The End of All Things
It fell upon me to ponder my own death. The world would cry for me, I knew at least that much. The world and my mother. There she hangs, in the abyss before the inner eye, cheeks streaked with tears, heart all agape, mouth singing out a scream (before the inner eye there is no sound). I beheld her. God opened a seam in my heart and it tore out of me to swallow hers whole. So I made a promise to her: never.
In immortality I would keep my mother. Immortality was the way out. In accordance with a folk remedy I once overheard, I stopped at the apothecary and bought two solutions: one of arsenic and one of lye. I mixed them in a coffee mug into a vile, frothing foam, drank it down and lived forever.