I Wait For Death Like A Soldier's Wife

The first time I read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, I was a senior in high school. Eagerly ready to leave the nest and flourish in college but also so depressed that I didn’t want to get out of bed most days. I was never able to fully describe the pit of my despair, though. Words couldn’t fully articulate the bottomless pit that inhabited the area where my soul should be. Constantly bargaining for an ounce of happiness but only having the darkness consume my psyche further.

In short, I was an angsty teenager who was so melodramatic she couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel of her misery.

Also, at the age of 25, I have to report that I’ve barely changed. Not for the lack of trying, though. (Shout out to my therapist Melissa.)

But when I read The Metamorphosis, I saw myself. I was Gregor Samsa. One day many years earlier in my youth, I was a happy-go-lucky normal person, and one day I woke up as a bug; I mean, I started struggling with anxiety and depression.

Suddenly all I could bring myself to do was waste away in my room. I felt the bottomless pit open and gave in to its demands. Stay in bed. Sleep all day. Be sad. Life is suffering, and it will never get better. People like you don’t deserve happiness. I was a bug.

Over time these feelings went away a little, but by the time I read The Metamorphosis, I understood the feeling of watching everyone else move on while I rot. Rotting away in my room. Rotting away in my head. Rotting like the food Gregor preferred to eat.

But on the outside, I wasn’t rotting. I was a straight-A student, 7th in my class, taking the hardest sciences offered, in a specialty center for the humanities, and just got into my dream college. I had friends I more or less liked, and things looked good. My rotting was and continues to be, internal.

The black pit in my psyche is covered with mold and being gnawed at by maggots. I am a zombie where the infection hasn’t spread to the surface. The thick yellow pus and bile of decay swim in my stomach and are violently ejected over the guise of “oh, I just have bad anxiety. Don’t worry also, please call my Mom. I want to go home.”

Rotting away. That’s what I do. I’m a human-sized bug hiding in the costume of a functioning person, terrified of being found out. Terrified of the day that my loved one’s give up, much like Gregors did. When the terrifying bug they thought was a person scurries out of its room only to be greeted by disgust.

This is why I feel bad for the little brown bugs in my apartment. They are approached with disgust and seen as the worst type of living being. I killed their friend, and they don’t know what happened. They don’t know why; they don’t know anything. They are just little bugs trying to live. They don’t deserve to be approached with disgust.

I kill them with bleach anyway. I hit them with objects. I flush them down the drain.

They disgust me. I disgust me. We are the same.

I’m 25, and I’m still rotting. I’m 25 and still scared those around me are going to wake up and realize I’m a bug. I’m 25, and there are bugs in my apartment. I’m 25, and when I see those tiny brown bugs, I see myself. I see Gregor Samsa.