It was a simple plan.
Pay all my pending credit card debt. There's not much left as I did my best to avoid spending money for months, so I managed to save up enough.
Create a neat spreadsheet with my banking information and all other useful data. Send it to a family member. Tell them it's only for backup. They won't think much of it.
Quit my job. I work from home so nobody will notice.
I have no social media, so all that's left is closing my email accounts. That alone would automatically take care of all suscriptions of any kind.
Stop my monthly automatic donations to charities.
Clean and close my bank account. This is the trickiest one, in my country they keep a close eye on all things financial. I could leave the money there and program an automatic transference, but that could make the beneficiary look suspicious. So most likely extract the money on cash and close the account on the spot.
Organize the money. Separate it in bundles and identify them with the name of the person who's meant to receive it. Save it on a briefcase with a password, add a brief note with the details of the different beneficiaries and the amount separated for them, to avoid conflicts.
This is the most annoying bit. Transfer my apartment's deed to a family member. If it's not possible to do it without the new owner's signature, contact a lawyer to write down a will.
Let the readers of my webtoons know I'll be dropping all stories and publish a quick file letting them know the development and ending. They'll hate my guts, but at least they won't be left wondering, I owe them that much. Oh yeah, I'm an artist here. Don't try to find me, I'm not popular.
Tell family and friends that I'm taking a week-long vacation, so they would leave me alone long enough to settle pending details and get ready myself.
Arrange for someone outside the family to find me a day later. This is the nastiest part, but it can't be avoided. My best bet so far was to give the building janitor a copy of the key and find a way to make him enter on the set day, find me and call the police. I'd like my family to only go through the ugly process of recognizing my body at the morgue, nothing else. Not even funerary arrangements. Those have already been taken care of and paid in advance. Quick cremation, no flowers, no service, no nothing. My ashes are to be discarded discreetly by the funerary company unless my family decides otherwise.
And then do it. I'm not telling you how. I'm not that cynical.
It was organized, detailed, clean (that's all I'm disclosing about my method of choice) and pretty much half way done.
And then this fucking pandemic hit the world.
You see, I always thought that a nice way to make ammends to those I left behind would be to leave them something. I know material shit does not ease the pain, but the thing is, it does. Once the few people that care for me start to move on, as they most certainly will, having extra assets to live a better life is always helpful. So I've devoted most of my time to gather as much money as possible and, in time, I managed to get myself a tiny apartment. A doll house of sorts, but mine to enjoy while alive and gift once dead.
I never enjoyed the experiencie of being a home owner though, as my rotten luck threw me into a pit of terrible, terrible neighbours. These people would harrass me, scream at me from below my window, leave nasty notes under my door and belittle me constantly (and I mean 24/7, there was always one awake) on the building's WhatsApp group. Why? God knows. They were awful with each other as well, so I guess it was nothing personal, but I have severe anxiety and it still made my life a living hell. My upstairs neighbour even had an asshole boyfriend who'd come over to fuck her in her studio apartment, with her seven-year-old in the room. He'd also scream at the kid and even the poor dog. I spent many nights awake, crying, popping in sleeping pills and too scared to call the police because I knew that not only the upstairs neighbour but the entire building would get back at me somehow.
So I made the easiest choice, after almost a year of being constantly afraid and uncomfortable in my own house to the point of fasting to avoid even going out to the grocery store.
I'd move back to my parents' for a while, sell my place and get another equally small but at least easier to live in. A property with an environment like that would be a burden to whomever would inherit it later.
So I took only my bed, my desk, my laptop and a bag of clothes and I came here.
And I never left.
The quarantine struck like a bucket of cold water and here we are. Some other countries have flexible quarantine rules, but we can't afford that here. Our health care system was bullshit when things were normal. Should the virus hit us like it did on Italy, then it would be Game Over for all. We can't fight back, we can't resist. All we can do is stay put and hope for the best. So here we are, not even able to go out and buy groceries.
The real state business is obviously frozen, so now I'm stuck here. I can't move back to my hellhole of an apartment. I can't even use the time to sell it and try to buy another one. So I'm in a limbo.
I can't go on with my plans to leave this fucking world, not here. I don't have the heart to do that to my parents in this very moment. Even if I was that heartless, I can't complete half of my To Do list to get it done, nor get the things I need to actually do it.
So here I am. Stuck in time. Working my ass off and doing constant overtime; as I said, my job is home-based, so not only I never stopped working, things got absolutely and terribly hectic to accomodate to the new situation. I'm an area manager, so I have to deal with the hysterics of an entire team while trying not to succumb to my own demons. And the cherry on top, I'm now imprisoned with a toxic parent that's making the lil' bits of my life that are non-working a burning hell.
This was meant to be a very brief, very temporal situation. An extra last step before saying goodbye.
Now I have never been so mind-numbingly depressed, so miserable, so exhausted, overworked and burnt, and so, so very ready to go. And I can't.
I wonder if maybe I already did it and this is actually purgatory.
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