obsession

Recently, I was told that children don’t think about dying because they’re too
young. They like getting into violent quarrels and riding their cycles too fast.
Babies are fearless- licking crap off the floor, crawling off of beds, casually wanting
to touch fire. This got me thinking of myself- what about me? I was obsessed with
death when I was child. I stood with my feet poking out of my balcony ledge, staring
down. I didn’t see the floor, there was a tarpol sheet that was stretched just a little
above the ground where we threw all our waste. If I fall, I’ll land on a pile of
filth. 

My grandfather’s father died when I was five or six. I have no memory of ever
seeing him, except for the day I saw his corpse. He was a dark skinned man, covered
in all white, lying prostrate on the floor. I was asked if I wanted to see him, and then
they lifted the cloth from over his face and showed me. That was the only dead person
I knew at age of three. Yet still, I was terrified of death. I spent a lot of time thinking
about where people go when they die, and realizing that nobody really knew filled me
such dread. If I don’t know where I’ll end up, I don’t want to go there. If I don’t know
where, how will I ever come back? 

I did a tasteless prank on my father once, where I pretended to be dead.
Tasteless is his definition, I still think it would’ve been funny if he wasn’t
so resolved about how unfunny death is. I put red paint on my lips, tried
very hard to lie still, and told my friend to tell my father that I was dead.
Needless to say he was very angry, and he made me promise to never do
something of this sort again.

It was habitual for me to go to my terrace and climb up to where the water
tanks were and look down, like I did at my balcony. There were empty
alcohol bottles lying around on most days, so I made up another life for
myself where I was secretly taking care of a runaway family. On days that I was
truly fed up of pretending I imagined how a rapid, painful fall from this height

felt like- but I always found silly reasons not to- there’s funny movie on TV I
won't be able to watch, or my mother’s making pazhamporis and I love having
them with coffee. What a thin line between morbidity and inanity. 

Like most existential anxieties, I never got over the question of death. I ran
steadfast onto a bedpost once and bled insanely, which gave me three stitches
that still glares on my forehead. More than death, and crossing over to the
other side where I can finally be at peace with my restlessness, I am obsessed
with pain. I was convinced that if I didn’t hurt and bleed and cry for help,
my life didn’t really end. 

When I was friendless and sad in high school, I told my worried mother that
she may have to take me to a doctor because I felt an intense desire to kill
myself. She had walked into my room when I was sitting with a shaving razor
in my hand. She called it her motherly instinct, to know that I was upset. I don’t
believe it was her motherly instinct because I hated my mother.

Is it ghastly that I am comfortable with these thoughts? Is it gruesome and
weird that I make very sincere jokes about it? What about now, when I know
the nature of death and grieving and still sometimes fantasize about laying still
on my bed till my body turns cold?

When I met my boyfriend for maybe the fourth or fifth time, we took a
hotel room because we had no place in the city to stay. I was intensely in
love with this person and the thought of him ever leaving me was like those
persistent toothaches I’d get sometimes- uncontrollable pangs of pain that
you can never get used to. How can I convince someone to never leave?
I told him in absolute seriousness that if he ever decided to leave me, I’d
come back to this same hotel, to room 303 and jump out the window.
Is it unusual to tell the person you love that your life has no meaning
without them?