Hello at the end

                                    

                                          
When Mbix got depressed, they made rag dolls. Sometimes at the sewing machine, sometimes by hand, sometimes out of scraps from their own skirts, or stalks of weeds and leaves from the garden, and sometimes after fishing in the dump a little ways behind Plorgles's hut.
	They had a whole mound of rag dolls in the spare bedroom. It'd keep growing until they died, because their therapist couldn't recommend any other coping mechanisms that'd help (partially because he'd died, and could no longer recommend coping mechanisms. Partially because some of his suggestions actually hadn't helped. And Mbix wasn't going to start now with a new therapist to explain the past seventy years of their life).
	Usually when Mbix felt sad, they made a ragdoll or two and it did away with the blues. Usually the rhythm of needles stitching and cutting up cloth to make doll hair and designing outfits and coloring their faces reminded Mbix they didn't actually want to be dead. And if they did still want to be dead, they cut off the rag doll's face and poked them with needles in such gruesome ways that it made Mbix too afraid to do anything to their own skin. Or sometimes they just got bored of the slicing and stabbing and made a new doll and then they felt better.
But the past few days, they'd been making rag dolls endlessly, almost without sleeping. And ripped most of them apart, because making them wasn't making the blues better. Stuffing currently littered the windowsill and the couch and the sewing table and gathered around the front door, and the death urge still hadn't dissipated.
But they were stronger than it. So their therapist said lots of times, before his heart attack last week. His affirmations hadn't usually helped, but Mbix had started trying them in the past couple days. "I am stronger than this feeling of death. I would rather be alive. This will pass."
Somehow it took Mbix four days after his heart attack to realize, probably they were sad because he'd died. That was such a normal thing to be sad about, they almost forgot it was an option.
The first rag doll Mbix made after that, they stained the middle red, then ripped it apart. It hadn't helped. And staining every doll after hadn't really helped either.
But they kept making rag dolls, and going out after dark to the dump to find more supplies for rag dolls, and forcing themselves to eat, and sometimes they cried and sometimes they just stared at the ceiling or the blank walls or the painting-covered walls or the stuffing piling up by the door. Because they didn't know what else was supposed to help.
They hadn't died yet--which was good, because if they did die, and someone came over to investigate, and they found the messy floor and unswept hall and dusty windows, they'd probably think Mbix was a crazy old person. And that was plain not true.
So they couldn't die yet. They had to at least clean up the house first. And do something exciting. And maybe visit an ocean first. And tell Plorgles he could take Mbix's half of the garden vegetables.
So they wouldn't die yet. Simple as that.