Volitare

Souls lost in the pyre

A week later,

I could sense my skin soaking, absorbing the sadness around me. I could feel it seeping through my skin and entering my blood stream like a toxin. It’s been a week since I woke up. A week since the accident. I looked at the memorial sight, so many scribbled letters, flower arrangements, ashen faces devastated by loss. People holding candles luminescent, bright and alive, amide crowds and crowds, enveloped by the impending sunset. The rail still shredded with engorged ends on either side facilitating the crash site of the bus, the waves crashing and loud thundering against the rocky shore. I could smell the salt of the sea wondering if salt does indeed heal the soul, the eternal soul. The sporadic dip and rise of seagulls in the distance and the speeding cars behind us reassured us of the life existing beyond this bubble of grief. My parents held my hands and sobbed silently, my brother, Salem, standing alongside my mother with a sheltering hand on her shoulder. He too was sobbing; I have rarely witnessed him cry throughout my life. I stared up at him and glimpsed relief, a looped reassuring smile and warm brown eyes stared right back. My brother worked in Dubai as a crisis management consultant, and has been there for about eight years now. He graduated top of his class and was scooped up the second he got his diploma. He was a people person; he was most known on his campus, was in every organization available in his vicinity, the leader in most of them, and is smart. Really smart. He fitted the lifestyle amidst people, managing their calamities, negotiating strategies, compromising, dealing…he can do it all. He flew in two days after what happened and never left my side since. We would watch whatever channel available on the TV in my room at the hospital, or anything on his laptop. He would talk to the doctors, made sure the nurses made me feel as comfortable as possible. He was my big brother and I his little traumatized sister. They haven’t told me anything about what happened, I kept asking incessantly about what happened? Where were the rest of the passengers? Why was I the only one found? They, as in my parents and brother, that it was now the time to recuperate, that we will talk all about it later. Too tired or too sedated by my pain meds, I would let it go. I felt numbed, a robot walking about humans. I could feel their sadness but not mine. All I could feel was pain, slightly if not completely numbed because of the pain killers.  I insisted on coming with them, compromising finally on sitting on a wheel chair due to my ‘physical status ’. I could hear faint whisper, ‘the sole survivor’, ‘she is the only one they found’, ‘thrown like a carcass’, ‘was on the rocks broken and beaten’, ‘just look at her! Look at her parents!’ flashing glances towards my parents and I. I just wanted to crumble into a ball and hide. I suddenly realized being here wasn’t my best idea yet. I did look at my parents, also I looked at the victims’ parents. The neglected look of them, puff eyed and wailing, crouching near the memorial weighed down by melancholy. They looked…lost. The dead find their peace I am guessing, every celestial religion says so, it’s the living that suffer. The living have to endure the vacancy, the loss, the void the lost ones leave behind. They won’t find peace, they settle for longing as company. The grasps folding my hands tightened, and I knew they saw the parents of the victims too. I felt fortunate for one reason and one reason alone following surviving this incident; that they don’t have to go through this. My parents. My brother. I wouldn’t have felt at peace seeing them like this; ruined and destroyed. I wanted to cry, I wanted to feel! I wanted to mourn the lives lost, the memory I lost and hadn’t gotten back, and I wanted to feel grateful, grateful to be amongst the living. I wondered too many times what could’ve happened if I had perished along with the rest. I wondered would my name be in the obituaries, one of the pictures hung clinging to the torn railing surrounded by flowers, tokens of love and remembrance signed by people I knew with my name on them, that people would come together at sunset holding candles to commemorate and share the sadness of my demise. It’s human nature to wonder if people would remember you after you’ve gone. It’s an inescapable thought! You would be sitting on your favorite chair, in your favorite room in the house, drinking your favorite tea, feeling as alive and content as ever, and all of the sudden the idea tackles you with vigor, followed by after-shock compiled questions; will they remember me? Will they miss me? What will they do after I’ve gone? What will they miss? What will happen to my parents? To my significant other? What will happen to my stuff?