FicWad

To Be or Not to Be?




You can feel the rain digging into your skin, each icy droplet feeling like a miniscule dagger, the cold of it burning deep into your flesh until you can’t even feel your body anymore. You are numb on the outside, just as you are on the inside.

You feel nothing.

You feel everything.

You feel every spit of spite that they gave you, that you gave to them. Every mindlessly meaningful and meaningfully mindless guffaw replaying in your head like a broken record. It’s sort of bittersweet; you used to love the sound of their laughter, revelled in it even, yet now here it is, driving you insane. And yet here you are, willing to do anything just to escape the sound of that once-sacred laughter. The laughter that was once your sole reason to live now your reason to die.

Or rather, one of your many reasons to leave drawling existence like a chaste kiss on a cold winter’s evening; gone too soon for it to be any good.

Or not gone soon enough, depending on who you ask.

You ask yourself and you, not surprisingly but surprisingly all the same, find the answer to be ‘not soon enough’.

A dry chuckle crawls from your parched, cracked lips like a dying rodent slithering out of the sewer. Pathetic. The irony of it all isn’t lost on you; how your answer would have once been a cheery ‘too soon’ without so much as a second’s hesitation. Another chuckle limps weakly out of your mouth as you think of how you were then, how you are now. You’re like two entirely separate entities; Past You and Now You.

Past You had an abundance of ‘friends’, had hopes and dreams that didn’t seem so far out of reach as to be unreachable.

Then Life happened.

Life killed Past You and left Now You to take it’s place; a shadow of a ghost of something that could have once turned out good. Not even a shadow, not really. Not even a being with a fully-functioning soul.

Not anymore.

Now you have nobody, you’re too hopeless for hopes and you have only nightmares. No dreams. Actually, that’s a lie. You do have a dream, the same one, over and over. It’s a dream that used to be, should still be, a nightmare.

You, pathetic and hopeless and alone little you, dream about death.

No.

You don’t want to die; you want to just not exist, to not have ever existed. You want to simply… Not be.

Now that you think about it, stood out here in the freezing rain, death truly does scare you. Scares you like you used to be scared of the dark, way back before you became the dark, or at least the scariest part of it. It’s all the same, really. It’s all about being afraid of the unknown, of what you can’t control.

You like control, you like knowing.

So you’re scared of death, we’ve established that much at least. Established one more stupid, insignificant little fear to add to your endless list of niggling insecurities. Pathetic.

Non-existence, though. That, that you think, sounds nice. Blissful, even, compared to your experience of what harsh existence can be like for people like you. Non-existence might actually bring you some form of contentment amidst your all-encompassing whirlpool of terrifying and never-ending uncertainty.

After all, what is there to be uncertain about in non-existence?

Nothing. Because nothing is all you’d be. Even more so than you are now. Just sweet nothing. Nothing.

So, non-existence sounds good to you; it is actually what you want, what you dream about, what gets you to sleep soundly in nights that would otherwise be filled with mindless sobbing and relentless insomnia.

But you do exist.

You do exist and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Now that some cruel power decided to force your pitiful self upon the world you will always have to exist in some sort of format, be it as a living being or even just as a whisper of a memory. You will exist. And that drives you mad. Insane, even.

The closest thing you can ever have now to your beloved non-existence is death. Unknown, uncontrollable and unfathomable death. It’s your only escape from a life you don’t want, can’t stand living anymore.

But still. Death is death. Final; the end. Just blackness or maybe even Hell. You know it wouldn’t ever be Heaven. Not for a person like you.

So, to be or not to be?





A/N: This is a second-draft of my GCSE English creative writing piece, so feedback would be hugely appreciated. The piece has to be based of a Shakespeare quote or title, but the piece itself doesn't have to have anything to do with Shakespeare's plays.

Thanks for reading! :D