Highest ranking: #1 in Short Story
*Rewriting and Editing on hold*
It was a race to leave behind her toxic past, the past that demolished her image, her family, and her sanity. Moving and starting fresh was Leila's number one priority. She desperate...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
In times like these, when I feel trapped, hovering between reality and a world that I manifested as a mechanism to hide from said reality—I start to realize the extent of my mental instability. When my tears have reached a point where it's able to fill a pool and my thoughts have intertwined like a vine dangling from a withering tree. . .I start to give a name to this instability of mine I call my inner devil of misery. And to my dismay, it's not going back to hell anytime soon.
It's that same misery which has been eating at my conscience since the day I lost him.
That day, I not only lost the one person who meant everything to me but I lost my sanity, my will to live, my dignity and more importantly the life of another innocent human being. I've been riddled with guilt: guilt that had consumed my now fragile body, snapping away like the days of my existence.
Being cocooned in a safety net never did stop the assault of insults, harsh stares, and mental abuse I've endured for the past three years by the hands of friends turned foes. Because of my persistence and resistance to the simple word no, countless lives were changed that night; The life of the person I loved the most and an innocent life—one that hasn't and will never see the world for what it really is.
Sometimes I think it was best for that precious life to be taken. She was still young, innocent and blissfully unaware of the demons that lurked on the surface of the earth; the demons that slithered across the pure flesh of the ripe freshly picked from a flourishing tree.
Someone so impressionable could have easily been led into an abyss that danced with the devil itself. She would not have survived...I sure haven't been surviving, I'd be a hypocrite if I said this world was a blissful ball of tranquility.
It's a selfish thought, and it isn't mine to think, but it's the truth.
Some people are better off dead.
"You should have been the one that died, Leila! Not him! Not my son!"
"Come on sweetheart, don't say that. You don't mean that."
"Don't you dare tell me what I mean. I wish she was dead. I wish you were dead, Leila. Why don't you just die!?"
That's right. Some people are just better off dead.
At least they wouldn't be able to get hurt or swallowed in darkness that provided shelter for our festering nightmares. As humans, we've never truly understood the purpose of our existence.
But the purpose of life? Well, I've concluded that life's purpose is to strike us until the weight that held us upright—our dignity, our will to live—is forced to buckle beneath us until our knees strike the ground.
