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Death

Something cripples you somewhere, oftentimes these days it is when you least expect it. It is the reality. A reminder of your vulnerability. Your being human. Mortality.

Its ugliness, its hard flesh, is inadmissible. It is more than an imagination. It is solid. Real. Stony. A reality. One can feel it. One feels it. Like a lump. The throat is blocked. Sanity, sometimes or just all the time, leaves.

At first, disbelief.

You see the face. The smile. The laughter. You hear the voice. Once, it is whispering...then, louder but soft. Gentler. You hear and feel it. You imagine it condensing into flesh.

The friend, loved one, must be alive. Somewhere.

You start to think it is a dream. It is night in your mind. Moonless, cloudy night. A few patches of stars in it. It never is the reality. To whoever has told you the message, you start to doubt them. They like drinking, sometimes you think, they must be drunk.

It is a bad and tasteless joke, another line hits you. 

You assure yourself. You believe, oftenly, that your assurance can affect reality if it is real. What is real anyway?

For the religious, they cling to the rafters of religion. Sinking with them. Floating with them. It is the last resort. Somehow, maybe, the teachings maybe correct. Maybe beyond the veil of this life there might be another. In that other, people ought to meet. We shall meet.

In the sweet by and by
we shall meet on the beautiful shore

Zonse ndi moyo
nthawi yathu ikazakwana
Chauta akazalora
tizaonana
(All matters because of life
When that time comes
The good Lord willing
We will meet again)

This world is not my home
I am just a passing through
my treasures are laid up 
somewhere beyond the blue 


Thoughts. Memories. Wishes. Dreams. Hallucinations?

I saw him smile the last time we met, you remember, he must have been knowing he was going...

What did she mean when in her last text she wrote she loves me?

Emptiness. The pain of laying the body to rest. Imagining it. Rushing the process. Wanting healing. A smile on your face. Self assurance. Convincing oneself...

I will be fine. I will always remember you.

Tears. Hot. Burning. Secretly coursing down the cliff of your cheeks. 

Whispering in the darkness of the heart. Your whispers echoing in the corridors of death. The deceased, hearing you, waving, assuring you, telling you you will meet again. This life is not all. Another awaits. The atheist in you going to bed. The religious one waking up, fervently.

Why you, why me?

This is a lie. You said we are meeting tomorrow. We agreed. We planned. We...

Slap!

Reality.

Gone. To never be seen again. This you are holding. This that is comforting you. This that...this that...this that...

It is nothing. It is a ruin that you are sitting on. It is no shelter.

Gone. Forever. The next time it will be another. Or you.

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