i wish i were dead so you’d think of me

maybe then you'd care

lucretia (rembrandt, 1664)

We are not seventeen anymore, and the weight of that loss is heavier than I ever expected. People must be weary of my constant laments, much like a clock that endlessly chimes the same hour. I cannot fault them for it. Yet, I cannot shake the feeling that, during those years, a vital part of me was quietly taken away, leaving me misaligned and faltering. Maybe it was the slow erosion of my life, or the way time wore me down without permission. In those days, we were everything—youthful, brimming with fragile dreams that felt boundless. I remember the way we wandered the labyrinths of our thoughts, aimless yet certain, our feet dragging heavy against the cold ground. We spoke of everything and nothing, as though the world could shatter around us and we would remain untouched. Even now, the weight of those moments lingers—the cadence of your voice and the peculiar ache of your laughter, suspended between light and longing. What does one do with the remnants of a self they no longer recognize? Do they archive those moments like photographs pressed between dusty pages, or do they carry them, threadbare and fragile, into whatever comes next?

I wonder if you ever think about me. Maybe you do in brief moments when the world slows and a forgotten scent or a familiar sound tugs at the edges of your mind. Or perhaps, like everything else, I have simply faded—washed away by the relentless tide of life. The thought gnaws at me. Perhaps I am the only one still grasping at the rotting remnants of what we were, futilely trying to hold onto something that no longer lives. Do you even think of me? Does my name ever flicker in the depths of your mind when everything else is quiet? Or have I dissolved into nothingness, a shadow you no longer care to follow? Maybe it is just me, wandering through the ruins of our past, haunted by memories that no longer belong to me. I wonder if you ever think of me now, in the solitude of your thoughts. Do you remember the way we sat together on that park bench by the high school, our coats brushing, shoulders touching, while the cold seeped into us unnoticed? We pretended time could be halted, as if we could freeze it in place with our careless wills. Do you ever find yourself wondering about the same things?

I wish I were dead so you would think of me. Just enough to linger in your thoughts. To be that brief, almost unnoticeable flicker at the corner of your eye. I do not want to be gone entirely, but I want you to remember. To know that, in some far corner of your mind, my name might rise unbidden from the dust of the years, like a forgotten verse from a song once loved. My rotting heart bleeds. Not in any graceful or poetic way, but in a manner so grotesque that it spills through my eyes, staining everything it touches. It is no longer a soft, delicate thing but a bloated carcass, hollowed out and dripping with decay. The once-pure pulse now stutters weak, as if it too is recoiling from the unbearable truth of its own demise. Blood turns to something black, thick and congealed, clinging to the inside of my ribs, suffocating everything it touches. I feel it—this wet, sticky mass, spreading like disease, creeping through my veins, poisoning the remnants of what I once was.

How pathetic it is, how wretched, this desperate hunger for a sliver of your attention.

---