Rossignol Eliot’s Will and Testament

I’ve been ill for three years, a gradual decline (albeit with a few more marked thresholds) until I was more ill than most people ever find themselves, while still being unlucky enough to remain alive.  

It’s hard to say much to summarize all of this.  It is literally hard. I cannot muster the energy to type very much.  I usually never type more than a paragraph on any given day. I think in tv static, bite-sized mantras and images threading together to offer me direction out of brain fog on a day to day level.  So it would be hard to say much more other than I suffered far too much, during that time, on many axes. I suffered immensely physically—pain, more shades of discomfort than have been named, etc.  I suffered emotionally from losing my youth and my life. I suffered cognitively as my pain and inflammatory disease rent my mind apart. Without palliative care or getting a break from the suffering, I was thrown into unreality.  I to this day am not sure whether I died on that day when I first got a fever and became ill with the initial infection that would lead to years of illness. I am not sure if I am in purgatory. When I say I feel like I’m in hell, or describe this as a living hell, people are never aware of the extent to which I mean this literally. 

And I fought through it and I did lots of research, tried many things.  I had a disease that doesn’t have a cure. But after years of false starts and false hopes, I have found what looks like really strong evidence for the root cause of my illness, and a treatment that is likely to produce full remission.  

But I’m not happy.  And instead of doing that treatment, or maybe if I do that treatment, I’m still going to take my life.  Because I’ve had too much taken from me to feel like I can rebuild. Because the idea of going back to living seems scary, seems like it could be a dead end, another taunt.  Because I don’t want to hear God’s mocking laughter on the inside of my head anymore. And because I don’t want to dignify something evil that happened to me with a silver lining.  I don’t want to take this deal. I just want to refuse to play on these terms. Because I have become nothing, a rag doll, a sack of flesh filled with poison and aversion, and because I don’t think that anybody can truly say they love that nothing, those impulses, the ruined flesh.   And if I am not loved, or respected, by those who I love and respect, then I am nothing.  

So to nothing I will return.   And also because fuck you.