A Guide To Leaving a Mark

Life’s an absurd performance - a ballroom dance, where death waits patiently, knowing soon it’ll get to lead. I never asked to be born. I was simply shoved on stage and forced to perform. As a child, I felt frustrated with my parents and repeatedly hounded them with the same question of “why did you force me to live just to die later?”. The dragging of consciousness into the world simply for death to haunt over the whole ordeal. They grew weary of my question, and their responses started to become briefer and briefer until they would respond with nothing but a disgruntled sigh. It was around age 8 that I started to become fixated on the idea of leaving a mark on the world. 

Many different types of marks can be left: The smudging of the ink on a page, the red rawness of a slap to the face, graffiti scrawled onto walls, and a threadbare carpet worn from the weight of a life lived. I used to go to school and scribble “I was here” desperately across every desk, wall and bathroom I could. Equally as quickly as I could scribble them, the school could erase them. Gone like they’d never existed in the first place. 

“I want to be famous”, I said one day. Not in a love me, adore me kind of way - though that would be nice as well, but more in a “notice me. I exist” kind of way. I wanted people to remember that I had been here once. That I, too, had thought they’d live forever once, I had also laughed under the sun as the warmth of spring crept up on the bitter cold of winter. How could people forget that I had lived, breathed and felt so strongly? 

I was later expelled from school for writing “I was here” in violent red paint across the school’s logo. That was my Guernica, my crescendo. In wanting to be remembered so desperately, I had left my mark - as the idiot who painted the school. People soon moved on from that as well, easily forgetting about my childish outburst. 

Without school, I lacked even more purpose and was given even more time to think about leaving my mark. I scrawled the idea desperately onto my brain, clawing at the idea of an ordinary life, rabidly trying to escape it. I cut people off - they were a rot interfering with my growth. It was necessary to be able to blossom into a flower worth remembering. I isolated myself like a mad scientist consumed by my creation, I stitched together my Frankenstein. 

My legacy twisted into that of a boy, one consumed by childhood fears and dreams. Even as my friends grew old and married, settling down into their comfortable lives, I kicked, screamed and cried against the reality of life and the forever drawing closer shadow of death. My art was self-destruction, I was both the painter and the easel. 

I write this guide now as a reflection of how not to leave your mark. I grow old, lonely, and feel as though I’ve already been forgotten. The hands of death hold mine as I lie in the hospital bed. The first hands to hold mine. My hands are bare - calloused, worn and ringless - from a life I deprived of love through my own selfish sputterings. In having attempted to defy death, I only denied myself a life. 

My name sits carved on the tree whose branches I used to hang from as a child. A symbol of the boy I once was who dreamt of recognition and remembrance. I’m sure that one day, the tree will swallow up my only mark. 

As I write now, I sit quietly listening to the singing of the machines that surround me. The machines that keep me alive. Even now I’m still clinging on to what I have left, and it is in this moment that I know it is pointless to try to leave a mark on a world that spins so quickly. If only I could do it all again. If only I weren’t now due for my dance with death. Maybe I’d do things difere…