follow it into the sun.
my hands are colored with ink and leftover paint from trying to purge and failing miserably at what i've already only half digested.
i was raised with death as only a fear, and it only happened to hamsters, buried haphazardly behind the garage in ziploc bags, popsicle stick markers. i was safe from anything, falling asleep to soft waves of sound from the television every night. i still can't sleep with silence. i remember making my parents put my aquarium in front of the window, because i was petrified of kidnappers. it wasn't death, but being taken away from everything that i knew that put a chill through my tiny body. there was not a single validation to my fear beyond sunday night made-for-tv movies and unmarked white vans.
when i learned that death really happened to people, i was thirteen years old at a funeral for the kid next door. i had baby-sat for him and his brother all summer, eight hours a day. nothing indicated sickness to me, nothing told me that something was wrong. i later realized what "blood disorders" and "adhd" and "medication" actually were to adults, signals ... small bits of morse code thrown into conversations to keep their children from truly understanding that bodies don't ever work right. disassembling semantics and early evenings in front of rows of encyclopedias taught me the truth. i had to fit the pieces together myself once i knew that no one would ever tell me what was going to happen.
i learned about hypochondria and how to acceptably fear and cower in the face of death and how little we can control.
to have to see a casket, pint-sized, for the first time, his face badly proportioned from steroids, his favorite model rocketship laying under his still hand. to go to school that afternoon with information battering my immature brain, visions of balloons dancing through the air, and red puffy eyes. it does something to you, something you're never going to comprehend. because sifting through my locker, all i could say to my best friend was, "i want balloons at my funeral."
that was the first day that i truly understood the sorts and types and whisps of things that might have transpired when her sister had died. i hadn't really been able to imagine. it was just a fact about her, like where she was born or what her favorite food was. that day, all i could think was that everyone should have balloons at their funeral, big bright ones with curly ribbons ... set free right as they're buried, given to air as they are, popping in the sunshine or fading into white.
i never knew that children could die anywhere but before commercials.
