Vision

Daisy Chen, Canyon Crest Academy, graduating in '26 March 22, 2023

CW: self-harm, suicide

The white luminosity is blinding and my vision is obstructed. I want to tell them to turn off the light but my voice is somehow displaced. Nothing is working. The tubes sticking out of my arms feel like second arms, an extension of my fading body. My lungs have given up, my throat slammed shut, brown liquid floating inside my body like a saturated pond. Drowning in a self-inflicted pool. ​ The doctors suggested steroids, poison injected into my blood, running a murderous rampage, slaughtering everything in its path. I knelt, in front of my bathroom mirror, pulling out my hair, watching as the strands stick to the

Photography by Natalie*

sides of the sink. ​ I sobbed alone that night. Not because of the hair, not because of the pain and nausea, but the coldness I felt within. One step closer to the edge of the cliff, one stride towards the end of the tunnel. The reflection wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t anyone I knew. It was of a nameless girl, pale and dull, bloodshot eyes and blue hands. The burning fire of life long gone, the last spark faded, just another unnamed spirit floating in the vacuum of space. ​ The sickness took my parents away. Mother tried to hide from me, darting behind walls or sticking her face in that awful, awful, mirror of hers. The disease pilfered her voice, robbed her beauty and charisma, and left her to die in that empty shell of a brain. She had become a ghost, a half translucent lunatic drifting through hallways and corridors, wailing for her real daughter. ​ She looks like she has aged 20 years, her hair gray and unkempt, her eyes dark and baggy, and clothes full of ruffles and stains. She was beyond saving, beyond the grasps of simple living. ​ My father had converted to be a recluse, startled by the sudden drip of water, petrified of the shadows and voices only he could see and hear. He no longer remembered the sound of laughter, and his eyes no longer shed any tears, forgetting how to cry. He had turned into a marble sculpture, with stone-cold features and a rounded mouth, absent of emotion.

He stands by the wall, intently watching the antique grandfather clock as its many hands move across the board. Lost in its gaze, fixated by its shiny opal surface that shines like a bubble even after years of use, he stares. As apathetic as a dementia patient, his mind blank, a deserted wasteland once filled with joy and festivity. ​ Purpose was a vague idea I had mumbled about, never becoming reality, drifting through the hippocampus. I spent my days watching the sunset, its crimson rays vanishing beneath the blanket of darkness, swept away like a bottle in the ocean. Another day elapsed, the steady march of time advancing, never looking back. ​ I tried to smile; I really did. I tried to be as brave as everyone said I was, to stand my ground, to fight tooth and claw with the misery. I tried to get back up no matter how hard it was getting and how painful my body felt. I tried to act like I had a choice, a choice in this pathetic exchange. ​ I was standing in my attic, sorting through aged photos, golden brown in hue, and smudged on the edges. She was so quaint, so picturesque, no painted lips, no masked eyes, no artifice, no illusion designed to deceive the naked eyes. ​ I prefer not to contemplate about the darkness. Pensive in thoughts, I sit and ponder, high up on the second-floor balcony. Windows swung wide open, letting in the light, trying to focus on the sweet angelic melody of the songbirds. Or is it the low hum of the generator? The piercing smell of death keeps strolling in. I cannot stop thinking about the poison, slowing diffusing in me. ​ I miss when I was a stranger in its foreign lands. Now, I am a traveler, a lonely wanderer, standing before the great beast known as the unknown. ​ There is so much of this world I have not seen yet, a paradise known as Earth that I am barred from visiting. There is so much I have not done yet and so much more, I will never get that chance now. My dreams are left untouched, forever remaining as unfinished masterpieces. They will die with me, carried to an eternity trapped in a wooden box, rotting away under layers of history. ​ It seemed to me rather unfair that I would die unknown, another simple link in the inconsequential chain of humanity. I suppose my death would prove meaningless in the long run and I would have spent the last fourteen years wasting my time. I would have lived an insignificant life and died an ordinary death, a constant reminder of human failure. Perhaps if I had more time, I would have achieved great deeds. I wish I didn’t spend my life daydreaming of regrets. ​ I cannot see the brightness anymore, my vision turning the white into a dull gray, a color long gone out of fashion. There are people wandering around me as sluggish blobs, appearing in and out of sight. I can no longer feel my head resting on the pillow, no longer feel the weight of my lungs as they heave and drag. This is the end, the short and inconclusive symphony of my life is fading, the violins and the cellos breaking unison, and the piano diminishing. There will be one final curtain call, perhaps an epiphany that befalls upon me in my last moments before gliding into a sea of nothingness. What has my life meant all this time? I have learned nothing, felt nothing. Barely living, I waited too long for that spark of inspiration, my big break from the humdrum of my life. The light is waning at the end of the tunnel, flickering on and off. For the last time, I am reminded of my weariness, sweeping me away into the clouds. My vision, indistinct and subsiding.