Doctor:
"How do you wish to meet death?"
A voice within —
perhaps it's me, or someone else living quietly inside me — whispered softly:
"I want it to be elegant… and clean.
Maybe a heart attack in deep sleep — something gentle, almost considerate.
Or a bullet to the head — refined, even poetic.
But I have no enemies,
no one who wishes to assassinate me.
And if such a person exists, I only hope the bullet they choose is of fine quality — precise, leaving no mess behind.
I don't want my brains splattered across the wall.
Yes, I want to share my thoughts with the world — just not that way."
Doctor:
"Are you afraid of death?"
Me — and this time, I'm certain it was me — replied:
"I don't know. Could you give me some time to consult?"
Doctor:
"With whom?"
Me:
"With myself, of course.
With the courage that wakes when I'm angry,
and the cowardice that seeps in when I'm afraid."
Then silence fell —
a silence heavy with the weight of a gamble neither of us dared to name.
He was thinking, eyes flickering between brilliance and extinction.
What decision was he turning over in his mind?
As for me, while searching for an answer somewhere between yes and no,
my gaze drifted — as it always does — toward the small details.
His office was obsessively tidy,
yet chaos had crept in, disguised as subtle imperfections:
a half-empty cup of coffee,
a wilted plant by the window,
and a novel thrown carelessly into the trash bin.
I stepped closer and looked at the cover.
"Didn't you like the novel?" I asked.
He lifted his head without smiling.
"The heroine was… too strong. She challenged the author himself."
I said, glancing again at the title:
"Maybe she simply refused to die the way I wrote her."
He didn't answer. He wasn't even surprised by my confession.
But something broke — quietly — in his eyes.
After a moment of stillness, he spoke,
as if escaping the gravity of the moment:
"Do you want me to kill you now, or after you find your answer?"
Me, with a calm smile:
"Do you happen to have that bullet?"
He opened a drawer and pulled out a sleek, silver pistol — elegant, almost artistic.
It gleamed like something from an old Italian film,
equipped with a silencer that gave it an unbearable dignity.
Me, lightly, with irony:
"I didn't expect you to have a second profession, Doctor."
Him:
"I don't kill people… I liberate them."
Me:
"So you're a doctor by day, and Santa Claus by night."
He smiled faintly.
"But the night hasn't fallen yet."
And that inner voice whispered suddenly:
Oh, but it has.
Boom.
The bullet was truly elegant —
graceful, almost tender — as if a lover had found her way into me,
eager and precise, nesting gently inside my mind.
A strange warmth spread through my skull,
light dissolving at the edges of my sight,
and then… peace —
a kind of peace I had never known.
The doctor inhaled the scent of fresh blood,
and sighed like a man who had just ended a long war with emptiness.
He had liberated a nation from its enemy…
by killing it.
But had he chosen rightly?
The last thought crossing my fading mind was this:
"Maybe death wasn't the end —
but the beginning of another chapter,
in a world I never finished writing."