The Bed at the End of the World
“To live is to die”
I first heard that when I was eleven. One of those aphorisms tossed around in spiritual classes for kids, back in the pre–Windows XP, early dial-up internet era. It sounded profound. Maybe even a little cool.
Naturally, I grew fascinated with death with each passing year.
Maybe that’s why I drifted from the cheery worlds of The Famous Five and The Secret Seven to the elegant murders of Poirot and the shadowy twists of Agatha Christie. Maybe that’s why I scoured every library in the city to track down a title of Goosebumps I hadn’t read yet. Maybe that’s why I rewatched The Lord of the Rings trilogy so many times that the CDs eventually gave up on me.
But death didn’t stay fictional for long.
It visited family. It visited friends. It rented a space in my mind and started charging rent I didn’t know I was paying. It embedded itself firmly after one teenage night watching Final Destination 2 — so much so that I refused to get a driver’s license at the “you’re-a-loser-if-you-don’t-drive” age. Death showed up in teaser trailers through nights of sleep paralysis. I didn’t know the term “wikithon” then, but I lived it through researching that condition.
At some point, the fascination turned into a kind of… embrace.
I made notes on what would be the most creative ways to die. I curated a Winamp playlist of songs to be played at my funeral. I wanted to join the 27 Club. I imagined being famous enough to co-write lyrics with idolo Jim Morrison in the afterlife. I even made a ten-year plan to get there.
But then, something remarkable happened.
I was watching classic films year by year, and I hit 1946. That’s when I pressed play on It’s a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra’s masterpiece. There’s so much to say about that film, but for now, let me say this: the title alone cracked open something inside me.
No longer did I feel like walking hand-in-hand with death.
There was now a small light — flickering, maybe, but alive. A glow that had struggled to stay lit in me for years, both from internal burnouts and external bruises. Suddenly, that light caught a breath and stayed. My relationship with death became… distant. Comforting. Like a bed at the end of a long journey — not one I needed to lie in every day.
So, I started searching for more light.
The problem with brightness, though, is that it makes your shadows longer. It exposes more of you — and you don’t always track what the shadow touches. You think you’re shining, but you don’t realise what you’re casting. For every new light I found, death placed a shadow just beneath it. For every light that fell on me, death hid the shadow from me.
And unlike death, I began to dream.
I dreamt of what life could be. That was never a step I took with death. I don’t know why I did it with life.
But death noticed. And it retaliated.
It burnt me. Again. And again. And again.
Death doesn’t like dreamers of light. It no longer wanted to wait for me. It wanted me back in its embrace.
As I grew older, the metaphors started morphing. Light became the thing that burnt me out. And so, I retreated — slowly, quietly — into the shadow. People who hadn’t seen the earlier version of me, the one who was bright and burning and dreaming, now looked at me and didn’t understand the dark. The space between relationships dimmed. Time spent in them thinned.
Death didn’t just burn me anymore. It began burning through what tethered me to life.
The light that once comforted me had now become something to fear. And death was no longer just a metaphor — it was a presence in the room. In the way people left. In the parts of me that dimmed. In the absences I couldn’t name.
Where once I saw the light in darkness, now I only saw the darkness in light.
And yet.
I feel the pendulum slowly swinging again.
What will my new relationship with death be? And what will my new relationship with life look like?
I’ve found new keys. And this time, I think the lock I need to open is made of words.
I’m starting this phase with a new aphorism.
“To die is to live.”
