righteousness

do we all agree life is a good thing?
if your mind fundamentally changes someday, would you want your body to continue housing it as if the new personality was in fact you? the light in your eye reflects a little differently now. your steps seem hesitant and unsure looking at us, but determined walking towards the road, going north. how you walked ahead of everyone else into the strangest situations and how i followed you, always eventually catching your habits a while after you'd seek out something new. i never heeded your warnings. i think you knew i'd fracture.
on that day, I never asked, and I should have. i didn't realize until today. did you want me to grab your arm? you'd just asked us to keep our hands off. it was selfish of me. i apologize. i think you wanted to die then, there. but i wanted to take you for lunch one last time, and i didn't want to see you hit and have to survive a car crash and a psychiatric ward in the same two months. maybe you just didn't know where you were going and that was all, but if you knew when we were younger how your mind would unfurl do you think you'd have wanted to live through it? if I get to that point, do I? can one?
your blood is the same, and your hair and your clothes are the same except for the ones you gave away in the move. yeah, you moved back to london, where you ran away to in the first place, your second and realer home; where you gave yourself no grace and covered the rot with high-quality architecural grade stone masonry, although it wasn't your fault, and built a mental escape perfectly suited to an eternal dream. thinking about it, you fulfilled your lifelong dream mentally instead of externally and when you hit your absolute limit that's where you went. i know of people who dance on that limit and are able to stay in touch with the world around them, but you have retreated from us all while attempting to drag us along.
ever since then, i've been slowly leaking away. your memories, your mental habits, all intact, but the associations you made are now corrupted and abstracted so you can hide away from any new input completely.
---
i try and stay in touch and it's hard to have long conversations. I wonder if it's because of you or me. I still feel guilt every time I think about it - pulling you back from the road. I wonder if you wanted us to eat lunch together or if it was a metaphor, a final breaking of bread before you ascended. What were you thinking and seeing when you called me, and when your phone died when you were alone?
If you'd died you could haave lived out your final moments in the alternate city reality you created, and I doomed you to remain in this mortal coil with no escape. We all have the release valve of psychosis and god knows I've used it. But it seemed like you were ready for the world around you to end for you whereas I've always decided to return to the world. I'm sorry that I didn't undertand the level of pain you live with.
Have I doomed you? To a life of ineffective surgeries and staying with your family because the real world always finds a way to harm you? To a life where you gallivant around and never really feel happy because how could you? A strong argument for you not wanting to kill yourself is that you never did it before and it doesn't seem like you've done it since, but nevertheless, suiciduality is tricky in that it can ensnare your mind with its promise of release but your better angels prevent you from acting on it for the benefit of the people who "love you." In your case, I could understand if you feel obligated to live every day but on that day there was nothing temporal or physical holding you back.
In a fugue state without the attachments you've cultivated, and without the bonds tethering you to the world, and only feeling the abject and overwhelming pain of decades of abuse, you snapped and you had to walk away from us all into the road. Was it lack of carefulness or lack of care for your own life? A prayer for relief which your higher powers listened to, but I blocked from happening?