Chapter 1 – I’ll get through, I have a flashlight

This wasn’t life. It couldn’t be life. But it wasn’t death either. Her perfectly aligned lips had half an inch between them; her hand had stopped twitching. The space of her lips had a trickle of blood coming down them that soon rolled down her neck and stained her long blonde hair. I looked at her, staring at her eyelids that weren’t moving; she twitched no more.

She could no longer see the beauty in life. She could only see the decay, the corpses in the dead brown leaves that had fallen. Fallen, worn out blooms, the only fate she could see in anything anymore. She herself was now only a shriveled bloom. Was it wrong for her to have gone this way? Was it even her choice, or was everything that she had always talked about, all of the waiting and wondering, taken its own course?

She had needed a blanket, if she only needed a blanket. If she needed arms she needed a shawl to cover them. Everything she needed was always too much, and everything she had was always too little. They were too many eyes in her presence scanning her body watching the sweat make her face glisten. She wanted to leave and she wanted them to stop following her. She could still see them. They thought that just because her body had turned pale that she couldn’t feel their looks, their cold, deadly eyes, they thought that she couldn’t feel at all. They wanted to help but they did it in all the wrong ways. That’s what made them sick, the fact that they didn’t even know what pain they were causing.

She was still there, her soul and her thoughts were still there, she could feel them staring. She doesn’t want to be found out, she doesn’t want to be saved. Their efforts meant for good could only come out in negative effects. This wasn’t life, and it wasn’t death. It was everything and anything in-between. It was all of the pain, all of the suffering, all of the mistaken bliss and all of the sorrow. This was more than life, and it was more than death; the simplest and most complicated fate; the realization of cruel reality.

I could no longer see the passion bestowed in any soul’s depths after the last time I saw her eyes shut. The scars and the holes that had been produced, broken, mended, and only to be cut open again had now been revealed altogether, as her body lay so flat. The broken hearts, the regretful mistakes, the lost time, it all added up in these very moments.

If only I could stroke her hand one last time, if only I could feel her heartbeat. I could see that she was cold; I could see that even in the most intense stage of the gate before death that her mind still was so sensitive in the most amazing ways. That she still had more intuition and apathy then any of us, that she had experienced the most pain, and in result, gained the most wisdom. Her thick makeup could smear no more.