| |
|
Death to the man came openly. It was not shy, and surprisingly not
jarring. One moment it was only an idea and the next, it was traded for all
the world. He did not think it tragic as he slipped out of life. He went
silently, never pondering. Besides its abrupt happening, it all seemed very
natural to him. No thoughts of regret flared in his mind, no anger or
surprise, not even peace. He was one to pay extra attention to small details,
odded-out architecture down alleys, the puffy red appearance around the
eyes of strangers that was the telltale of tears, even after an hour, the
every ingredient tasted in cocktail hors d'oeurves, be it brown sugar or lima
bean paste. Losing these fine, unspoken points, or the interest to notice
them, would have saddened him in life, but now these did not matter. It was
these unfinished, seemingly unimportant things—all that he had not
done yet, all the people suddenly emptied—that would suffer the grief.
He wondered how these shards of what had been his person would hold for him
the pain that he could not feel.
He could not analyze death, it was not like that. Many struggled with
missing the living, and others with letting the living miss you. He let it
come into him while everything faded. He waited in the nothing he was
becoming.
He hung around for a while, not feeling, not impatient. He might have
lingered an eternity, if time here could be measured like that, for death to
sink his final standing. But it was as he stayed that he noticed a straining
inside of him, and he chanced to look at his heart. It was bruised and
swelling, and it made him think of how his arm had once been, a time in his
childhood when he had fallen off a swing and broken it, right at the
elbow.
This sudden memory in a space of such blankness shocked him, and slowly
he realized what he had been waiting for was not death, but for himself, to
let every feeling he had explode, all at once and live on.
|
|
