That it probably had risen from death. This pain isn’t the actual funeral, it is merely a mirage of all things that have once lived but now have passed....
INTROSPECTION
As the first wisp of autumn, strung across the neck of October, crept in, I kept wondering why it felt like an estranged nostalgia knocking at the windowsill. A peculiar feeling of once knowing this ache and sadness but at the same time being struck by a jarring memory that I had buried some time ago. That it probably had risen from death. This pain isn’t the actual funeral, it is merely a mirage of all things that have once lived but now have passed.
So I sat there, watching her distant eyes in a way trying to decipher the profound sadness that they carried. She was both here and elsewhere. Like every day of her life was an homage to the one lived before but devoid of all joy and happiness. The colour of her eyes deepened with a wistfulness of her once abandoned dreams. She was lost some place which I thought was where all orphaned thoughts go, into the land of the unknown.
And then I saw her life, like a cryptic jigsaw of everything that had led to her breaking point. How all the pieces which once fit perfectly had now outgrown each other. The life she once wore as a crown was made to feel worse than the ashes under her feet, and she had walked way too far in the future to notice she had deliberately done away with the corpse of herself that made her feel complete.
Now, as a hollow being, she sits across me carefully looking for words, pinning them together, talking about love and life. Like alienated objects, like objects she has only read in fiction. As she makes sense of how she got here, or if there will ever be a way back. So, as the sun finally set in her eyes and the clouds of the evening tea rose a little higher, her eyes met mine in a small interjection, a familial haze blew over the nape of my neck, and I was ushered back into reality.
What l saw was my reflection staring back at me and I could, for once, see how much I had changed all the while wearing the same visage. That didn’t wrinkle or flinch. Somehow I thought if I pretended enough, I could act like I deserved to be here, but instead I think the reason I’m still here is because I don’t want to stop this waltz with make believe.
You miss a step, and just like that you’re no longer here. You’re gone.
