It is indeed the end of the world

It was the first time I had fallen asleep after my dad died. Right before I woke up there was this split second when you can't remember much and you don't know where you are. And then everything came to me, like a concrete plank. The world I was waking up to had changed for the rest of eternity: it was going to be emptier, it was going to be limping, for ever. I told someone that I hadn't been aware of how perfect my life had been until then. The truth was it hadn't been perfect at all; it was just that from then on it was going to be worse. Just that. The someone told me 'and you're not aware how perfect your life is now' and since that day, sometimes I've managed to believe he was right.

Today the concrete plank fell on me again after that liminal split second. There was no funeral to go this time, so I fed my cat, made a coffee and sat outside. The sun made me frown and the people walking carelessly down the street scratched me like only indifference can scratch the heart of an orphan. 

I believe that in order to live we humans need to have at least something we can take for granted. I should take me for granted: no matter the uncertainty, no matter how heavy the plank is, I'll be there, I'll still breathe. The problem is I can't find myself today, so heavy was the plank that I'm buried beneath. I'm under the ground actually as I'm writing this, next to my father.

If I were Sylvia Plath, I'd stare at the worms and see all the life that lies here too, in the deep soil. But I'm not her and don't want to be. Today I'm gouging out my poet's eyes and leaving them in the bedside table. If I could just disconnect all the sensors, all my receptors of pain and beauty, just for today... But the thing goes that if I miss today, I miss tomorrow as well. That's how this shitty game is.

So because there might be a tomorrow where I might think again that what the someone told me was right, I have to go through the pain of today. All for the promise of a better tomorrow. Until another plank smashes me again and so on and so on until one day I'm so achy that I don't care anymore about the promise of tomorrow and make peace with the fact that what has been has been enough. 

When I asked my dad when the end of the world would be he used to tell me 'the day one dies'. Well, it might have applied to him, but not to me. It is indeed the end of the world now and here I am, still breathing.