I think you wanted to be found dead, not jerking in the last, undignified twitches of life, your racked and bitterly exhausted body mechanically obeying the rhythmic misfirings of your brain. As I watch you, you seem like a clockwork man, your steadily nodding head a pendulum marking the last hours, minutes and seconds of the life of a human.

I don't think you wanted people to drag you from your summer-hot car, to lay you down on some stranger's blanket salvaged from the back of an unknown vehicle. I don't think you wanted to be whisked away to a hospital, to be placed on life-support, where people you don't know await news of your death, or your continued life in some brain-damaged and pathetic state.

You just wanted to die.

You deliberately waited after work for all the others to leave. You held a door for a late worker, and someone checked on you as you sat in your car. You told them that you were tired, and just sleeping it off before you attempted the drive home. Then, when the parkinglot was deserted, exactly when, no one knows, you drank antifreeze. It burned your lips and throat as it slid down, a chemical taste left in your mouth.

Yours was a common story. A perfect life: job, girlfriend, children; people envied you. Then it all fell apart. She left you. You must have loved her a great deal, though perhaps you didn't show it as much as she wanted you to.  The secret of what really happened lies in her conscience and in the tattered remnants of your mind.

You certainly thought of her as you sat there waiting to die. Thought of the life you had together. Thought of how it all went down. Thought of the prospect of life without her. For some reason, you could not deal with that thought. Of all the people who experience what you did, and feel how you felt, you were the one who actually could not take it. Perhaps you thought of how people would look down on you for ending your life, but apparently you didn't care.

You thought of your children, how they would be effected by your death. Maybe you cried for them. Maybe you thought you were such a screw up that they wouldn't miss you. Maybe you numbed your mind to their plight, and to the plight of all those who cared about you - your parents, siblings and friends. The devastation that filled your heart overwhelmed all these considerations.

You did not think of how it would effect them if you lived to remain a vegetable.

Soon you will lie in a hospital bed, dead to the world around you, although machines and tubes keep the heart beating and the lungs breathing.  The doctors will expect you to die.  You yourself did not expect to live this long.

I wonder what goes through your mind now.

Are you conscious of pain? Or are you lost deeper than that? What does the mind experience during a seizure, or during the aftereffects? You could tell us if you could speak. Perhaps your mind tumbles in contorted hallucinations, rather like a fever dream. Perhaps mishapen orange trees turn into your mother's contorted face, which turns into a pink elephant.  But I kind of think your mind is far too chaotic at this point to handle even that degree of lucidity.  I think perhaps spots of color explode, and sounds come and go, and you experience them all with the wonder and acceptance of a newborn, too inexperienced and simple of mind to sort it out.  Either that, or nothing.

This is your death.  Is it all you hoped it would be?