[TW: Death, Suicide Metaphors]
The display flashed in red, the hue given to emergency matters. One would think such an alarming display would bring anger, and despair, and terror…. but for all the alarms and blaring speakers, all that was brought was regret.
Warning: Oxygen Regenerator Critically Damaged, Please Repair Immediately
He tore his eyes away from the display screen, not able to look any longer. Or more accurately, not having the will. As the sole engineer, it was up to him to be the herald of the oncoming. He would make way for the angels of death. Without the oxygen regenerator, it was hopeless. They would all suffocate within the hour.
As he walked to the main hall, his mind wandered, refusing to acknowledge the imminent, and started to calculate certain courses of action. The engineer was not able to fix the regenerator. What if they went to a repair station? No, no, they’d need to divert power to the jump drive, and that would only bring their deaths sooner, in a section of the cold vacuum just as empty as the one they were in right now. What if they escape pods? The nearest hospitable planet was almost a full ten lightyears away. Even if he managed to modify it, the most they’d be able to make it was five.
What if…. What if… what if….. No. There was no clever solution. No mathematical equation or secret schematic. No scenario in which they win. And with that grim note, he opened the doors to the hall where two dozen scared, angry, and desperate people awaited for any, any hope of survival. The engineer died twice that day.
The first time when he had to shake his head, signaling his failure.
Wails erupted. The children cried in the arms of their mothers and fathers, who desperately tried to comfort them. The rest of the crew began to pour out the liquor. A final toast to the final journey any of them would ever take.
The engineer, however, did not want to partake in spirits, seeing as what was about to happen to all of theirs. He sat down, slumping against a wall.
And once again, stupidly, he began to think of life. Rather counterintuitive, seeing as how quickly death was about to arrive, but…. he supposed he was still human. A human that once welded his finger to the hull of a model ship…. A human that stayed up late at nights studying for entrance exams…. A human that left behind everything for the opportunity to journey into the vast and great beyond….
And no matter the high-atmospheric dogfights, the close calls with asteroids, the pirate skiffs that came down like vultures, they always came on top. He’d find a way to reconfigure the guns, or soup up the cloaking device and avoid the pirates and…. and…. and eventually, he stopped.
He stopped trying. He had ventured into the great beyond and found nothing. Glory only lasted a night and a hangover. And the sadness, that was neverending. And he couldn’t help but think of, in the late, waning hours of the night, of fantasies. Of returning home, and weaving stories out of thin air.
Of magical worlds of dragons and wizards and conquerors and kings. Of gods and spirits. And all that he had given up. The false, the illusory realms for the reality of this….
And regret begun to sink in, finally, in the last hour of his life. He should have stayed home. He should have defied his parents wishes for him to go to engineering academy. He should have kissed that girl on the beach, published that book instead of deleting from his computer’s hard drive, went to that party instead of studying.
The author laughed, reveling in the irony of the situation. He, a writer, had lived a life scripted for him, and now? Now it was too late. This was the end of his story, with slow, agonizing regret. He had starred in quite the wonderful tragedy. He had killed his very soul, and with it, the dozens of passengers and crewmates he had drank with in the late nights. Cried to about breakups. Laughed at stupid jokes together.
His silence, his refusal to live for himself, to speak through the pen, was his death. The bright and glorious career, the promising and stellar academia, and eventually, his stubborn insistence. His attempt to be something he was not. The longest suicide note in history, and he had no one but himself to blame for it.
As a child, he wanted to write fantasies and comedies…. and in this last hour of his life, the only work he had finished was a tragic and sad one. Oh, what he would do for a rewrite…. for the opportunity to turn back the pages to the beginning… but no…. he had written this, and now, death would bring the finishing flourish to the horrible work.
He was wrong earlier. About dying. He was already dead, and now, his body would match his mind. If only he had stayed home, where dead souls return to the warm embrace of the Earth. Here, in the void, he would only have more of the same.
An eternity of nothingness, in the vast and cold vacuum. The author would write no more, his pen put to rest. His mind would no longer think of what he could have had, and…. one would imagine that would bring him peace…. but all it did was make the author hate himself for not taking charge of his story while he had the chance.
And as all stories must come to an end, so does this one, with the final, sobbing breath of an author who never wrote. Who tried to be something he was note.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Silence.
How ironic. All his life, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. And now he actually couldn’t.
