Yesterday Is No More

You never know the whens and ifs of meeting someone again. 

The supernatural has a mystifying way of dislodging our schedules, hijacking valuable human connections. 

The tendency is to picturesquely frame youth as unconquerable, staging our bodies and our minds as though we are immortal. Death does not have its prejudices. Anyone who has intimately confronted loss will painstakingly confess that life's cousin is far from sexist or racist, let alone ageist. Negating Darwin's theory. It's process of selection is random. Without philosophical logic or scientific deduction. A thief by all means, it grants little satisfaction to those it steals from and leaves forsaken in the wake of its earthly destruction. 

Waiting beyond its door, a box of opened letters, unanswered, ink run dry.

When asked, the explanation might be simple. Yet, for those victimized by its reasoning, it would never be easy to swallow no matter how sophisticated the decorum. 

For those armoured in the ground war, there is never a cut clean rationale to any of it. The uniform: black attire. The wailing that pleads. The eulogy that can never possess enough details to encapsulate the entirety of a lived life. The salty tears against the four elements. The handshakes plagued by the anxiety in each grip. The perpetual prayers demanding a re-take, a directors cut of alternative endings. 

I will wake up tomorrow in a world without you. What a thought to have running, to have reeling. Forever motionless. Recounting the scenarios, I stare blankly at the popcorn ceiling. To imagine how it is that those who are close to you will continue to labour, love and soldier on is deadening to the senses. The moments continue to pace on, the palms of my two hands oscillate on the ruffled bedsheets. I certify that the memories will grow dim. Time folds in, most mis-recollect. Calendars label days, fingertips flip through months. Somehow, tomorrow and the days proceeding it are different from yesterday. 

Yesterday promised the whats, the ifs. Yesterday, the actors in this drama drudged through the script that regulated their (e)motions without reading ahead. No notion of its written ending, just promise of a timely reconnection. 

But today we fall victim to erasure. Yesterday is no more as we anticipate the future. 

Tomorrow solicits a greater crime. It disintegrates the physical. Blurs the memorable. Deadens the audible. Little by little, the world I once knew, one populated by the physicality of your body and the spirituality of your soul in the everyday, transcends into fiction. 

...You never know the whats and ifs of meeting someone again. 

The world promises only a limited time offer. The supernatural places its hands on the controls, stamping an expiry date on each of our fated outcomes. 

Wherever it is you now come to exist, I am versed in its promises; a rekindling of experiences, a reawakening of thought and intimacies, and a renewal of connection. 

Death reminds us that in a second, life as we know it, can change. It is a hand that forces each of us to have a face-to-face encounter with our own mortality. Coming to terms with the fact that we, the living, can be quickly separated by the limitations of our skin.

Tomorrow, when the sun warms my closed eyes, I will remember that time spans a short space. I will tell those who inhabit my circle that I love them. I will reach out to hug those who sustain me. Never once forgetting that one day, yesterday will be no more. 

Dedicated to the memory of someone who I knew yesterday and remember today. R.I.P Troy Dixon.