Your Black Eel Memories

Death is a slippery thing for the blessed; it is hard to envision, harder to touch, and impossible to hold without causing great discomfort. The pain of others, even when presented to us in tangible form, writhes like a black eel in our hands. We cannot offer comfort to the damned.
Perhaps I should be thankful that I am separated from that suffering, protected by a great white void called innocence. But it grows lonely here, on my small island of bliss. And I can hear the wails. Sadness has a way of drifting across chasms and oceans, you see, and burying its sharp tooth into the heart of the most secure.
But we are given time for a purpose, and some use it to shield their hearts from the bite of sorrow, while others seek for a way to fill the void. Those who seek will learn, for they look, and they listen, and they do not close their tender hearts off from the pain. And they see that death has many forms.

There is death of the heart, come from too much grieving and loss. There is death of the soul, which comes for those who have forgotten the meaning of life. There is death of the mind, taking the ones with broken wings and scattered dreams. There are small deaths and broad deaths, deep deaths and deaths that chip away one layer at a time. Sudden deaths. Slow deaths. Torturous, loud; numb, silent.
And there is death of the flesh.
(It comes like thunder, it comes like a heavy, dark night, it comes like snow, and when we are given a warning we cannot avoid it, only flounder as the storm approaches until it covers our eyes and sweeps us off our feet and we kick, we thrash, we scream for help or for mercy or for anything to just make it please, please end...[but we know that hope has forsaken us she's gone he's gone they're lost forever and there is nothing that can bring them back yet even though we could never have protected them we still feel this is all our fault and if we truly fought hard enough we would have found a way but it's too late now there is no respite no relief no release from this jagged hollow tear deep deep inside us except for death itself sweet thoughtless death free us from these memories--])
Is it, perhaps, the absence of life? But no, it runs deeper than that - this absence can be felt, it causes A wound in life, then; a wound that does not easily heal.

There are as many names for death as there are forms of it. Heaven, the Underworld, the Other Shore. Some claim death does not exist at all, but is only one step in the cycle of reincarnation, one piece of the whole. They call it rebirth. But I have no pretty names for death, and I see it very simply:

There was a person, here, before. And then the person was no more.

I wish I could see what you see.




((I took a break from Reports yesterday because, heck, it was Chinese New Year, and I spent all day on college research and summer program applications. And working out Sun Road's plot. Can't get away from that, even on my holidays...))