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Scenario: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya and I are talking and having hugs, late in the evening. velithya has just been talking about how much work she has to do for upcoming assessments in her course, and is a bit stressed about it.
She concludes by thanking me for things I have been doing to help and try to keep her from needing to worry about other things.
velithya: So thank you. You could make my life so much more difficult if you wanted to.
sami: Aww. *snuggles close* I would never intentionally make your life more difficult. *pause* Unless it was really funny.
velithya: *bursts out laughing*
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Once upon a time, I had a nightmare.
It was a very vivid nightmare, too. It felt as real as waking reality does, and it hurt.
The premise was simple. I dreamed I had killed myself. I dreamed my death, but that wasn't the bad part. The bad part was that I didn't end because my life did, and amid the drifting peace of the afterlife I saw the pain I'd caused.
My mother sobbing in the arms of my father, whose face was twisted with grief as tears tracked down his cheeks. My closest friends crying, falling apart, all of them wracked with loss and guilt, all blaming themselves for something I knew was entirely my own fault.
I watched people hurt, people I love, and I knew I caused it. Knew I could have prevented it, knew it didn't have to be that way, but that it was too late now to prevent it. I saw that I had left wounds that wouldn't heal, but I couldn't go back and fix it...
... but then I woke up. I woke up crying, at first with the indescribable pain of it, and then with relief because it hadn't happened after all, and I still had the chance before me not to make that choice.
If there is anything of truth in the doctrine that suicides are condemned to Hell, I think that that is it. I can imagine no torture more painful. Physical pain is nothing, not really. I broke my leg in three places once, and it very definitely hurt, but it didn't hurt nearly as deeply. Remembering my broken leg doesn't hurt. Remembering this dream does.
Sometimes I wish everyone had had a dream just like it.
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