6/29/2026 Matthew P. Haubert

Read me my last rights at the edge of the weekend.
Told me to prepare. Told me my heart was finished.
Given three more days. Told my lungs were going to let go.

But something in me — sadistic, unnamed —
refused the permission to leave.

Even as life had been so fucking hard,
screaming and crying through so many nights,
I refused to just die.

Alone with no one but silence,
my thoughts, and time ticking
in a room where I could die at any minute.
A kind of torture I wish on no one, ever.

The thought of never seeing my animals again.
Never seeing my instruments again.
Never kissing someone again, saying I love you again,
walking outside and just looking around.

No. I was stuck in a chair.
Oxygen on. Couldn't move. Couldn't speak.
And the nurses' looks were devastating.

But the constant torture inside my head —
the suicidal ideation, the romanticism of pain
through psychiatric suffering, year after year —
I think it made me immune to this torture.
I grew happier as I was tortured. It was odd.
Calmer the more grave things became.

Then I came back from the dead.
And it was silence.
No static. No hunger.
No wolves ruminating, barking at the door.
Just breath. Just the strange gift of morning.
Just a body, a mind, that chose to stay.

I thought survival would fix me.
I thought the fire would burn the old habits clean.
But the drugs were still patient.
The ones I loved wrong were still waiting.
And the fear of being abandoned again
was louder than any machine
that pumped my chest with pain
to keep my heart beating.

Four years now. Four years.
Falling back into old routines.
This past week I've been running myself into the ground,
torturous, like if I push hard enough
I'll find that quiet again —
that one moment free of anxiety
that came free with death,
with the extreme odds, the pressure
pushing down from all sides on my skull —
that pain that calms me.

I sometimes think I wasted my second chance.
But maybe it wasn't a second chance at all.
Maybe it was a new life.
Maybe I'm still in it — learning to live again,
as a new person.
Born completely new.

Maybe clarity isn't a destination
you arrive at once and keep.

Maybe it's this —
the pain, the reminiscing, the ruminating, the rushing,
the radical range of aches,
the honesty at last,
the moment you finally sit still enough
to hear what survival, and death,
have been trying to say.