What Love Used To Look Like

Death

When people die, do they get remembered for a long time?

Enough to accompany them to the afterlife?

When they sleep and don't get to wake up the next day like before, do they transport to a better place where there's an endless supply of ice cream and cakes they can eat without worrying about their weight or their stomach in the morning? 

I wonder about the things they leave behind, 

The pictures candidly taken on Wednesdays, 

Their beds unmade, 

How they liked that one show which was repeatedly watched in the course of their short life, Over and over again,

Through painful days, happy days, and days that felt like they didn't happen. 

I wonder about what happen to their mugs, their favorite shirt, the stain on their bedsheet that doesn't come out no matter how many times you've put bleach on it. 

I wonder how their friends feel existing in a world without them, not being able to call anymore, and make the same jokes, because they're only funny with them around. 

When people die, do their souls disappear into the abyss— to that secret place you can only go through death? 

Or do they just go to sleep for a long, long time and wake up again to find that the universe may have changed without them but it kept on moving and evolving in their absence? 

I wonder what becomes of the body that once walked nonchalantly on the shore during a four o'clock break.

Does it only break and disintegrate until there's nothing left? In the ashes of memories, is there a way to remember fondly the touch of a person that once lived and loved? 

It often surprises me how much time passes by without a thought, and a person goes by like a whiff of lavender one used to like but doesn't anymore, and the record will play, and we're back in that room where we wish we didn't say those last words to them.