Old soul

People sometimes would be amused by her "knowledge", her "cultural depth".
She would laugh, because she knew it was just a varnish. Nothing too serious. Just things that you collect in your brain in the course of a lifetime of being observant and alone.

As she came to think of it, she had been old since she was 12 years old, around her father's illness and death, when she was left to her own devices.

As she grew older, her loneliness thrusted her into reading and then writing. 

People born old  should grow younger. Maybe that explained why she was so impetuous, a risk taker as they would say.

Even though she was piling up losses and set backs, she was still "going strong". "How can you be so strong?" they would say. She knew it was not a matter of choice, but instead the total lack of choice that kept her going. All she had to do was nothing. Just remain alive.

If it was for her own choosing, she would be already gone for good. She just didn't have the energy to take herself out of misery.

She reflected on the dementia that had affected so many members of her family. Maybe that was the way to grow younger. One's mental faculties start regressing until one can no longer be responsible for oneself. One ceases to be strong and is seeing with pity. Someone will make the choices for you now and will carry the burden of such choices. 

Why people die (or kill)

She had the impression of having understood why people die.

It was the same way of why they kill.

There is that fleeting moment in which you hold life in your hands. It's so fragile!

An idea crosses your mind that you could end it right there. No matter if it's yours or someone else's, but something stops you from doing it.

That is, until that pain that inebriates the mind takes over and all you want is for life to go away.

That's how you crush the little chick in your hands, or the dreams that are agonizing in face of the impossibilities. 

And there goes your soul, forever hopeless.

Near-death experience (NDE)

"A near-death experience (NDE) is a personal experience associated with death or impending death. When positive, such experiences may encompass a variety of sensations including detachment from the body, feelings of levitation, total serenity, security, warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, and the presence of a light. When negative, such experiences may include sensations of anguish and distress.^[1] NDEs are a recognized part of some transcendental and religious beliefs in an afterlife.^[1][2][3][4]

Different models have been described to explain NDEs.^[5] Neuroscience research suggests that an NDE is a subjective phenomenon resulting from "disturbed bodily multisensory integration" that occurs during life-threatening events.^{[6]" . Wikipedia}

She, like everyone else, was always intrigued and fascinated by the anecdotes of near-death experiences. The bright light, the tunnel, the peace and the sudden return to life.

Her life today was like a very slow-motion NDE. She lived looking at herself from the outside of her body, the world moving around her unresponsive body, reduced to mere reflexes to social stimuli. No intent in her actions. She watched the living world in a jail-like box seat in the life's theater that was featuring this long running show that she had no part in it.

What she felt today was a kind of perverted NDE. While most accounts of NDEs show this smooth pilgrimage-like stroll towards the light, finishing with a sudden thrust back into corporeal life, her life now was different. She'd been suddenly thrust into the after-life where she was now trapped.  She had known about some negatives accounts of NDEs involving anguish and despair, but they all finished with a resolution. She was now dragging herself in a suspended state of despair that saw no end. It seems to her that others recounts of NDE felt they were still "alive" inside of a lifeless body, her sensations were clearly showing someone dead that felt trapped in a living body.

Hers was not a near-death experience. It was an all-around-death experience. There was no light. No serene stroll, no reassurances and she felt the certainty of death every single moment of her so-called life.

If I do all you ask of me, will you let me die?

As I sit here in the darkness of the noisy bus

The huge stars in the vast sky weigh on my head. 

There is another person screaming 

in the solitary confinement of my soul 

begging to be set free. 

It’s myself trying to escape through the tears. 

But just tears are so narrow for my pain to go through.

I’m banging on the walls of my sanity:

let me go, let me go!

Close your eyes near me so you can see it. 

Hold my hand and the screams will be deafening. 

If I do all you ask of me, will you let me die?

Dec 8, 2018

How to start a story

"...Quem sofre fica acordado

defendendo o coração." 

Thiago de Mello

She thought about writing the story of her daughter's life.

It would have to start with Clair de Lune, by Debussy. It was her daughter's favorite.
It was pretty like her, profound, full of mystery and beauty, energy and despair, intensity and resignation, but above all, with awe for life, the universe and all its possibilities.

Awe was what had filled her when she came home from the hospital with her little princess. She was so complete, so perfect. Her heart was full of happiness and energy, that felt like trapped in her chest, almost out of air in admiration the beautiful present that she was given by nature to be able to mother such perfect being.

She remembers she holding her daughter embraced by her husband and all of them surrounded by such warm love that it was as if the universe had stood still watching them.

Intense was her daughter's life. So short, but so intense. So large was the void when she left. In her grief she though she would never be able to write anything. No amount of words would do justice to describe what was having a child like her. It was as if finding the right words would mean confining her daughter's life to the limits of this word, showing her the true extent of her tragedy, her pain, the finality of everything. Her daughter was made of stardust,, she thought. She made herself believe that her daughter's pain was over now, but her life now was free from her body's jail. She had to believe in something to survive.

She wasn't sure why she needed to survive. "You need to survive!" That's what she kept hearing.  She didn't have strength to fight.

Nights were dreaded. The indigenous people of her homeland were right. Bad spirits can haunt you at night if you fall asleep. They sure did. Her nights were tormented with nightmares where painful reality couldn't be forgotten.

Cosmic Time

She thought the abortion, euthanasia, pro-life, pro choice discussion was all too stupid. In the great scheme of things, death and life are all part of the same thing. All complex events altering long chains of carbon molecules along a timeline.                                                                                          

Longing for a life that would be was meaningless, because in cosmic time, each individual existence contributes a neglectable amount of energy into the whole universe. In the way she saw it, no matter the lifespan, the achievements, the impact in other lives, when compared to the 14 billions or so of the universe, they were all and the same practically zero. species can go extinct in the blink of an eye and something else takes its place while the universe and everything doesn't take notice.

The universe goes on expanding itself, stars exploding with all nuclear reactions, black holes swallowing everything, light might get distorted, black matter continues to fill the space, dark energy, and so many more mysteries won't cease to exist, whether  anyone is conscious of it or not.

Even what we call matter really doesn't matter when you consider the size of the universe that keeps expanding. a bunch of nothing that keeps expanding. It's like the absence of her children. Each day expanding and taking up space inside of her.

She is becoming this immense void of life, feelings, reason that somehow is still mutating, the void expanding. She is getting thinner, transparent. she looks at herself in the mirror and she almost can see through herself.

That's what we all are. Stardust specs, infinitely small representations of the whole universe devoid of individual meaning.                                            

CPR

She called her daughter and the silence was deeper than usual.
She started banging on the door and the silence was deafening
She asked for her husband to help opening the locked door.

As they scramble to look for tools to break the lock, her heart was pounding in pain.

She heard her husband screaming:"oh, my God!"

She rushed into the room and started screaming, asked him to remove the belt from around her neck. As they started CPR and he called emergency, she heard a breath of life leaving her daughter's body.

30 chest compressions, unblock the airways, ventilation through her mouth. Every second counting.

The emergency crew arrived and started pouring on the front door. As her husband continued the chest compressions she went to open the door, and from that moment on she was not allowed back into her daughter's room.

The seconds now became minutes and minutes converted into long hours of pain, screams, tears and wailing.

As the hours became days and the days are becoming months, they miss her even more and the void gets bigger and bigger.