Deathology

When I was small, death was like a sleep away, a painless departure into another realm of subsistence. I remembered feeling my grandpa’s wrinkled hand, the icy touch of death, that lifeless shell that lies before me. I shook and called him, “Grandpa, time to wake up.”, I wanted to play with him, I wanted him to give me sweets. But my mother came in and told me, “Grandpa is sleeping”…

An eternal slumber it became, I never fully realize his death until a few years later. I began to question my mother, and she just ended my memories with him in 2 words… “He died”… These 2 words so simple, yet forceful, like how Shakespeare ended King Lear existence. Is that what happens when the soul finally leaves the confines of our viscous cage? Just 2 words to tell others the end of one’s journey?

At 14, I wished I was 18, so I could get a driving license and go into bars and pubs. At that time, I have an affinity to trouble. Everything I did and thought was not right in this civilization, this culture. Finally, my creativity evolved into practicality, dulled by the societal skeletons of humanity. All my thoughts and works, all my ideas of life just melted into oblivion. At this age, I learned how to think, work and play like a puppet under a puppeteer.

Then at the vicissitude of 18, I wished I was 21, so I could freely enjoy independence and also to openly enter more bars and pubs as well as the theatre for R(A) shows. I began to grow out of my shell, I began reaching and eating forbidden fruits. I began having my own life. I got into love, only to fell out of it time and again. At last, I finally reached here, at this time, at this moment, a few years past the independence state of 21.

Until then, the flow of time seemed stagnant, incarcerated by the warden of youth. But now, time seeps through my fingers like sands in an hourglass. I’ve lost her, now, I’m also losing time… Often than not, I switched on the news to watch people die, flipped through the papers to read about others death… At such times I realize how real I am, I bleed when I am cut, I cry when I am hurt, I feel pain at both the physical and mental altitude. I am just like these people who was once alive…

Over age, I have grown out of my juvenile ideas, ideas that I am invincible, ideas that I am special in some ways… But now I know, I am just human, a mortal, a soul trapped in this decaying flesh and bones, and I am withering together with the evanescence of time… I am not Peter Pan, and never will I be, there is never a Neverland, only a tombstone at the end.

In this world where everyone is either a capitalist or an opportunist, death seems like it is the ultimate equalizer which will finally make strangers shed tears for one another… The counterweight to bring balance to humankind. The final recapitulation of one’s itinerary on Earth. All in just 2 words, “He died”…