From Indianapolis, Indiana.
#1945720651

Deconstruction of the Desire to Stop - m4w

I don’t want to die.

“To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.” ~Samuel Butler

Noone wants to die, no more than one wants to fall from a great height. Many people want to jump, but after the leap, the ‘wanting’ is done and gravity takes over. To want otherwise is to defy natural law.

I don’t want to.

This comes closer to the statement of how one feels when the desire to stop begins. It is not so much the desire to end as the end to all desire, the wanting to stop wanting anything at all.

I don’t want.

This is merely a distillation of the previous step. The verb of being, “to be” is composed of the being itself, “be” and the launch into it, the “to”. Not to be is not to take the next step.

I don’t.

Vacuum and the realization of entropy entail the cessation of all motion, at least at the macromolecular level. Perhaps the remnants of the great universal birth, the hadrons and quarks, are still spinning, charming, strangely until the next great folding into themselves. But up here, at these lofty levels of human experience, it is enough for our atoms and molecules to stop, to bring peace. Hoping and wanting are not necessary if we are simply ~not~.

I.

And there we come to the root of the issue, the “I” problem blinding us all. Without the “I”, there is no pain to see, no damage to survey. Without the “I”, there is finally

.

Dear DNW,

I feel like your entry would do much greater in a poetry chat room.
In fact, I think it’s a pretty darn good poem, so good that I’m at a loss as to why I found this on Craigslist. But you know what? Good for you, and I hope you find someone who’s on the same wavelength as you.

xoxo,
Lexi