Dust to Dust - I

My breath caught in my throat. The shadows were the only things that had changed since I had left. The bleak silence that remained threatened to smother me. It made me wonder how people do it. How they come home day after day to everything exactly as they left it, without the lights, or the noise. Because after a while you grow used to the change.

You begin to think of your house as something that teems with activity, personified with the characteristics of the life you’ve lived there; forever in motion. You’d like to think that as long as the structure stands, the rest of it must linger as well. I had always thought the distinction between a house and a home trivial but in light of recent events I’ve come to realize that they are very, very different. Because a house, my house, was really only a skeleton- my naïve mind had clothed it in flesh. I had seen the ghosts, the memories that lingered there and mistaken them for life itself. I had begun to view it as if it had a life of it’s own; a brick and mortar being with pipes for veins.

I couldn’t even be sad; there was nothing to mourn because there was nothing there to begin with.

Ashes to Ashes - II

I had hoped that my life was sturdier than a bunch of ideas, a fragile body, and a group of fleeting souls. I had tried to pin it down like a butterfly on a corkboard, but the pin I thought I held so tightly dissolved as soon as it touched those beautiful wings. No matter how hard I try, no matter how hard we try, it will always escape us. Despite the number of shallow breaths we hold on for or how hard we fight back. We think ourselves monarchs, owning life - we are the only animals prideful enough to think we can. But as we are left fading we will inevitably watch it flutter and fly away from us, our fingers reaching until we too turn into skeletons. And we will see then that life was never truly ours. It was, it is, a momentary miracle; the opportunity of brief consciousness so that we may observe the beautiful world we are inherently bonded to.

Earth to Earth - III

Even when the gift is returned to the soil of our birth we will remain in the sparkling crystals of snow, the warm summer breeze, and the salty currents of the oceans. Until there comes a time when the butterfly will flutter back into our remains and life will be sown again in our ashes. At that time we will take on a new role in the universe.

I know now that life can’t be captured, and I know now that I will never truly understand the complexity of the web that we are all a part of. But I find comfort in the knowledge that we will all continue to exist in the world that surrounds everything we love even as our personal ghostly imprints begin to fade.