No One I Know Talks About Dying
Quite often I am moved by the whim to write about dying, indirectly, without noticing it. I never before gave the theme of death a second thought until I rummaged through my older stories and found that many of the ones that do have death in it have won recognition. I suppose that would make me quite experienced in the topic of dying, except I’m not really the coffee shop person, online dater, or coworker friend who opens with “And how do you feel about dying?”
A friend had asked me the other day if I was afraid to die. Was I? I could never answer that question with a simple yes or no. I was even sort of disconcerted with sharing my stories with them, unsure if they would read into my stories for an answer to that question.
If I were to look at the topic of dying as having unresolved issues or the infamous unfinished business that has claimed many a ghost then I wouldn’t consider myself as someone ready to die. And therefore I would then not so much be afraid to die but not having room for it in my current schedule.
However, as my stories have proven to me, apparently I have become obsessed with dying or the theme of death and should, as right of who I am, self assess why that is. Death in my previous stories have come to mean different things, not always bad or ominous, or even renewal, sometimes it just meant the things that we live with everyday like indecision, insecurity, regret, and confusion.
In The Man Downstairs I wrote about death as a way to express my loss and regret. Loss and regret at not having made the time to appreciate the things we take for granted. Death in The Man Downstairs also represented a goodbye an entrance into another world, my downstairs neighbor was going somewhere I couldn’t be, somewhere I wouldn’t be. Death in The Man Downstairs was also a representation of confusion, of a collision of feelings and facts that I was not ready to face upon his death.
I think then that I put myself and these characters within deaths presence because I consider that a form of bravery. I believe to face death in our own lives requires a sense of bravery. Even when we have lived fully we still see our bodies age. We still see a return to the earth and the last of our breaths and the final sparks of thoughts pass.
My name is Alicia Narrea and when I thought about the title of this post I allowed myself to write in feelings as opposed to the meaning behind the singular words. I would say the title out loud “No One I Know Talks About Dying” and then just write. It was similar to hearing a single tune and adding words to them. In this case the title of this post is the backdrop, the melody and the words I wrote below are it’s lyrics. Thank You.
No one I know talks about dying. This story takes place decades ago when I lived somewhere else, when I was someone else. I used to live at night but I’m not a night owl. I loved beautiful things like sunrises and the way nature looked with the sun shining down. I was afraid of the night. Like how children learned to be afraid of the dark. We never put in the things that define the dark. People put those things in for us. Like pain and the people who cause it. The night could signify the awakening of things that could cause pain or take the life from your heart and that was enough to be afraid of it.
At 5:45 am I would wake up before my alarm and watch the sunrise from my bed. My room was small, but I was small. The sun started with a pale blue light just under the crack of my door. If you weren’t used to waking up at 5:45 am like I was you would think it was the moonlight. The pale blue light was very similar but I was used to waking up early. I was so used to it that all I had to do was think of a time in my mind and that’s when my eyes would open. All I had to do the night before was think really hard and imagine a digital clock hanging inside my mind, with its large digital soft white letters glowing. If I saw 6:15 then that was when I would wake, but today it was 5:45 and the sun was a pale blue light under my door.
I don’t want to talk about yet what my mind is telling me to talk about. It goes back to days and nights and I would prefer to be in one or the other. One afternoon I was walking home. Home was a tall apartment building then and I used to think that matching meant wearing all one color. I think my color then was heather gray. I was in heather gray walking home watching the things on the street. I used to love watching things below my eye level. Back then my mind called it looking down. Today I am conscious of it. People don’t understand wanting to look down. Looking up is normalized. Looking up is considered brave. What they don’t know is that looking down is braver. Looking down puts you at a disadvantage with gravity. One look down too hard and you could fall.
Inside my mind, somewhere in the past, there are things that even I don’t know. Images I can see and some of them I don’t like to see. Sometimes we don’t have the option but most times we turn the images into imagination. Like maybe I wasn’t alone in a room with him. Maybe his face was shadows. Maybe the voices I heard against the plaster wouldn’t quiet when I stared at them. As hard as anyone could stare inside the dark. Images can do that. I think all images are real. The mind keeps them for us and so they must be real. But sometimes the images change, sometimes we bury them so deep in the past and deep in the mind that we don’t recognize them anymore.
