Remembering and Forgetting

You will never forget what it means to be young and carefree. Eternally damned. And you know that this works the other way around, too. Somewhere your parents grieve, the picture frames tipped down to hide your smiling face. It will never grow old, far too painful for your mother to bear. Practically immortal without any effort on your part. But immortality is not something that you ever sought. Old friends from school, people you used to wave to in the hallway, will smile fondly at a memory of something you did - the legend - but their time still keeps pacing forward while you are left behind. They’re getting married now, some of them have children, they know what it is to be alive and have a future. There is at least one of them who has confessed to wishing you had the chance to have the same. But wishing and wanting are not the same as having.

It will never be quite enough.

This is not what you wanted but it is what you have been left with. Sometimes it makes you restless, it makes you confused, everything tumbles together and sparks like a lighter in your head. Flashes. Flashes of images colliding together. Pretty lights of a city. A skateboard. Forest floor. A snow globe glinting in sunlight. Someone laughing, happiness filling their voice. You think that might have been you. Holding hands with someone at a party, though you can’t pick out a face. Blurred trees. Long drives. Fresh air. Pain more clear than anything else, that at the worst times blocks out everything else. Collision. Laugh sharp and hysterical as it bubbles out of him that hurts more than anything else in the moment. Blood in your mouth and handfuls of dirt and body on fire before everything goes mercifully dark.

It’s all too much sometimes.

You will be left with too much time to think and remember. Even though you try not to let it all make you bitter, even though most times you succeed, there are times when a feeling of panic - fear - gnaws at your chest and you can’t help it. You reach out. You tug papers off of desks. You overturn chairs. You tell yourself to stop acting like you’re haunted but that’s what you’ll always be.

It all works out for you in the end.

You’ve never had a constant in your life and certainly not in your afterlife - you’ve watched the world change and not give a damn that you’re not a part of it - but your friends are loyal and kind and no one judges you for being a little weird. They give you distractions, they let you forget. They decorate your room for you as a Christmas gift. There are fifty snow globes hidden in plain sight all around. They string up so many lights in different colors that it’s blinding because they know it will make you smile. And you do. You start to wonder if you are okay with dying because it has brought you here to them. You don’t think you ever will be truly okay - it was all too harsh, you still feel the pain and the panic and the betrayal deep in your bones - but this is something close.

You know what love feels like and that is worth everything.