And so, I Die Again

Twenty-seven-year-old me died today. How odd! I hadn’t realized she was still around until yesterday.

She gave me a book as she passed, about time and death and dreams that we kill. She wrote that novel and called it The Forgotten Story of the Highway Inn.

“Don’t forget me,” she whispered as she went on to another world, one of the memories and things that are no more and faint, like the sense of a favorite perfume after a long day.

 I grieved; I am still suffering as I write these lines because she was the bravest of us all so far. She carried our inner child, the teenage dreamer and the troubled twenties. She held the misery of my darkest years, all by herself. Not only that, but she pulled us back on track and got me writing again. “Write,” she said. “That’s what you do; you create realities. Let’s create a new one for ourselves. Write!” And she wrote. And she saved me.

She broke the chain holding the beauty back, but she carried the steel about. She didn’t know it because I was so used to heavy things that moving attached to something else made no difference. And the noise? Well, life is noisy; our mind is loud. Its clanking mingled with other cries, and we couldn’t hear it. But she was tired, oh, so tired. I found her lying on the bare floor, shivering with fever, near the exit door of our most somber corner. I saw the chain then. She could not get rid of it because it was inside her skin; I had to pull it off because that thing was not a souvenir I was willing to carry from now on. Along came flesh, and the warm, sticky deep dark red liquid of old death spilled on the dirty gray floor.

She died from the pain, and I held her until it was over. Both of us, the book in our hands. The book that saved us.

Thank you for everything, my dear girl.

Rest in Peace; I can take over now.

I can take over now.