In Death We Do Not Part

​There is a corpse living under my bed. 

The air is stiff there. She does not need much to survive, but she needs the immeasurable to die. I see glimpses of her when I pass by the right side of my bed to open a nearly empty closet. The wine-colored nail polish, that I wore for the three years after my fourteenth birthday, will catch your eye first. The blue shoes I threw away nine months ago, as I packed for a cross-state move with impairing uncertainty, will demand your attention next. There is little else that can be seen. I do not know what has cemented her to the past, yet keeps her impossibly alive in the present. I have never found the wound responsible for her unsettling stillness. 

I have never looked. Perhaps it is not a wound, at all- but instead the weight of an unyielding anchor. Either way, I do not wish to know. If I found the cause, I am afraid that I would try and fix it. If it is fixed, she might learn to move. If she is healed, she may decide to leave. As of now, she does not move, and she does not see- but she hears. I swear, she hears. ​

​She must- because I hear her. A small voice that begs to be louder echoes throughout the room at night. The sound bounces off the walls and pierces the part of my brain that does not understand silence. Her company is familiar. It is comforting. There are times of sudden, unexpected quiet, however- and in these moments of absence comes my ungrounding. So, on these days that her voice has lapsed, I look for it. I walk in tireless circles around the places I heard her last. I flip open the books she loved and endlessly scan the pages for her favorite words. I let the songs that ripped her heart open begin to pull apart mine. I let the journals, where all her most sacred confessions sleep, confound me once more. I grant the lines permission to settle inside of my wrecked mind- all in hopes that she will not be able to resist the nostalgic draw. I try to lure her out and keep her awake. I do not let her sleep. I search for her when she tries to hide. I cling to her when she wants to leave. I convince her that she is not ready to go. I do not admit that I am the one who is not ready. I hide the expression of terror that comes with the thought- but we share a heart, and I know she feels the pulse quicken when she is quiet. There are too many missed beats to go unnoticed.
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I do not know where my past lives, I only know that it does not die.

I do not let it. If the past begins to fade then I tighten my grip. It is what exists behind you that can keep you from returning. It is the truths borne from the past that ensure you do not repeat it- and any semblance of repetition will be innately new, no matter how similar the scent or seemingly identical the color. The touch will be pure, and unknown. The sound will be unrecognizable, and the taste untraceable. No two experiences can be born of the same palette. It is only you, who woke up six months ago, that knows the sensation which left you bedridden on an unnecessarily sunny Wednesday. It is only you, who lived a mere minute ago, that will know the curiosity which led you to this incoherently written rant.

I struggle to reconcile with the fact that I am forever barred from returning to what I once was. My body refuses to accept that it can only be what it is now. Nothing more, and nothing less. It haunts me to know that, in the space between this sentence and the last, there was a loss. A part of what was once me is gone forever. She will spend an eternity in the ether where our past selves go to die- or perhaps she will continue a life outside of my own. I do not get to ask.

When she leaves, I fear she has taken the thing she was meant to give. I worry that she missed the opportunity to divulge the secrets she was meant to tell, or touch the people she was meant to touch. What if she did not leave the mark she was meant to leave? What if her impact becomes nothing more than the ghost of a chance untaken? Or, even worse, what if I repeat the mistakes she made? She is not here to remind me of the depth of their consequences. Will memory serve me well enough?

I remind myself that this cannot be. I walk in tireless circles around the places I heard her last. I flip open the books she loved and endlessly scan the pages for her favorite words. I let the songs that ripped her heart open begin to pull apart mine. I let the journals, where all her most sacred confessions sleep, confound me once more. I walk by the right side of my bed and bask in the relief of wine-colored nail polish. She is stuck there, under the mattress, collecting memories as they come. She has not died. She cannot die. She is everything that I become, and she is all that I have been. We look eerily the same and feel disorientingly different. She remembers the distaste for coffee at seventeen, while I remember the obsessive flavor from twenty minutes ago. I exist in a loop, where I fear losing what cannot leave. In death, we will join together and relive everything- once more- at once. We will feel the varying sensations of every breeze, and embrace all of the confusion that is human contrast.

Our puzzle will be completed, and for the first time, we will be one. I will be the official culmination of an existence- my existence. It is only in the end that we become whole. The missing parts I longed for will collide with the things I collected in life. I will find that they have never been more than what I already had. In that moment, I will miss nothing. I will know nothing more than what I had been, and it will be enough. It will be more than what my current mind can imagine. It will be everything.

Death will bring all who I have been together. The six-year-old, who just got off her first bike, will hold hands with the woman that spilled tea all over her shirt, right before the meeting she thought meant everything. My fear of losing what I have been will die with us. It is unfounded.

​Your past cannot be erased, it cannot be killed. Your existence, in its entirety, is eternal. All that you have been cannot die. You cannot erase yourself from the narrative, and no amount of effort can strike your impact from the earth. You are an amalgamation of every lived moment, and this offers the beautiful blessing of reflection. It is the personified chance to continuously recreate and ceaselessly, unabashedly grow.
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You live infinitely through the immortality of your untouchable and promised past.


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