The tears keep falling as I reach for another candle. This time, I hesitate, my hand trembling, but I still light it and set it beside the others.
For Daniel.
My mother once said God works in mysterious ways, and we shouldn’t question the path we are on, but I lost that faith. Whatkind of path is this, where I will never see my mother’s face again? Where I will never hear my father’s voice telling me how to move through life, urging me past my fears? Every day, it feels like my memories of them are slipping further away, and all I’m left with are fragments. Their faces. Their voices. The people they were. Even that is starting to fade.
Life is just a flashback in the end, I guess. You pass into another life with nothing but your soul, and what is left on Earth becomes a memory. Even the things you owned grow old, fade, rot, and turn to ash.
My chest burns as my thoughts flicker like an old film reel. In one memory, my father taught me how to drive. His hand shot out when I pressed too hard on the gas, his face turned white in panic as he grabbed the wheel.In another, my mother in the kitchen, baking every single birthday cake for me. The one with strawberries, because it was always my favorite. The way she used to stop everything when I played the piano, listening to every single note with her eyes closed like she wanted to hold on to every sound like she might lose me. And Daniel... taking me to our favorite rooftop restaurant, drinking champagne and staring up at the stars, waiting for one to fall so we could make a wish that never came.
The memories crash so hard I can barely breathe, and I break into tears.
We hold on to the happy memories because they are easier to carry. It hurts less that way. It is less painful to picture them smiling, to keep them alive in places untouched by grief, to hope they are somewhere out there still smiling. But are they? Do their tears get wiped away somewhere beyond this life, or do they simply find each other sad?
The worst part is having no answers.
Death never answers anything. It doesn’t leave behind the things you want to know. It just takes, and takes, and leaves the rest of us orphaned, heartbroken, afraid.
Maybe in some horrible, twisted way, it was meant to be. But what if we don’t want it to be?
The ones who are left behind don’t get to ask questions. They just keep living. They breathe through the fear, through the memories, through the shape of the life the dead would have wanted for them. But the dead can’t feel. They can’t hear. They are just gone.
And the part of us that lived inside those memories goes with them.
How are you supposed to stay the same after that kind of loss?
You can’t.
It changes you. Even when it feels like you are dying a little more each day, you still have to wake up and live the next one.
Because that is life.
One moment you are here. Next, you are gone.
And in the end, we all leave alone, not hand in hand, but one by one.
Maybe that’s why I’m afraid of haunted houses. Because if I ever stood face to face with someone who knew what death felt like, I would ask the question I have carried for too long.
And I’m not ready to hear the answer.
And the living... People can hurt you in the worst ways possible, and somehow you don’t get to carry that pain honestly, because the moment they die, pity steps in and silences everything else. You are left holding the wound, and eventually it turns into a scar. You live with it, and get used to the pain of it, even while it keeps eating at you from the inside.
That is what trauma is.
And when we finally try to speak about it, we are called crazy. Misunderstood.
So, tell me, God. Why were we made to be this complicated, this cruel?
I have lost hope for goodness.
But maybe that is just me.
I take a few steps back and sit down on the bench, staring at the candles as the flames dip low, then rise again, burning side by side. Tears keep spilling down my face. I’m falling apart all over again, piece by piece, and no one can put me back together because I’m alone.
Rosewood House can’t scare ghosts away, because I’m the scariest ghost of them all.
I’m not angry anymore. I have gone so numb I can’t even find the shape of who I used to be. My wholeness is gone. There is only emptiness now.
Only numbness.
