I choose to stay

While I have my faculties in place, and the choice is mine to make, I choose to stay. I don't want to go. I don't want to die. I don't want to drink myself to death, or lose myself forever. I choose, instead, to stay.

I have a body that, kindly, still works. I can see, hear, touch, taste, smell and feel. And while I have a condition that delivers me a great deal of pain every day, I'm lucky to have the disability I have: a chance mutation in my bloodline and I could have been born with the version that would have robbed me of much more by this age, or killed me already. I am lucky to be disabled in the way that I am, because it means I am alive. My body is a beautiful machine that does incredible work every day. (Thanks, body. You're rad.) I choose to stay.

I have a mind that processes information with relative ease and alacrity. (Putting aside the cognitive parts of my disability, and the fact I've been dulling my wits with alcohol abuse for literally years.) I'm fairly clever, and that opens the doors for enjoyment and understanding on levels that some other people don't get to experience. I'm analytical(ish), inventive(ish), artistic(ish), kinda funny, and I like to think I'm a pretty decent person. I'm in love, and am loved, deeply and completely, in return. I am so very lucky to be me. I choose to stay.

I have incredible, basic freedoms that others would be grateful for. I feel safe, mostly, most of the time. I can choose to live how I want to, and do what I want to do. Nobody tries to stop me. I don't live with daily fear of violence or violation. Others do not have the luxury of my position. I'm so very fortunate. I choose to stay.

I don't know what's next. It may be bad, or good, or just nothing. Not a single clue. I like Christmas songs. I have a spirituality of my own. I know what I want done with my shell when I'm done. (Donate what you can salvage – probably not the liver – burn and scatter the rest.) Organised religion isn't for me, but I get to choose based on what I know in my soul. And right now, that's that I am alive. Cogito ergo sum. I choose to stay.

When I do die, I want to be right there for it, so I finally get an answer to the eternal question of whether it will hurt or not. I want to be fully present when I die. I want to die alive. To feel the end. I don't want to slip into a blackout and never wake up. I don't want to be conscious of my senses shutting down, and feel my control over my body slipping away, and then be conscious of nothing ever again. I choose to stay.

I choose the feelings. I choose the physical pain I was dulling with drink. The singing cauterisation of molten lava seeping along my nerves; the grinding, eroding gears of my joints; broken glass pushed through tissue paper; needles digging through marrow. I choose the pain, because the alternative is not feeling anything at all, and I don't do that any more. I choose to feel the emotional awkwardness, and the hurt that dances unbridled In Here sometimes. I choose to feel all the emotions I drowned away, dulled, numbed, compartmentalised, and excised. I choose not to steal myself away too soon. I choose to stay.

I choose to be present; to Be Here Now. Not locked away In Here, while Out There carries on without me. Raw, vibrant, scintillating existence in this very moment is my gift to myself. I'm grounded by my newly-unearthed desire for self-preservation. Tethered by my self respect. I decline on oblivion. I'll pass on the "just one" that "can't hurt". I choose to stay.

While I have my faculties in place, and the choice is mine to make, I choose to stay, for as long as the world will have me.