By the time I turned twenty, I had asked myself that question often enough that it no longer sounded dramatic. It doesn't only show up on bad nights, or after some obvious failure, or during some clean breakdown anymore, but rather is now always sitting in the background.
I know there is nothing special in that. Plenty of people have felt the same thing before me, and better people have written about it more clearly than I ever could.
Most people, I think, do not keep going because life has revealed some huge meaning to them. They keep going because tomorrow is already there, because someone would be disappointed, because work still has to be done, because dinner still has to be made, and because habit beats despair more often than people like to admit.
Those reasons used to feel too small to me, almost insulting in how ordinary they were. Later, I started to think they were probably the only kind most people ever really had.
If there is anything in my life that still deserves to be called attachment, it is a story.
That sounds pathetic when said plainly, and I gave up trying to lie to myself about it a long time ago.
Lord of the Mysteries stopped being something I merely liked years ago. I reread it too often, followed too many discussions about it, learned Chinese for it, and later even learned Hermes and Ancient Hermes because of it. It was an embarrassing amount of effort to pour into a story, and the sort of thing no reasonable person should admit without at least a little shame.
However, at some point, the story stopped feeling like fiction and became a place I kept going back to whenever my own life felt too thin to stand on. That world is cruel, secretive, and full of things that can destroy a person for understanding too much, yet it still feels richer than my own.
Curiosity matters there. Knowledge matters there. History has weight there. Even despair feels like it belongs to something larger.
The night I die, it is raining outside, and my laptop screen is still lit.
I am reading a discussion thread in Chinese about pathways, boons, and outer deities, which is exactly the sort of thing I have wasted too many nights on. One line catches my eye and holds it because it annoys me by being right.
Yall really think knowing the lore means you'd survive in lotm? Even without corruption, knowing the world and actually living through it are two completely different things.
I stare at it for a few seconds and can't really argue.
I know the pathways, the sequence names, the hidden organizations, the broad outline of future events, and way too many names that should be handled carefully. None of that means I could actually live in that world and stay intact. Knowing where danger is helps. Surviving it is something else.
I lean back in my chair and rub at my eyes. The rain keeps tapping against the window in that uneven way it does when the wind cannot make up its mind, and the coffee beside my laptop has already gone cold.
The pain hits so fast that at first I do not even understand what I am feeling.
My hand jerks and smacks into the cup. Coffee goes everywhere, over the desk, over my notes, across the edge of the keyboard, and I am already trying to stand before the panic has fully caught up. My chest feels wrong. Crushed. My left arm goes weak so suddenly that for a second, I just stare at it like it belongs to someone else.
No. No, no, no. Not now.
I catch myself on the edge of the desk and try to pull in a breath, but almost nothing comes. The room tilts. The rain sounds louder. The screen is still glowing. That stupid thread is still open, and some part of me is irrationally furious about that, like the universe could at least have the decency to close the tab before I die.
Another stupid thought crashes right after it.
What the hell did I even do? Did someone write my name in the Death Note? Seriously?
I try to stay upright and fail.
There is no revelation waiting for me on the way down. No sudden wisdom. No clean final understanding. I do not become profound just because I am dying on my bedroom floor.
There is pain. There is dizziness. There is the awful, stupid awareness that I am really about to die over cold coffee while reading a thread about outer deities.
And the most annoying part, the part I would have mocked in anyone else, is that the second death becomes real, some buried part of me still panics and claws backward from it. I had spent so long asking what the point was that I never expected my final answer to be this pathetic, terrified refusal to let go.
The floor hits hard, but it already feels a little far away.
For a moment, the room is still there in full. The spilled coffee is there. The laptop hum is there. The rain is there. The ache in my chest is still there.
For one brief second, I can still tell what belongs to the room and what belongs to me.
That feeling slips almost immediately.
Something loosens inside me, and all the knowledge I have crammed into my head over the years starts rising with a clarity so unnatural that I know this has already gone past ordinary memory. Pathway names, formulas, symbols, scraps of theory, pieces of Hermes and Ancient Hermes, all of it surges up too fast and too cleanly.
This is wrong.
That is the first clear thought I manage to hold onto.
This is completely wrong.
It does not feel like a dying mind throwing up its contents in chaos. It feels like everything I know has taken on shape. The knowledge is no longer just in me. It has become outline, structure, something coherent enough that it feels visible from the outside, and the instant that thought forms, something turns toward it.
I do not hear a voice. I do not see a face. It is colder than that. Bigger than that. It feels like attention stripped of everything human and reduced to its barest function.
Something is examining the shape of what I know.
That is what terrifies me. There is no simple anger in it, no clean hatred, nothing I can understand in normal human terms. There is only interest, cold and exact, and it makes me feel smaller than I have ever felt before. The pressure of that realization is so sharp that for one wild second, I want to grab the knowledge back and shove it somewhere deeper inside myself, as if that would still matter.
Don't look at me.
It keeps going.
Looking is probably the wrong word. Whatever this is, it moves over the shape of what I know and presses against it, tracing it, attempting to read it, finding every place where it does not belong. There is something deeper inside me, too, some part of me it cannot reach cleanly, yet the knowledge alone has already been enough to make me visible.
I understand that much all at once, and the understanding hits hard enough that the fear almost becomes simple.
This is how I die.
A second later, another thought tears through it.
No. Worse than that.
The pressure changes before the panic can settle. Something cold and dense forces itself into place, like a seal pressing down over my thoughts. My mind should be splitting under the weight of what I know. It should be tearing open. Some frantic part of me is already bracing for that, waiting for madness, waiting for the first real break.
It never comes.
I am still there.
Barely, but I am still there.
The knowledge does not burst outward into insanity. My thoughts do not cave in. My sense of self stays together, and that scares me almost as much as the attention did, because everything about it feels deliberate. There is intent in it. Control. A choice I had no say in.
Whatever noticed me has not let go.
It has left something behind.
I do not know what it is. I only know that it feels like a mark, a claim, something cold and distant settling deep enough that I cannot tear it out even if I want to. The fact that I am still myself gives me no comfort at all. It feels like control. It feels like being spared for a reason that has nothing to do with mercy.
For one last second, through the pain and the rain and the laptop glow, I have the sick certainty that something vast has reached across the edge of my death and decided I belong to it now.
The world tilts again, harder this time, and everything starts to go.