Death (Not a true story)

I used to think about it all the time. Not because I was unhappy – because at that time, I wasn’t – but because it seemed like something from a fairytale, something far away that no-one knew about or understood. When you’re young, five years old, such mystery is irresistible. At least it was for me. I used to lie on my bed or under the clouds, stare at the sky and think, what would it feel like? Where would I go?

No-one ever seemed to know. And no-one ever seemed keen enough to want to find out, either.
I used to plan it out, too, my own death. I wasn’t morbid – I wouldn’t put it that way – but when you’re childish, and bored, and sheltered and cosseted and distanced from pain: it’s natural, to think curiously about things you have no experience of. It’s like how sometimes, rich people feel the strange need to prod into the lives of poor people, just to see what it would feel like not to have hot food to eat and a bed to sleep in for a night. Death wasn’t scary to me back then: nothing was, ghost-stories and the like aside: and death was different to ghost-stories, because death was real in the way that LEGO and PlayStation were real, and therefore made sense somehow.

I used to envision myself as some great knight, riding forth on a white stallion with sword and shield, vanquished at long last by a fire-breathing dragon after an epic battle; or perhaps a great explorer setting off to charter new worlds, standing at the prow of a tall ship and vowing never to desert, even as the waves roiled summit-high and the lightning flashed. Those were my light-headed, empty-minded dreams of childish heroism, where death was not really death but a way of penning one’s name into the legend books. Painless, easy, guaranteed. My name would be remembered forever.
All those elaborate plans – all those days of dreaming, warm and loved, viewing death through a haze of intrigue and glory and romance. Perhaps I’d watched too much TV. I guess I’ll never know.

Death became real. Real in the way that PlayStation never could be. No longer far away – oh no, Death came so close that I could picture it every morning when I woke up, burning like smoke behind my eyelids. No grand heroism for some: just a white cross, and plastic roses because you couldn’t afford real ones every day. A tiny square in the ground, like so many others, the person that had been so alive and their smile so vivid now a fistful of grey ash, indistinguishable to the dust my Mother vacuumed off the carpets every week.
Death.

I suppose that was what really brought me down from the clouds, changed me. It was as if I’d never been the wide-eyed boy lying on his back on the front lawn, staring at the skies and wondering at Heaven. Just one year, and it felt a lifetime away.
I wondered for a long time after that. I wondered and I fell apart. Your life was splitting at the seams and you couldn’t, no matter how hard you tried, seem to be able to hold it together. It was like diving: once you take that step off the block, you fall, and nothing can stop you until you hit the water. Only with me, I hadn’t taken a step off anything. My parents had made the decision without me, and pitched me off the blocks all the same. I don’t blame them – they tried, in their own way, to give me what they couldn’t have – but I suppose they fell short of it, failed themselves more than they failed me.

well.... ok then.....

i got bored

That's the longest, most randomest post I've seen in a long time....

Did you make it up?

WOW that is really RANDOM i like it i like random

a very long post. so long i didnt even bother to read it 'cos it was so long