Social Casualty

Chapter 21

 Regardless of what other people think and say, life is kind of stupid, and so is death. When people die, they are just buried in the ground, and to me, it always felt like it was just a way to make the ones who are left alive to forget them. And they do, and the dead ones just drift off to oblivion.
Sometimes I wish that it was different, sometimes I wish I remembered precisly what my mother's face looked like when she tucked me to sleep, how her voice sounded like when she was scolding me for doing something stupid, and how warm it made me feel when she hugged me and kissed my head everytime I scrapped my knee. But I can't, in fact, the few things I have from her consist of foggy memories and old personal items. And a grave, in a graveyard I've never even been to.

I wish I could say it felt peacefull to see where she had been resting all these years, and would be resting for the rest of eternity, that it made me finaly come to terms with her death, but it didn't. It had been two days since me and my family arrived to Miami, for our vacation, when I decided it was about time to visit my mother's grave, already tired of trying my best to avoid my family in that bigass resort. So I took a cab to the Dade North Memorial Park and spent around two hours trying to find her grave in the midst of all the others. And it was hard, because there were around other three people named Mona Morrinson burried there, and the simple air of the cemetery was thick and heavy, and made me gag every so often. And when I found her grave, there weren't any flowers in there, the tombstone was dirty and weeds had already grown around it.  It wasn't hard to understand,  my mother had been forgotten. Maybe I should have read those grief management brochures that had been given to me by the nurses in the hospital around the time my mother died. aybe if I had paid more attention to them I wouldn't have forgotten her, and I wouldn't have to be here, staring at dirt. Part of me just wants to dig and dig, until I find her wooden coffin, and open it, just to make myself suffer through watching her carcass, making sure I'd at least remember what her dead body looks like. But I don't, instead I stay right where I am, sitting in front of her tombstone, glaring at it. Why did you leave? Didn't you know people needed you here? Did you forget us the same way I forgot you? I ask in my head, wondering if maybe her ghost can hear my thoughts and somehow give me a decent answer, instead of those things I heard from everyone else 'I'm sorry for your loss' they say 'That's just how life works', 'She will be remembered'. I feel myself burning up, fuck them, fuck all of them. They know nothing.

If it was me who had died? What if I had been successfull killing myself those months back? Would I be forgotten as well? Who would even care? Maybe Katniss? No, I didn't know her back then. My friends would be sad, but they would eventually move on, they'd forget me, and I'd be just a carcass buried deep in the ground, inside a degradating wooden casket. In my mind, I play up what the whole thing would look like. My body would be found cold by Effie, after I didn't show up for breakfast. She would scream, and cry, and make a scene, although it'd be more from shock than anything else. My father would come, prepare me a bigass funeral, that would be filled with other business man, and people he worked with, that didn't even know me. They'd come and tell him the same thing 'We're sorry for your loss', 'He was so young', 'Peeta was definetly an incredible young man, he'd sure to do some great things'. There would be people I didn't even like crying, inclunding my stepmother, who would be crying as loud as ever, stating she'd miss me as she'd miss her own son. But no one would talk about the fact that I had killed myself, because it was embarassing for my family. No, instead they'd talk about me as a tragedy, and that's all I'd ever be for the rest of eternity, a tragedy, a sad tale that would be forgotten with time. And that makes me angry, because I should be much more than that, everyone else should be much more than that. And for the first time ever, I think I'm glad I didn't die, that I still have a chance to to stick around, to make my father grow grey hairs because of my behaviour, to make sure Principal Snow is out of the highschool, to kick Cato's ass a few more times, to see Gale Hawthorne get rejected by a girl for the first time ever and my brother moving in with his boyfriend and intrducing him to the family. And to make Katniss Everdeen love me. These thoughts are all it takes to make me stand up, and place the single dandelion I found sprounting in the entrance of the cemetery over my mother's grave.