32 Days of Christmas: Day 21
You know that one call you dread? When air turns into glue, every condolence glib, and every posture uncomfortable?
Yea, that call.
Do you ever fear that as the years pass you’ll one day forget the people those calls were about? That day by day only fewer memories of them surface? Vague flashes of how they laughed. The exact tone of their voice. The shape of their eyebrows.
Do you ever fear that gradually it’ll become just a name that comes to mind, not the full embodiment of a person?
I do.
It’s a cruel quirk of the mind, that as new memories are formed by daily living, the old ones thin and fade until they are nearly gone. Garbage in, garbage out, they said. The only silver lining in our mind’s GIGO is that it lets us heal. No, scratch that—it teaches us how to live with it. To accept that this is the universe’s way. Its cruel, unavoidable way. That something must end for something else to begin. To become.
It feels like a sacrifice made to appease the stupid and indifferent gods of the universe; an offering demanded so that new life can exist at all. Only for it to be taken away again, after we’ve been allowed to love it, to hold it, to believe it might stay. The circle of life, someone said, as if giving it a name makes it make sense.
The strange thing is that life keeps moving. Trees grow. Children start new schools. You buy new trousers. You bring home a puppy. You walk barefoot on a beach. You cut an apple in half. You shave bald, or get a tattoo.
Life goes on.
Months turn into years, into a decade.
And soon no one but you remembers that your partner, your brother, your aunt is gone.
✍🏽Reagan.