When I was younger, I thought about heaven and I saw clouds, the softest, fluffiest ones that greatly resembled cotton candy. They never gave way beneath my feet. I thought about heaven and I saw a place flooded with pure white light. I thought about heaven, but not hell; never hell.
I grew a few years, taller and bigger but still with the heart of an inexperienced child. I thought about death. Death scared my little hands into trembling and my heart hammering away in my rib cage. Lights off, I would lie in bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark. My mind raced and my imagination flew heights too ominous for a child's innocent but foolish mind. I'd close my eyes and open them once again inside a closed casket, cold and alone, 6 feet beneath the living. My soul was trapped and smothered, mingling with endless filth and worms feeding on dirt and flesh. I was scared. I was suffocated. I would find myself arisen in reality again, gasping for air with silent tears streaming down my contorted face.
I was a child, still, when I first lost someone that mattered greatly. She was my grandmother, but not by blood. My parents loved her and so did the rest of the family. I don't think I had ever felt close to her, for I've never felt comfortable with grown-ups. But she was a good person and she mattered. Cancer slowly robbed the air out of her lungs and lay upon her a struggle, but there was always vivid life in her eyes despite her bedridden condition. I didn't cry when death took her. I shed only but a few tears during the wake when I saw people hunched over and sobbing for their loss. I didn't go the funeral. I knew she was going to heaven.
I've grown since then, but I am still but a child, fragile and small, against a world I haven't gotten to know so well, stretching endlessly for miles and miles and miles. I still thought about death and I found that the world was strange. People yearned for escape so they cut their lifelines and let themselves bleed. I've seen too much of it, read too much of it, heard too much of it and watched too much of it, that it wasn't long before life slapped me in the face and I longed to walk out of life as well. I realize now that I wasn't afraid of death at all. I was afraid of the casket and the lonely depths you were thrown into once they found that your heart had stopped beating and your body had gone cold and stiff.
One of the most haunting fears that lurked in my being and in my thoughts every single night when I couldn't sleep was losing people. I thought about losing people to passing time. I thought about losing people to careless words. I thought about losing people to unconscious but piercing actions. I thought about losing people to
other people, but it only dawned on me how I could also lose people to death and how it would hurt a lot more, crush me a lot more, and crumple me into nothing more quickly than anything else could.
You see, I have
never lost anyone I held close during these years of realization and growing up, when your mind leaves your fantasies and your fairy tales for reality. I don't know how it would feel, or if I have the strength and emotional capacity to deal with it. Losing someone to the realistic and cruel side of life is....well,
life. That's
life. You can always brave the boundaries and the walls built up in order to fix things. You can always stand in the dark and watch from a distance. But death? How can one bear it? Never seeing someone except in immobile photographs? Never being able to hold them close? Never being able to wrap your arms around them in a reassuring embrace? Never hearing their voices, their laughter, their stories? And how does one move on without forgetting? How does one forget without fear?
