Slowly push myself off the edge. If I get lucky, it wouldn’t hurt at all. Maybe I’d get hit by car and the death would be instantaneous. Maybe I’d hit the road and everything inside me would be as broken as my spirit was. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much, but it would probably hurt too much.
My brain completed the loop and I realised where my thoughts were leading to. I walked on and walked away.
But with this happening I can’t help but think about it again, and you shouldn’t worry because I won’t /do/ anything, but I want you to know that I’ve thought about it, multiple times, mostly in moments when I’m too exhausted to think straight.
I keep having visions of my legs giving way because of the smallest of reasons. I can’t go down stairs without images of me missing the next step or stumbling down stairwells superimposed in my head. I can’t carry anything without imagining the worst possible situation happening — of me dropping and breaking things, or of me dropping things on other people. Sometimes I’d be walking completely fine and a vision hits me and my ankles feel weak, as if they’re going to fall apart and in those moments I think, what if I just stopped.
And it wouldn’t be hard at all, to just stop and to run and to never come back but I guess I am tied strongly to myself and to my responsibilities that I snap out of the exhaustion and move forward. But in those moments, everything truly does feel like it’s falling apart.
It isn’t about me. It shouldn’t be about me. It’s about all of us, and how we might have once stood in those shoes. It’s about all of us, and where we go from here.
