Memories: Installment 4

This is one from the vaults. It was something I wrote several years ago when I was in college. I had been to too many funerals in too short a time, too many of them for people my age and younger. I began to suffer from terrible, mind-consuming panic attacks.

Not all my memories are pleasant recollections of starry nights.

I'm happy to say the panic attacks are nowhere near as bad as they were, and come infrequently at best. My faith has become much stronger. That said, the scars remain.

If you have the stomach, I give you this memory.

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What the hell?

No seriously. What. The. Hell.

Death didn't use to bother me.

Now it causes me mental anguish every time I even think about it.

I'm used to death. I really am. I mean, anybody who knows me at all knows how many frikkin' funerals I've had to attend. Uncle Cecil's when I was eight, that was my first one. At least, the first I can remember. I don't know whether or not dad brought me to Gramma's funeral. I was really too young then. I do remember him sitting in a chair and when I asked him what was wrong, he said, "Well, sweetheart... my mommy just died."

But I really recall Jonathan's. I remember mom coming down the hallway to tell me that the eleven o'clock news had revealed the second drowning victim's name. I remember crawling, shakingly, out of bed, and walking down the hallway to confirm it for myself. I remember how trance like it felt. I remember the way his face looked swollen, having drowned, at the funeral home. I remember all of it.

I was sixteen.

Kids shouldn't die that young.

In fact, kids shouldn't die. Michelle shouldn't have died. She was only four for fuck's sake. A four-year-old shouldn't have to be buried.

But they do.

I will, someday.

And even though I was "Fearless" when I was three, I am older now, and know better. I know I am mortal, and will die.

And that thought, the thought that someday, my life will end, scares the living piss out of me. Not because I'm afraid of the pain. Not because I'm afraid I'll have lived an incomplete life. But because of what happens after that.

Nobody really knows what happens after that, you know? A lot of people THINK they do, but nobody can agree on it. Ask any Catholic and God is sitting in the Heavens upon his great Throne. Ask a Hindu and he'll tell you that you'll wake up in a whole new body. A Jew will tell you that Abraham will hold you to his bosom, and a Muslim will tell you that Allah will grant you a great reward. Some of the zealots believe you'll have a harem of virgins. Everybody's got their own idea.

But we can't reconcile them all.

I mean, I used to believe that all religions stemmed from the same Source and thus we would all end up going to the same Place afterward. But we just can't. We can't. There are too many stipulations and secret handshakes and hoops to jump through to get to "the Right Place", which differs depending on who you ask. What if we've just made it all up? What if we, as a species, when we discovered our own mortality, had to adapt a means of understanding and justifying life so as not to instantly lose our minds?

What if there is no Heaven, no Hell, no Valhalla, no Happy Hunting Grounds, no rebirth? What if, when you die... that's just... it?

THAT'S what scares me, and keeps me awake at night. It's what gave me a mental breakdown when I was fourteen and has reared its ugly head again to tear at my psyche. It's what has made me look over my shoulder every hour for the past six months, and why I've gotten so short with people. I'm scared. Plain and simple.

I'm scared that I'm not even real at this very moment. I'm so very, very afraid that what I am right now is nothing more than someone else's dream, and that when they wake, I will be gone. As though, and for all intents correctly, I was never here. I can't distinguish reality and dream anymore. Sleep brings dreams that are so real I forget they were dreams WELL on into the day. I'll dream that I talked to someone on the phone, or perhaps bought cereal, and later that day I will be shocked to learn that no, in fact, we are out of cereal or that conversation never took place.

And reality itself has become a dream. I no longer really taste my food, nor my drink. Sensation is so fleeting I can barely call it real. A moment passes and I wonder: was that a moment in which I created a memory, or am I simply dreaming, and that memory that I think I have made is simply made up? What if there is no future to this exact second, and the only reason I'm sitting here RIGHT NOW is because somebody's dreaming that a girl my age, my height and my nature is sitting in front of a computer having a mental meltdown and all of her memories leading up to that point are just filler?

What if that's the case?

Why can't I feel real anymore?

I know I used to. I know I used to smell the grass and taste the popcicles and feel the sunlight and hear the leaves and see... gods, the things I used to see! I cannot see anymore, I have grown blind. And no matter how I strive, I still cannot see. I can't look people in the eye because, in my mind, somehow, they aren't there. They are no more real than I. I am related to dreams, friends with figments, and in love with a phantom. None of the people or things I know and love are real, nor am I.

This is what frightens me.

This is what has cast me on my downward spiral of late.

If you know the way out... throw me a rope.