I didn’t know how I was going to tell them why I left home. Maybe a letter seemed harsh, but I can’t stand them to see how I look now, how this damned disease had destroyed me. Leaving my family was hard, but I was afraid I’d go mad staying with them. I’d prefer to live out my final days with a sane mind. The day had started out sunny, but it was raining by the time I reached the end of my letter. It felt like my depression summoned the rain. Hell, you’d be depressed if you were the one who was dying at the usually healthy age of twenty-five. It didn’t look like the rain was letting up any time soon so I might as well walk out to the mailbox anyways so that the letter could be delivered on time. When I walked outside, I was immediately drenched. You’d think a water hose was pointed at me or something. The walk to the mailbox was the longest walk to the mailbox ever, perhaps even the longest walk of my life. I reached to put the letter in, but I just couldn’t. I ripped the letter up and let the wind blow it away.
I stood in the rain, reflecting on my life. Before I became sick, my life started to feel meaningless to me. I found no joy in anything I was doing. I couldn’t even feel joy in reading like I used to, and so I had stopped reading altogether. My life started to feel like an endless checklist of all the things I had to do. So by the time I was diagnosed with leukemia, I was okay with it. I accepted it and decided death was the best thing for my life because I felt like there was nothing good left for me to do in this life. Nobody understood me or how I felt, and I had decided no one ever would. I had lost several friends in my lifetime because they didn’t understand me. It had reached a point where I didn’t care if I had friends anymore. I preferred to be alone because everyone disappointed me, and that was exactly how I was going to die: alone. I began to walk back inside thinking of how I had gotten soaked for no reason.
There was no tomorrow for me.
