The Wifi Router & Other Logistics
Sometimes survival looks less like hope and more like remembering you have to water the plants.
Someone would have to deal with all of this?
I don’t know why that’s where my brain went at 2am as I was laying on my floor balling my eyes out, wanting to die. Why of all things would that be what kept me alive but somehow it was and I guess I should be thankful for it. I would assume most people think of their loved ones, pets, maybe even their job. None of those things really crossed my mind, instead there I was laying on my floor thinking about the logistics of it all and how annoying it would be for everyone if I offed myself halfway around the world.
Logistics…thats what kept me alive.
The actual, logistical, administrative nightmare of what happens after, is what my brain went to first.
All I could think was: Okay, so. Say I do this. Who has to deal with all the admin of this?
Who would even find me, it would take days until someone noticed they hadn’t heard from me. I don’t say that in a dark way, just in the simple reality of living aboard, living alone and working remote, no one, even those that loved me, would think much of not hearing from me for a few days.
The police would be called, I guess the embassy too (I assume that’s what happens when someone dies aboard), would it be the embassy that calls back my family or someone else?
God does anyone even have the phone number of someone to call.
Someone would also have to fly in, someone would have to get on a plane fly 6 hours to deal with everything here. All I could think about is how annoying a task that would be.Not devastating, not heartbreaking, though obviously it would be those things too, but the word that kept coming up was annoying, because that's what it would be on top of everything else, just deeply, practically, logistically annoying.
While I’ve never tried, I’d assume repatriating a body would be a complicated, expensive, and annoying process.
I can only assume there's a lot of paperwork. And that all felt so annoying. That's the thing that kept striking me, from the floor.
The sheer annoyance of all of it and the inconvenience of that annoyance.
Then there was the issue of the utility bills, which was on autopay but it would have to be cancelled and no one had my login details. I had a friend's birthday on Saturday, and I was the one who'd booked the restaurant.
Someone would have to return the wifi router. Someone would have to figure this all out.
Someone who was already dealing with the embassy and the forms and the six hour flight would also have to deal with the wifi router, and I found that genuinely unbearable to think about.
The landlord would need to be contacted. There was a package coming on Thursday that required my signature. Someone would have to deal with all that. My plants were half alive already, which felt both relevant and beside the point, but someone would have to water them or make a decision about them, and making decisions about someone else's half dead plants while grieving felt like a specific kind of awful I wasn't willing to be responsible for.
And then there's all my stuff.
I hate the logistics of moving.
I have always hated it, the packing and the sorting and the decisions about what matters and what doesn't, and I couldn't imagine having to do that for someone else, for someone who wasn't even there to say keep that, throw that, that one actually matters even though it doesn't look like it matters.
Someone would have to go through all of it.
Somehow this is all I could think about as laid on my floor at 3am, not the reasons to stay alive or the things that make my life worth living. What I thought about instead, at 3am on a Tuesday, was the logistics.
Specifically: whose.
And the answer, every time, was someone else's.
Someone who already had enough.
Someone with a new job, or a birthday on Saturday, or a life that didn't need a six-hour flight and a wifi router and a call to an embassy added to it.
Someone who would have to stand in my apartment and decide what to do with my half-dead plants. Someone who would have to open my cupboards and find all the things I'd forgotten I owned.
Someone who would have to cancel the internet. Someone who would have to call the landlord.
Someone who would have to figure out what mattered and what didn't.
And lying there, crying so hard I could barely breathe, I realized that I couldn't bear the thought of making someone else do all that. I guess somehow my will to not inconvenience others outweighed my desire not to live.
Maybe this was my sick way of thinking of my loved ones, maybe it wasn’t it.
The thing is it definitely wasn't a reason to live but it was a reason not to die that night.
So I got up off the floor and watered the plants.