Be forewarned, this post is rather self-indulgent.
One of my earliest memories is of lying in the dark at a cabin that my family was visiting in the Uintas Mountains, hugging my Amanda Doll. The weight of the unfamiliar night shrouding in around my body like a vivid and complete thing. Something present, something aware. Something Invading the space of my brain in a way I did not like. Pushing out the comfort of what I had known and inserting in it's place a dread. An unknown. Like a physical compulsion I could not squirm away or hide. I just huddled. Letting it wash over me in waves until I silently sobbed my little self to sleep.
I might have been about 6, and a neighbor's dog had died a few days prior. I don't even remember it's name now, but what will never leave me is that moment of waking up in the pre-dawn hours to the sound of my sister snoring next to me, suddenly knowing beyond the shadow of any doubt that I too, was going to die. Some unknowable, utterly terrifying nothing would swallow me up and make me disappear. I was capital A Aware for the first time in my life.
Fortunately children are not capable of maintaining or contemplating abstract thought for long, and my limited brush with the idea of my mortality faded as quickly as it had sprung up. I woke up the next day none-the-worse for the wear, and went fishing. Where I caught a fish. And then had to put it back because I couldn't stand to let it die. And that was that.
Life went on. And on. And on. When I was 10 or so we lost our dog Dino. Troubling, but not so bad. And 10 of the 12 or so chickens we had slowly disappeared or turned up sick and then dead. Every fish we put in the 10 gallon tank died. Usually horribly. Death was not the constant companion that some people learn to live with day after searing day, but it was not an unknown.
Then, when I was 13 I read the book Dracula. At night. Alone. On a dare.
Bad idea. From an adult's perspective it is a quaint horror, written in a language resembling English that has long since morphed into something new. 13 year old me saw in Dracula that literary tide of death. Rushing in when unexpected. Stalking in the guise of friendship. Obsessed with the beautiful, the young, the new, lurking around every corner. That idea of Death as inescapable. I lay in bed that night. Clutching my pillow (Amanda Doll was on the desk--WAY too far to get too) and chewing garlic. Knowing again, in that unmutable unutterable way, that I am not a thing that gets to last forever, and that forever is almost too terrible a concept to even pretend to want to understand.
I chewed garlic every night for a week. But teenagers are immortal. And so I moved on. But I was old enough by then to know, every once in a while--usually at night--that while the world was wonderful and full and amazing and alive, that there was something dark. Something grim. Something that tore at my soul every time I glimpsed it, that existed in partner with the stunning rise of the sun, or the light bouncing off a moonlit lake.
Impermanence. Utter, complete and unavoidable.
As an adult I am unfortunately capable of abstract thought, but fortunately mostly capable of self-distraction. But sometimes that understanding rears it's leering head. Sometimes when I'm mourning the loss of someone I loved. When a pet dies or runs away. When a childhood toy disappears or breaks. When an idea slips away--never to be thought again. When I move, which I've done a lot, and have to face the idea that everything familiar will change. Will morph. Will shift irrevocably before I return.
That I will change. Will morph. Will shift irrevocably before I return.
And worse than that, that someday the little goodbyes I say for a year here, or two years there, will become permanent. To the point that I will someday lie in a bed, and say goodbye to myself before slipping off into oblivion. I will say goodbye to the bend in my index finger, and my slightly obnoxious taste for sweet white wine. To the wrinkles I have and hopefully will form. To my hands and feet---my tools and navigators through this world. To ever feeling bothered again. To biting my lip or feeling my bottom rib slip out of place when I stretch too far to the right.
There will even come a time when no one remembers me.
No one loves me.
No one is annoyed by me.
No one misses me.
And that is the way of the world. The circle of how things are and ought to be. There are days. Usually when I am warm, it is light and I am with friends, when that seems alright.
But lying alone in a new bed? Staring at a unfamiliar ceiling in the dark? Feeling and being utterly alone, just a snapshot of a second in the grand scheme of things? There are times when my heart breaks for everything I will lose. For my family, for Amanda Doll, for how much I hate the line of my neck in profile.
There are times when I need to mourn not just the inevitable loss of everything. But also the eventual loss of me. For the ceramic filling in my teeth and the way my hair won't curl or even wave. For the sting of the cold beach air on my nose, and for intestinal cramps when I eat fish. For the feel of my hand on the keys of a piano and the joy of wearing knee high socks. For how grumpy I get when someone else is right, and the pain I feel when I disconnect--somehow--from friends.
Sometimes I have to cry, to mourn all that, because when it comes down to it, I won't be able to after I've gone.
I don't even remember when, but at some point I learned to play 'Taps' on my Harmonica. Nothing else. Just 'Taps' because hearing it makes me feel a little bit better about the whole thing.
I've played it every night, lulling myself to sleep, since I got here. Since I really committed to leaving home, leaving friends, leaving the familiar, the comfortable, the distracting.
Reminding myself, every moment could be a goodbye. And reminding myself to live every day like seconds are more precious than diamonds.
Because they are. Far, far more.
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