You’re about to experience one of life’s cherished lessons.
Those around you die.
And, by extension, you die.
Yes, the end of intricately confabulated stories is near.
Stories you’ll remember. Stories the person thought were critical . . . but fabrications nonetheless.
Just like this here is a fabrication of graphite on paper.
It will burn away some day, or smudge, or wash out in a flood, in a slow and final disagreement brought on by a force that gives no care to conflict, importance, legacy or legend.
There is no disagreement.
There was no argument to start.
The words and the life were either witnessed or they were not.
The moments and phrases were either lived with acute awareness or not.
With attention or distraction.
And if with distraction, oh what gesticulation and complexity.
What bending and obfuscating in order to deny a death right there.
Right out front.
As close as the skin.
Sound and fury, importance and character traits layered on like miles of mortar on the tallest of brick buildings.
In and out, up and across.
Denial, denial, denial.
Squeezing the eyelids closed.
All for an unreal fear.
A fear just as confabulated as the story of a character, as fictional as life vs. death itself.
A lip quivering with both laughter and awe realizes none of it was true – except for one despite the other.
A burst of light on a vast patch of blackness.
If anything, all hail that.
Revere the characters dying next to you.
The other will demand that a story was told.
Something of real significance.
A father, a son, a daughter, a mother. A town elder, an achiever, a city councilman, an innovator, a space explorer, an underestimated genius, a jokester, a lover, a romantic, an ambitious soul whose gushing of striving found him at the same end as anyone else.
And the misses painted over in the elegy.
Never a mention of the heresies against man.
But those might never have happened had he or she just stayed awake long enough to witness them as they crawled forth from the scenery.
What power wanted evil anyway?
Except for a backdrop to place more triumph, passion and shiny baubles.
The deaths will come, and yours will too.
Bloom now and never believe you’ll bloom again.