The car next to us saw us singing with The Beatles, communicating through a beat in our blood. Once we stopped fighting for control, we found summer again. I woke her up begging to go to school. She would have preferred if I stayed around a little longer to share a cup of tea. The horizon is here, not there. If time reset, I would spend my mornings opening up the blinds and showing her the world from my eyes. I imagine taking her hand and walking down by the ocean to discuss big ideas. She would urge me to move closer to San Diego, and I would consider it, because of her. We would stay up late watching movies and laughing at the silly plot twists of life. She would encourage me to stay true to my beliefs and to write as much as I could. I would grow concerned for her age, as her body began to betray with signs of ageing. She would wear glasses on the tip of her nose and freshen up her lip gloss after we ate at our favorite Mexican restaurant. We always loved that salsa, the spicy one with all the chunks.
I came home a few times after school, and I had a panic attack when she wasn’t there. Almost like I knew one day I would wake up every morning without her. I wasn’t ready for it, but I had to be. Everyone told me I was strong. I didn’t want to be. In my depths, I wrote down my reflection. I didn’t like what I saw. My words were everything I had in a world left of nothing. I believed the darkness would never subside. The sun never left, I just couldn’t see the invisible.
Every summer before she was gone, I sat on the porch and tanned my bones. I didn’t know my best friend was inside those suffocating stucco walls. A house on a hill. A single family-home. She sat alone in the darkness and watched the world live on without her. The bottom of her own self-perpetuating trench. Can’t live without surviving.
She despised every holiday which was focused on her. Anger at the world for not accepting, and a silent fury at those stuck in the tragedy of their own judgments. When a person is depressed, we expect them to stop acting like it. We project our brains onto them. Fix it! But support isn’t stitched. It’s listening even when we know they are wrong. It’s showing up when life doesn’t feel convenient. It’s knowing the best of them, after seeing the worst in them. It’s compassion and patience and knowing the truth behind lies. It’s waking up in the morning after a long fight and staying for tea, just because.
Snuck into her room on birthdays to deliver an array of gifts – my favorite stuffed animals, a stick of gum she bought me the day before, and a hand-written note thanking her for being my mom. I didn’t understand that gifts were meant to be something the other person wanted. Instead, I took an opportunity to give her things which meant the most to me. When you’re a kid, the world belongs to you. Tick tock.
Try not to idolize the dead, or the living for that matter. We’re all racing towards the middle.
Every night I fall asleep conscious of regeneration. Like a portal to another life, on the other side of death. A sleeping of the soul, in order to be reborn in the next world.
We see the clouds moving, air above water. There is nothing to be made of nothing, only matter, which surrounds invisibility, can show us what nothing is made of. Space and time frozen in a capsule of nothing. We can contain it for a while in balloons, drifting as moments playing in time. A little bit of heaven navigating back to where it came from, until the constricted matter loses its hold on an element built for space. When the matter loosens its grip on the oxygen inside our skin, we float up and away to be the whole, only to be captured again by space, bubbles in time as we gulp air towards the end.
A new idea. I can feel the rhythm of our car rides to school. I can taste the impermanence of moments as the beat taught us who we are.