We separate ideas into increments. A body paragraph for every separate theme, tied neatly on each end with an introduction and conclusion.

Life works with the same sandwich format; you are born, you live, and you die. Cold cut and oh so very clean.

However, there are multitudes of tiny little paragraphs in a life. Deleted sentences in the margins, aborted actions, eye contact, decisions. Every moment of being a person is a word and essays can’t capture that mini-universe.

I open my mouth to say something and nothing comes out. My words backspaced inside my cavern of thought and I choke on them, wondering blindly if I should’ve set them free.

I open my eyes to look but they can’t hold, they slide back down to earth like oil, unable to climb the wall that is some other human face. Or, even worse they linger, fixed on a point and unable to escape. My oily gaze burnt black and horrendous.

My brain paints things my hands cannot. In the curves of an empty plain I sculpt, recreating sweet lines and angles and eyes and mouths and throats moving and breathing in sweet tandem to my own, but never to be free from my skull. My hands are too clumsy, too dull to create a mirror image, twisting the beauty into filth, impure, corrupt.

If I could just pour the contents of my mind onto the page, and watch them dry perfectly like water color, I would love nothing else. I would die the happiest woman alive. But if I cut open my head and let my life flow, I get nothing but red and pink and glassy eyes. There’s no beauty in that, nothing grand. Only lifeless matter that used to be a person. That’s the problem with funerals, I like to think.

A human being is simply a collection of ideas that come to an end like any proper paper. After the thing that makes the mind more than pink goo leaves, what is there? An empty husk. We can come and cry to this husk, touch, mourn, but the person has been snuffed out like a candle. Funerals are for the living, because the dead are long gone; an ended sentence.

Not always ended at due time, for some end in the middle, or in the beginning far too early. But we smack down a period and leave it at that.

Sometimes one takes control of the pen and writes his own period, a ragged, filthy thing, ripping the paper. A specific and glorious ending, but nonetheless the end.

Is it an act of cowardice, to take the end in your own hands? To not let the fates finish with flourish? Perhaps. It takes a certain kind of person to do something so strong as to wrench the hand of fate, yet so weak as to end themselves. A certain breed of desperation.