Epilogue

They're crowding around me and I don't know what to do and I think I'm dying.

Their bodies are foul, with a stench that you could smell a thousand meters away. I was just in an alley, dying of starvation (again) and suddenly these monsters, making clicking noises, rushed at me, and bit me.

The pain is so overwhelming I don't even notice it anymore. I'm bleeding out. Why am I not hurting? Why is there no pain? Where did the feeling go…

I think I'm falling to the ground. I don't know what these creatures wanted with me, but they filled my blood with something strange. I can feel a toxin of sorts working its way through my blood, filling me with emptiness.

I'm dying.

For real.

I think I spend days in that alley. Nobody notices me, not even when I'm sweating and seizuring and writhing in pain. I don't know what they did to me but it's not good and my life is slipping away.

Maybe it's for the best, though.

I've lived too long, seen too much, done bad things.

I don't know what those things were, but it doesn't seem to matter.

I didn't choose to die.

But maybe, in a way, I did.

I've given up now for a long time.

I think…I think my only wish is to find someone else. Someone who knows my struggles. Who I can talk to when I'm feeling bad.

God, that sounds corny.

I just wish I wasn't dying alone.

Breath leaves me and then I'm rising up, up, up out of my body and I'm in the next dimension and I'm here to stay.

I always had this thing that I believed in -

"There's always a choice."

In a way, I chose to die.

Maybe, just maybe, I'm right about something.

Maybe today things will be okay, for once.

Maybe today I can live by dying.