Writer Games | Death Wish & 51

Task Five: The Dear Departed /QF - Maria Thisbe [5]

I am not one to cry. I  am emotional; my feelings spiral into anxiety and fear yet I do not cry.  I am not one to pay attention to others. Past friends have disappeared  because I am not adequate in noticing anything but my immediate  surroundings. I have grappled with the complexities of why we mourn for  those we do not know since I was a child. And yet, there is only one  answer I have found, from a book I once read and have read many times  since. So it goes. The book also goes along the lines of 'All moments,  past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist'. It is  for that reason I do not feel connected. I am detached, unstuck from  humans just as Billy Pilgrim became unstuck from time.

Perhaps I am not normal.  Normal is of course another concept us humans have created. Normal is  what normal seems to be. Normal in this moment is to recount stories of  those we barely knew to those here we barely know, normal tomorrow is an  unknown to us. The only one I knew was Solace. I cannot even recollect  her last name. Everyone they speak of now were only faces. They were  stories of their own making but I was never but a character of a  character if a character within their short lives. The speeches and  dramatics make me begin to question my own living life.

I understand this might  sound odd, cruel even. Perhaps it may sound evil and psychopathic but I  cannot confirm or deny as I do not know who I am myself. Who is anyone,  who is we and who is me and why did I come back but no one else?  Questions, they float around my mind, dancing on clouds of worry. The  others, their faces are shadows. Alicia, her face is downcast. I am the  only one who seems detached, whose face is cast around the room,  watching. A girl speaks of a leader.
Leaders came and went here, she could be speaking of anyone. I purse my lips and draw my eyes down to my lap.
Solace,  her face is already fading from my memory. I am sure I must feel some  sort of anguish over someone I grew to know for several days, but there  is little. When I was younger, before I wanted to go into astrophysics, I  often found myself in suffering over the inevitability of death. One  day my parents and family would die and perhaps I would be alone in the  world.
One day I would lose them and I would no longer be able to  see them and I would often force myself to think about how much I should  have been doing, since after all they may not have been there the next  day. Sometimes I still get that feeling, the heavy burden of  impermanence, of an infinite amount of 'so it goes's'. I do not feel  that now. I mean, I feel it now, but only to myself, to the fact my  family may never see me again. I ask myself if that is so selfish-to  worry of my own death when here I sit among those with tear-streaked  cheeks who recount their friends who have not come back.

I cannot think of Solace  for an extended period of time. I revert back to myself, but I force  myself to try and keep thinking of her. I can kind of hear her voice and  kind of see her face. I can hear her walk, though I can always hear  walks. Everyone's is different, every one is unique and strange. Solace,  we were together for a couple days but I barely knew her past life. No  one likes to remember who they once were, no one likes to speak of their  yesterday. Perhaps that is in good reason, that we don't speak of our  yesterdays. We are new people each day. Regardless, I never knew her.  One day she was beside Alicia and I, the next she was gone. Like someone  who simply just said goodbye and left. Like someone who simply walked  away.

We do not mourn the  strangers we meet, even if one we see may die afterwards. We do not  mourn the people we met for a day yet people are always quick to provide  sympathies regardless, as though it makes them a better person for  doing so. Strangers were the people, are the people here. We may mourn,  but perhaps it is our selfish desire to see those who have fallen below  us, to raise ourselves up, to provide us with another push to continue  on, to win.

Solace. I need to stop. I  have to be polite to her memory. I have already told Alicia I won't  speak though. I said it was against my religion but we both chuckled and  then the joy was broken and we went back to being solemn and I said I  was serious so she said she would speak instead. Solace Endy, I would  have started to the group, perhaps even to the media. Solace Endy, I did  not know her, is what I would say. Perhaps I would just end on her  name, let it ring above the cavern or around the room as I spoke to a  group of reporters, letting it settle, mysterious, just like her. Only  her name, because I didn't have anything else to say. And then the  people would implore me, prod me with microphones or their piercing  stares and I would stick a foot in my mouth by saying 'so it goes' and  then maybe I would get sued for copyright infringement by Vonnegut's  family. Unless I became rich, then it wouldn't matter.

Look at me, I keep going  off. I cannot focus on death when I have spent my entire life trying to  focus on everything else. It was why I went into astrophysics, to find  the tiny speck of hope. Of course, the hope that came with discovering  the universe was discovering that the universe was so infinitely complex  that death was just an illusion, that the people I loved would just be  somewhere else, at a different point in time. It is why I cannot seem to  feel sorrow for those in the expedition group who have gotten lost. I  have shielded myself, put my potential sorrow into only my family,  shoved it upon them so such inevitability comes only at a stronger price  for several people rather than a smaller price on many. Solace was not  one I entrusted with such feelings, and I must apologize for that.

I must apologize for  many things, yet my predicament here is one in which I must pretend I do  not have. People look at me differently sometimes, when I discuss such  matters. It makes people uncomfortable, I think, to not focus on what  the person gave us in their lifetime, but on the fact that everything  must die. We must die one day, but some days are more tragic than other  days; some days we are faced with our uncomfortable reality of  impermanence, and we mourn. Solace Endy, I say to the watching eyes in front of me. So it goes.