I want to die because death feels like a friend

I have never wanted to die, I have never wanted to live either. I simply didn’t want to exist.

Sometimes, I think I still want to cease to exist.

Lately what I’ve discovered is I want to run away somewhere between existence and the void. Somewhere where nothing is required of me, where I can be eluded by the idea of nothingness without having to call it death.

I don’t know what I want, but I know I yearn for a place where I do not have to be something or someone.

Death has never been a hoax. There is no performance to it, no negotiation, no pretending. Death simply is what it is. It does not promise to make me better. It does not ask me to become better. It merely waits.

That has always been the most comforting thing about it.

I am exhausted by continuation, by the endlessness of things I cannot touch, cannot hold, cannot make certain.

I envy myself just as much as I envy others, maybe even more. I envy days when I smiled, when joy threatened my existence. Those sweet memories cradle me, as if they were lived by another version of me and I am only remembering her from a distance.

In some quiet way, I have always been seduced by the idea that there is a place where nothing awaits me. A blankness. Nothing before, nothing after. No unfinished business. No truth or lie. No having to carry myself into another morning.

I have sat with this idea since I was a child, before I understood what breathing meant, before I understood what life would require of me.

But perhaps, perhaps, what I really wish for is not death.

How could I desire death when there are still so many things I have to atone for? How could I not desire it when sometimes it feels as though there is a hand blundering around my throat, or a knife moving quietly through me?

There are days when I am barely there. Where life feels like an episode of disappointments and the grey of the days begins to make me sick of myself.

I want to rest.

But I wonder if there is a world where that truly exists for me.

I walk around with sadness on the tip of my tongue. The smallest touch can bring back everything I have lost, and everything I could have had but never gained. The love, the unattended wounds, the love, the people who saved me, the things I thought would stay.

But, there are times I don’t feel exhausted by being myself. There are rare but they happen. I don’t loathe where I came from, who I am, or who I might become.

I believe I am tired of carrying the distance between what is and what I wish it could be.

And maybe that is why death has felt like a friend, because I have mistaken its absence for mercy.

But death is not a final thought. Nor is it a friend. It is a thief.

It would take the people who kept me here. It would take the ordinary mornings I have not yet lived, the conversations I have not yet had, the dreams I have not yet achieved.

I have never been good at believing there is more, but sometimes I allow myself the smallest possibility that one day I will finally meet myself. I don’t know whether life can give me that. I don’t know what it might still make of me. I don’t know if relief exists in the shape I have been searching for.

But the curiosity keeps me awake, and that has to be enough.

If this resonates with you in a way that feels immediate or unsafe, please reach out to someone you trust or contact your local emergency/crisis service. You don’t have to sit with it alone.