Ending it

Some say sleep is a temporary death.

Some days, I don't feel much like waking up.

When I do wake, the guilt envelopes me. The regret belts me up and almost refuses to loosen its grip.


I have done wrong things. To the person who was supposed to matter.


I sat on the wrong thing, knowing that it was like an unexploded bomb. Knowing that it could go off, but unable to get away from it. Fearing it might go off in another way the moment I let go.

Then just the other day it really went off.


And it seems to have taken my will to live along with it.



~~~

When I was younger, I stumbled onto my dad's pornographic collection one afternoon.
It was in a metal cabinet that I had always been curious about but had never mustered enough courage to open.

Magazines, some old, some new, had pale naked flesh painted on the fronts.

Next to the pile of revealing pictures was a stack of black video cassettes.

My little organ stirred in a strangely pleasurable way as I stared at the pretty brunette vixen smiling slyly at me from the topmost magazine, even as I reached out to a cassette next to it.

I quietly closed the cabinet, fully aware that both my parents were at the office and sneaked into their bedroom where the video recorder and television set was.

Inserting the cassette while my heart pounded and my body grew warm from the sense of anticipation, I breathed a little too heavily as I pressed the 'On' switch below the television screen almost simultaneously with the 'Play' button on the recorder.


A naked black woman, a little too rotund for my liking, was prancing on a wide open field, her jiggling breasts putting me off slightly, but my eyes also probed her other private part greedily.

I involuntarily turned off the television when what I later concluded to be sheer guilt took over.

But that remorse was too hollow, and eventually temptation dictated that I would lay my eyes on almost half of all the contents of that metal cabinet.


It only stopped when one day, to my dismay, I found it locked.