No Title Yet

[Jnusch]

Woesh woesh woesh!

[Jnusch]

When you do not just have one, but several lifetimes worth of memories, it gets harder and harder to remember each and every person you meet properly. Faces and names blend and blur together until only those few special people remain visible, the people who leave a lasting impression. Like Layla, who never shed a single tear throughout all her sickbed. Not when she was told she had cancer and that she would lose her gorgeous, lustrous blonde locks. Not when she met me – the messenger, or when she was finally told the chemo was not doing what it should do and that she would not survive. Not when she then realised only the kids who were not going to make it ever met a messenger. She never cried and I admired her greatly for that, making it all the more painful when she confided in me in the end, telling me, as I was taking her to her final destination, that she had never allowed herself to cry because of the people she loved. All that time, when other messengers had kept saying how lucky I was, getting someone who did not cry for hours on end, she was in reality just as sad as the cry babies. It was her mom and dad and her baby sister and all the other kids in her ward that had stopped her from letting the floods loose. Every time she saw her sisters hair, so much like that which she had been forced to shave off after only two chemo’s, made her want to break down to the floor and sob like a baby. The moist that never seemed to leave her parents eyes was enough to make her whimper inside. It was only when she was sure that they would never see, never be affected by her emotions that she showed them. It was one of the saddest moments of my life, and of my afterlife. That sure means something; I lived through a lot of sad moments, but more on those later.
Sadness, it is something all too familiar to us. Us being the messengers. You see, only special people get messengers and quite contrary to popular belief, special people are usually extremely tragic. Messengers all were special people once. That is why the average age for messengers is so young; the older you are when you die, the less special you are. Most of us are in their early twenties or below, the youngest being four years old. Kids under four do not get the chance to be like me, they just go straight on to the after life, which is for the better in my opinion.
Some days I regret accepting this “offer”. Taking the chance to remain attached to my old life, to the mortal world, a little longer seemed tempting, it was tempting, but it is nothing like what Life for me was like. In no way does it make up for dying. And I really hope that it does in no way wage up to what Afterlife is like, I hope for that very much. If not, I am not sure I could bear it, but I assume that is impossible, for Heaven is said to be perfect right?
From the bits and pieces people have told me, Heaven is supposed to be pretty great. Nothing like the angelic, cloudy place children keep inquiring about, but pretty great nonetheless. Heaven is the place where there is no more worrying. When all the earthly tears have been shed and forgotten, you go to a place where you can just rest and be happy. As soon as you die, they make you walk through this white hall. You can see the Waiting Room from this hall. That is where they put you until they are ready to deal with you, until you are really, officially and irrevocably dead, it is also where you first hear that you are special and thus selected and given the chance to procrastinate your departure. I'm not completely sure what happens to the people who are not selected from that point on. I guess they just do not get told they are special, but they must put them in a different part of the WR, because I never saw anyone who was not special there. For me and the other “special people” it was, still is, either procrastination or immediate relief, as they call it. Becoming a messenger or declining and just going straight on to what is supposed to be the best place you could ever be. By that time, upon leaving the hall already, you have no recollection of your old life any more. All memories are gone, lost forever. They store them some place, but I doubt anyone ever looks at them twice after they are put away there. There is no real need to, no one who might be in your memories and dead like you remembers you or them and the people who are still alive are not aware of the fact that they are there, so they never come looking either. The people in charge of storing them must be the people who never truly find a way to leave behind life. The sentimental people presumably.
From the hall, you can see into the Waiting Room. So when you die, but come back to life, sometimes you see the Waiting Room in the distance. The people, waving for you to come over. You call it a near death experience, we call it an accident. You are not supposed to see the Waiting Room or even the hall at all, when you are not surely going to die. Fortunately, nothing harmful has ever come from those people. They are special anyway, only special people can almost die but not quite. Or maybe it is almost dying that creates the special people. Regular people just die, they never have a choice and they never learn that things could have been different. How easy that must be.
Anyway, Heaven, it is the place of forgetting. When you walk into the nothingness of that hall, you actually go through genuine nothingness. All the fears and frustrations and all the memories you had are washed away. It is a sort of cleansing, getting rid of anything that might spoil the mood in the place at the end of the hall. You don't remember your family or friends and that is what makes death easy, there is no one you might long for.
That is also exactly what many, if not most, messengers find a frightful thought – forgetting everything. It is stupid really, because you have already forgotten all about your life when you walked the white hall, so forgetting is not unfamiliar to us, but realising that you are going to forget is quite scary. It is like dying anew, without having a clue whether you are going to like what comes next. We are not allowed to tell our protégés that when they die they will not remember their life as it is was. I like that rule, it saves people who are going through enough already a lot of pain. Otherwise they would just have to endure double agony, once for dying and once for knowing what it will be like, for knowing that anything you leave behind – the things they value so highly – will become meaningless.
Of hell I barely know a thing; supposedly, it is the place where you spend all your time waiting, in vain. In my imagination, it is colossal, a place where you would never find the person you are looking for, even if they came there at all. But obviously they never do come, they never come anywhere near where you are anyway. And that is what hell is said to be like, the opposite of heaven. Ignorance is bliss, it is true. When you can go to heaven, you may forget everything, so that there is only the future to look forward to, and when you go to hell, you will surely remember, always looking back at what once was but never will be again.

[Jnusch]

They called me a fighter. Fighters are the people who hang on to life until their very last breath is knocked out of them, who holds on with fists clenched tightly, arguing with death until it just tears the life away from them. Obviously, I only heard this later on, when I had already forgotten everything about my life and honestly, it did not make it any easier. Of course there was nothing for me to miss, but knowing I refused to let go for so long made me wonder what the live I had hung unto so desperately could have been like. I will never know, so in the end I just put that wonder in a safe corner of my mind, where I did not have to think about it to much. It works, more or less.
Myself, I see fighters every day. Most of the kids I meet are fighters, exactly because they are kids. It is only at the very end that some of them resign and accept their fate, usually around the time they realise what I have come to do. That is not always pleasant, being the messenger of death, but you get a lot in return, so you won't hear me complain.
Still it is hard. Months and months on end of fighting, even years for some of the kids, months of trying to fend off death, and the minute I get to witness it, I know this person's struggle is useless. That is true agony and the fifty years I signed up for make a long time, much longer than it seemed back when I signed my contract. Glad, that is what I will be when I finally finish. Sad too, but hopefully by that time I will have made peace in my mind with the thought of loosing all the memories I have of these kids. All these boys and girls, none older than twenty, kids I get to know and tell they are dying and then when I go on, there will be no one left to remember, not in this world. Or at least, there will be memories to look at, but no one to look at them.
I could have done worse, too, I am well aware of that. But let me explain a little bit about messaging to you first. Dead people, or their souls or whatever you like to call the part of them that is left when they die, are the messages. There are different types of messages, all carried by different kinds of messengers. Generally, we group them in five different categories; sickies, crazies, suicides, accidents and elderlies. Elderlies are widely considered as the easiest group, these are the old folks whose time has naturally come. No drama there, they mostly accept death gracefully. Their messengers are often former old people too, the special old people, they like to hang out with people they can relate too, exchange stories about their lives and all. Sounds incredibly boring to most of us, but they love it. Old people messengers' contracts last only five years, which is pretty short compared to the other categories, but that is because there are always loads of old people dying. So many in fact, that there are always more than enough of them who are capable of and willing to become a messenger.
Accidents, like myself, are supposedly easy too. We die in crashes and fires and other stupid incidents and in ninety percent of the cases, we go quickly. That all makes it pretty easy on the messenger, all they have to do is show up as soon as you have died and send you in the right direction. Most victims do not even regain consciousness, so they do not really get to know their messenger. There is simply no time, when all that needs to be done is for the messenger to grab your hand and drop you off at the gate. Precisely because it is so easy, accident messengers sign for twenty five years. To me, the boredom barely seems bearable.
Suicides and crazies are both difficult. Suicides because they are so unpredictable, they are given a messenger the moment they first attempt to fly themselves to the Elysian Plains. From then onwards, until the moment they die, their messenger stays with them. The part of the contracts which is supposed to mention how long a contract is binding just states “indefinite”. That made me decide not to go for that category. The thought of spending someone's lifetime with them, when really for most of it they are perfectly healthy did not sound very appealing. Crazies I did not even think about for a second, fortunately. They are... well, really special, if you know what I mean. They are so different, the workings of being their messenger are so intricate and restricted by rules I did not even bother to contemplate the idea. From what I have heard from the people who guide a crazy, it is really, really exhaustive and more often than not quite unpleasant. That is all I really need to know.
Obviously, these messengers only work on one suicide or crazy, that is the limit. A whole lifetime is long and I doubt any of them would want to continue working even if they did get the chance. Some of them choose to do Accidents or Elderlies afterwards for some time, that is allowed as an alternative to immediate departure. I believe those who do that are the people who have a really hard time letting go of the mortal world, even if they have not been an actual part of it for decades and even though they have no personal recollection of what their world and their life was like. It is a silly though, I know, but sometimes I wonder what their lives were like. Maybe they secretly long for a life that was absolutely horrible, who knows?
Then, last but most definitely not least, we have my field of expertise: the sickies. Sickies are, as the name suggests, patients with a lethal conditions. Men and women who are ill, terminally ill. In my case, boys and girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty. The sickies have been subdivided into groups according to age, and then again in even more specific age groups. So we've got kids, adults and aged people. When you are a kid, you can be in any of three groups; kids from five up to ten, teens between eleven and fifteen and teens and young adults aged sixteen to twenty. When they move up from that group, or I should say, when they are just older than twenty when they become ill, they go to the adults group. Kids who fall ill in their late teens do not suddenly get allotted a new messenger, it is strictly one messenger per person.

[Jnusch]

In a couple of months I will have been doing this for twenty-two years, a long time, but a long time ahead of me still. The thought of having been gone for twenty-two years freaks me out. I wonder if any of my friends and relatives have died, I any were even alive when I died. Maybe I had been an only child and orphan, a loser with no friends, there are so many countless possibilities. I might have been a rock-goddess, or a treehugger, maybe I was promiscuous, or extremely chaste. There is no way of knowing. Only the people who I left behind to mourn me still remember how old I was, what I was called. And when they die, along with the people who they passed this knowledge onto, then I will be truly gone. It will once again be as if I never did exist. What marks did I leave? What did I do that might be remembered long into ages yet to come? What was my use, or was there no use for me? Was that why it was OK for me to die so young – I do know for sure that I was young, because in my current shape I am young and they are pretty clear on that subject. You die and come here as an exact replica, a copy or a clone, of what you were. In fact, you do not really come here as anything but yourself, the self you were and still are. Only you are being yourself somewhere else. When I think about that, about why my self was not necessary, not a fundamental part of the living world, at first all it does is kill my usually good mood. Then when I ponder some more, the thought always inevitably strikes me that maybe there is no use for any of us. What do any of us really leave behind that has any value to anyone but ourselves? We do nothing to sustain the earth, or help out animals. All we do is kill and eat and destroy and annihilate and eradicate and consume, regardless of the consequences for anyone but us. Preferably, that us includes only one person. Yes, I have come to find human beings are quite selfish. Seemingly a lot more selfish than other animals, but I have never studied the subject, nor found the willingness or time to do so, so likely my theory, in as much as I have one, is not flawless.
Hanging out with dying teens day in day out is like an emotional drain. Even the ones that aren't sick very long, they still get to you. Sometimes that sucks, other times I just feel so incredibly gifted, getting to see those kids, how strong they are, it gives me strength to keep doing this. Like i said, some of them, I will always cherish. It is a crying shame that I will probably never get the chance to see them again. Even if I would, they would not remember me and it would only be painful for them. For me too, because they would not remember me. But it is better that way. When you move on, you should really move on, letting the past rest and facing the future in all its eternal glory and splendour. Thinking of your messenger is a senseless thing to do, it does no one any good. That is what we are told and in time I have learned that this is probably something actually that is actually true.
So I keep doing this. Not just because of the youngsters I help of course, my contract is binding, even if I found a way to pass on, I would just be stopped by the guards. Even when you die, there is still responsibility to live up to, expectations. When you say you are going to do something, you do it. thankfully, giving up has never been my style anyway. That does not make it any less difficult to deal with though. At times, especially when someone you really wished could live, dies, it seems nice just to stop doing all of it.
Rex was one of those people I really, really, really did not want to die. A seventeen year old boy dealing with leukaemia. But what power soared through him! Such strength, such courage, such a will to live. If I hadn't been dead already, the knowledge that however hard he fought, he would still die, would have killed me. He never gave up, even though he found out quite soon after I came to him what my role in all of it was. He decided just not to take no for an answer. Like Layla, he never showed anyone his tears. But he cried. Oh, how he cried. At first only at night, sometimes, when he had had a particularly rough day. Most days he could do anything he wanted – and he definitely would – but the bad days broke him down. A boy with that much spirit is not meant to be caged by incapability. He hated sleeping, he called it a waste of time, the way young children see it, when they do not want to go to bed. Only for him, it actually was a waste of time, of the little time he had left. He resented his body for not cooperating with his mind. His thoughts were always ten paces ahead of mine, they flew all across the world and beyond, to places no one had ever though about before. When he tried to explain how fast his mind would roam the earth, he concluded that his mind was making up for all the time his body would not have. His mind had to work at ten times the speed of a regular brain, because he had to fill the life-quota he had been given. I liked that and he like that too. Every kid has a way of dealing with the fact that they do not get to live a full life. His way of dealing with it was by just living his life inside his head.
On the days he was feeling well, he would force his body to keep up with his head. As sick as he was, he never left the hospital any more, but the hospital proved to be a perfect place to live a life if necessary. Rex never saw the hospital as a prison, but as just another place of adventures. In the three months I knew him, he did a lot of things most people only ever dream of. The most memorable of which was the film he made , together with some of the other kids who were permanently staying at the hospital. It was completely nonsensical, but the joy it brought them moved all of us, parents and messengers and personnel, to the cores of our hearts. It goes without saying that it was Rex who stole the show, who gave the performance of his life in the role of the courageous and chivalrous prince, on his mission to rescue the princess. Layla played the role of princess, with a mob replacing her hair. That had been Rex' idea and if anyone ever knew how to hype people up about something, it was him. No princess in past, present or future will ever match Princess Layla's grace and dignity. No one will ever wear a mob for a wig so elegantly again.
The idea had been that Prince Charming, as Rex had so aptly named his character, and Princess Layla would live happily ever after, but unfortunately the evil wizard of Leukimeland interfered. Before shooting had finished, he passed away on a Thursday afternoon, in the company of his closest friends and all his family, and Layla, whom he had grown very fond of. Rex told me, just before he entered the white hall, that he did not mind too much that he had not lived to see his film première. He had not made it for himself anyway, but for the people he left behind.

[Jnusch]

We are given no time to mourn our protégés. There simply is no time. Souls cannot be made to wait, they just show up and demand to be guided. There is no order to it. We have no say in who lives or who dies, life just comes and goes as it pleases, oblivious to who gets hurt. It has always been like that and I presume it will always be like that.
I got no time to mourn Rex, a boy who will always hold a special place in my heart, for there was someone new to help. That someone new who required me to ease their passing into the netherworld was Layla. Of course she did not know me, but I felt grateful for getting to help her. Such things were almost never done and I still believe that Rex had something to do with it, even though I know that it is impossible for him to have had any saying in it.
Layla and I never became as close as Rex and I. His death affected her deeply and she did not want for me to be her friend. Losing him and her family was enough, all she wanted me to do was help her in whatever way I could. I did. That and nothing more. I never insisted. I admired her for the courage she showed in her own way, by never crying, but I did not feel the warmth for her that I had felt for Rex. In a way I regretted that, because when I realised I was going to be her messenger, I had hoped it would be a way to cherish a part of Rex' life. There was nothing for me to do other than accepting it though, so I did. Maybe the reason I remember her just as clearly as I do Rex is that she was so important to him, during the time I knew him. She was special to him, so she became special to me.
Layla was the one who insisted on finishing the epic project Rex had had in mind. When the Prince died, the beautiful Princess chose to live in solitude, grieving all by herself, somewhere the world could not see. Without Rex, Layla refused to wear the mob for a wig, while at the same time not wanting to appear on screen in her current bald state. It suspect it was Rex she really did not want to be seen without. Though she must have been aware of her beauty, she probably also felt that it was Rex who made her shine. So the Princess was seen no more by her faithful subjects, until they found her dead one day. An eerie sight, to see someone who was quite likely terminally ill take on the role of the deceased. The tears glistening on her cheeks – the only time she ever broke the promise she made herself – only made the scene all the more surreal. The citizens concluded must have suffered from a severe case of broken-heartedness, which eventually led to her tragic death. Naturally, they saw the sunny side of things too, noting that she would at last be reunited with her beloved Prince Charming.
In the end, it was quite clear at what point in the film the Prince had so inconveniently died – everything was shot in chronological order – the mood changed after that. Where before his untimely death, the message had been to embrace life and live it to the fullest – Rex' motto – the Princess' retiring made it a dark piece of work, gloomy. Brilliant still, in a way, but not quite the same as what Rex had had in mind.
When the Princess retreated from the public eye, her people cried. She cried too, and all this sadness was too much for the Gods, or nature, or whatever rules the earth, to bear, so time stood still. The Princess, the only person untouched by this strange spell, found out, she was so shocked, she stumbled and fell from an opened window of her tower - dead. (This was something that would have pleased Rex quite a lot, it was something he could have come up with). As soon as the lovely Princess died, the people came back to life again, time continued once more and everyone could go on with their lives.
Her message, Layla's, seemed to have been that mourning does no good, that it only keeps one from living their lives. Grieving too much and too long makes it seem as if that is all there is to life, until in the end time stands still and it is really all there is, and all you feel is loss. Rex most definitely did not fall for just anyone. Both him and Layla had a keen eye for the beauty the world has to offer and both had a way with converting it so that anyone could see. It is a damn shame that such people, such special people, should die so young. I will not go so far as to claim that only the good die young, but if God, or Gods, exist, I think they are jealous of us. They are jealous, so when they find out one of the creatures they have created is more brilliant, more splendid, more magnificent than the rest, they take him or her back immediately, so that only they can enjoy the pleasure of having it around. They are greedy, I think.
Layla died less than two months after Rex. She barely had time to finish the film, partially due to her own perfectionism. An iron will and dedicated actors who worked their asses of so that at least one of the main characters would live to see the film in its complete and final state, did the job though. I am not sure what Rex would have thought of the result, but Layla was pleased. She liked it and at least he would have liked that. He would have liked how it became their co-production more than how his message was slightly altered. The eventual message was still a good one, even if it was not what he had started out with, I think he would have approved.
For some time, the film, lasting about twenty minutes in total, became a YouTube hype. Their fame was short-lived however, non-lived in a way, as both actors were already dead.

[Jnusch]

That was one of the many stories I have witnessed. Not all were as inspiring, or nice to recount I should say, as this one, most were not. It is sorry to have to admit it, but most kids die in a really boring and dull way. Excruciatingly dull. Not because they themselves are, but because they are sick. I did not go into detail about Rex and Layla, but they were "boring" too, just before they died. Too sick to get up, too tired to talk. Too finished with life to care.
I feel Rex has become a messenger, like me. There is no evidence, non that I saw anyway, to suggest it, but I am pretty sure. He liked the idea when he met me, and though all memories go away, you never become a different person. You always stay the same you, just in another place and without your old memories. He may well have gone on to help some more people in need of a hand. That was what he was like, he did not live for himself, he lived for others. His goal was not to seize the day really, it was to help others seize it. Though I will never get certitude, the thought of him not just crossing over to indifference right away is soothing.

[Jnusch]

I only ever befriended one messenger here, before I learnt my lesson. Messengers do not really become friends with each other, not only because our protégés take up a lot of time, it just is not the normal thing to do. We are constantly moving about, spending only a couple of months at one place – sickies-messengers, that is. That proves to be a difficult environment for cultivating frendships. Another, bigger, problem, is that from one day to the next, messengers may be gone, due to various reasons. Their contracts running out is the most prominent and most probable cause.
Ava was one of those people who know a thing or two about the way things work, but could not care less. She was very much aware of how messengers just suddenly disappear when their time runs out, but she chose to ignore that, to just go on the way she wanted to. This she told me with a smile on her face, as if it was not something sad she was talking about. Her smile was ever-present anyway, she was one of the most genuinely happy persons I have ever met, both dead and alive. Ava  could always discover good in the world, I never saw her sad. When I thought about that later, when she had been gone for quite a while, it occurred to me that it always took her some time to find me after one of her protégés died. Only then did I add up one and one and saw that the time she took for herself was probably the time she allowed herself to be down for a bit. Otherwise, she was always smiley pleasantly.
Befriending new messengers, especially – solely, really – those guiding sickies, was what she loved to do. Only if she thought she would like them, she assured me, when I admitted that made me feel like she did not care who she became friends with. Helping people was what she did best, she claimed, it was what she was born, and then had died, to do. As if just being a messenger was not enough, I had exclaimed. This had just earned me one of her smiles, in it I could see clearly that in her opinion I did not understand or try to understand, but that it was OK, because no one can understand everything. Only God. It has always struck me as funny that one can believe in a God when no one ever mentions him around here. Ava would just say that I probably was not religious during my lifetime either, the same way she believed she had been a person of faith during hers. Either way, it did not matter, we did not spend our time arguing about that. What little time we had to just sit and talk, we talked mainly about the boys and girls – or men and women in her case - we helped. Often I regret not being able to let her in on my time with Rex. Rex reminded me so much of her, it is such a shame they never got the chance to meet. Ava would have loved Rex, and he her. He died years and years after she moved on to the next stage. Just as life can be lonesome sometimes, death can be too, even when you are caring for someone else. Especially when you are caring for someone else. When it is that someone else you are worried about, there is no one you can tell, because you can't tell them. You are not supposed to do that, it is about them, not you. You have had your time. Or well, me being the accident I was, it goes without saying that I never had a my time, but then again, I never was in need of any special me time.
My first and last friendship here was a good one and I was lucky enough to be able to spend almost eight years with Ava. In those years, she taught me many things about how best to deal with different children – she too had chosen the age group of sixteen to twenty. Every now and then, she told me one of her stories. Sometimes they made me smile, other times cry, but always I found something useful in them. Besides being incredibly gifted at making people feel good, she was also a grand storyteller and mentor. Forgetting her I deeply regret too.
The reason I did not, like her, go on making friends, was the way she left me behind. Some say it is most painful when friends vanish in the midst of a conversation, while others object that messengers can feel their time coming, at least when it is really close, so that whereas they cannot take all the time in the world for goodbyes, they can still warn the person, the friend or acquaintance, they are talking to. I fear that I have to agree with them. Yes, it is painful to lose someone so suddenly during a bit of small talk. But how painful is it when that person, that close and dear friend, just never shows up again? Never comes round anymore for that bit of small talk you became so accustomed to? When you do not get to say goodbye at all? And then one day, when it has simply been to long to be anything else, you realise that they have crossed over definitely. That it is not that they do not have the time to come see you, and not that they do not like you any longer, they ... are no longer able to come over. They not only would not know how to get to you, they do not know you. They are building up a new life and there is no you in that new life.
Then again, what is a goodbye when all the person who is leaving can say that is has been splendid? Saying they will never forget you, or that you hold a special place in their heart, that would be a lie after all.
Personally, I only want for Ava to be happy wherever she has gone. Knowing her, or the way she was when she was here, she is. She Ava could be happy anywhere, with anyone. It sucks she cannot be happy here, is not allowed to be happy here, as my friend, but that is the way the cookie crumbles and there is just no stopping it from crumbling. Sudden departures are only a part of that. Possibly it is this way to keep us focussed on our goal: to make departure less sudden for other people. You die when the right conditions have been met, when everything is in place, the way it was prophesied to be for you. The same goes for the final crossover, it happens when the world senses the conditions are ideal.
Most of us only take one or two friendships to learn it is best to be nothing more than acquaintances. You learn a name or two, say hi when you encounter someone, but that is it, like a business contact, all formalities. Eventually, you get used to it and you accept it and even more eventually, that is all you need to sort of get on with your life in a more or less pleasant way. You just meander on and focus on what is important and try to think about friendship and love as little as you can. After all, you keep saying to yourself, it is only fifty years and fifty years is nothing when compared to forever. We keep telling that to ourselves and they keep telling that to us, until all of us believe it, because you do not really want to believe anything else and you do not want to disturb other peoples peace.

[Jnusch]

Lately, I find myself wanting to disturb that peace. Needing to disturb that peace, for my own sake, for my sanity's sake. Twenty-two years to go may be nothing in relation to eternity, but it is still pretty long when you are not in a position to look at all of eternity, but only the few years ahead of you. Hell, I cannot even look twenty-two years into the future and still it is upsettingly long! More frequently than before, I find myself thinking about it it. Wishing more fervently for time to pass. I keep recalling stories I have lived and ended, like that of Rex and Layla.
Or that of Tiffany Teacup, a sixteen year old cheerleader who suffered severe head trauma during a practise with her squad. Paralysed from the neck down, she had chosen to take matters into her own hands and that meant putting an end to matters. The fifteen days I spent with her, from the moment she made her decision final by signing some formal statement, where some of the most special, most educative of my "life". I have never seen anyone deal with the knowledge of dying and with convincing everyone that that is also the best thing to do, as efficiently and pragmatically as she did. It would have made me laugh if it had not been so sad.

[Jnusch]

To whomever it may concern,

I am not sure what this is supposed to be. A diary entry, to a diary that I don't have? A letter to my future self? A letter to some random person, I don't know. Whatever.

Today it is ten years ago that I saw Rex' film for the very first time. I just watched it again, for what must have been the trillionth time. It hurts, watching it, but it is a nice kind of pain. Is that strange? Mom would say it is not, she says everything is okay. Nothing is wrong with grief. But that is not what Rex would have said, I know that for sure. What else was all that stuff in the film about? Him and Layla, they both wanted to tell us to freaking move on with our lives alright. That it is stupid to let fear and sadness stop you from living. I agree, but it is not as easy to act like that. I hate, absolutely HATE HATE HATE never meeting Rex. The Rex adults and people his age saw, instead of the heroic big bro. In my mind, he is still the one to call when I needed a spider removed from a dark corner of my room, because it might crawl onto my face while I slept. He was the best horse in the world and my favourite victim for playing at being both a stylist and make up artist. Sometimes, when I feel particularly down, I look at the pictures and they still haven't lost their magic. When I look at them, they can still make me laugh so hard I cry, only the crying usually turns into real crying and then I am even sadder than before. I know this, and yet I still do it, I make myself feel the pain. It makes me feel like a freak.
I don't know anyone who has lost a sibling. No one my age, none of my friends anyway, they don't talk about anything. It would be nice to talk about it I think. I wish Josh would talk about it, but he is just like dad. I wonder where Rex got his personality from. I can't imagine mom and dad having changed so much that it is impossible to detect some of him in them. His liveliness, flamboyance, but mostly his optimism, if he got any from them, that bit must have been all they had, leaving nothing for themselves.
What would he be like now? Would he be famous, the way he always said he would? Whenever I had him all dolled up, he would pretend to be a star. Someone other than him. Especially – though I only see that now – towards the time he became to ill to stay at home. He would jokingly exclaim things like "Free at last!", when he had make up on. Finally his inner artist was free, and then he just went and danced and hopped through the room, singing silly songs and reciting famous scenes from movies and plays I had never even heard of at the time. But he loved it and I loved it and we both loved it even more because we were having fun together. The weeks before he was hospitalized, he did not go to school because he just couldn't make it through a whole day, which I did not mind at all. At times he slept, but mostly he wanted to stay awake and do the things he'd always dreamt of doing, dumb things mainly, many of which he was already too sick to do. But he did write a book, which sucked horribly -  he gave me a printed version a couple of days before he died – and he did make a film, obviously, and he did paint a portrait of me, and he did try to watch the girl next door while sunbathing naked. (All of this came from his List, which I secretly peeked at, and there was a tick next to the naked neighbour thing, but I doubt he actually saw her in full nudity. It was probably just some stupid rumour, because all the gardens were really easy to look into, especially from the upper floor windows, so she would have been crazy to do that. Unless maybe if she was an exhibitionist, but that doesn't seem very likely).
He did lots of other things too, but most of them were not that cool. Mainly stuff along the lines of "smoke a cigar", apparently he'd already tried cigarettes..., or "start a fire somewhere", which I hope he never did. The things he felt he should have done before he died. Manly things, I don't know, I mean, it wasn't like he had to prove himself to us or anything, we couldn't care less about those things, we were just glad to have him with us.
Well, actually, I hardly remember what it was like for me. What I felt. I was so young, I guess I did not really understand the full magnitude of the situation. Death was something so abstract. It wasn't as if I could "see" death, so it was difficult for me to grasp what it implied. Someone never ever coming back, that was just weird. Why would Rex not come back, he wanted to, right? For me it was simple: if he wanted to come back, he would, and him not wanting to come back... that was just not the way it was, so then obviously, he would come back. Only he didn't. He died and then he was gone and he never came back. And that sucks. It did, it does and it will. And I hate that. Young people shouldn't die. Only mean people and people who are old and have lived rich and long lives. What the hell is wrong with the person who designed all of this? God didn't see the technical error, that anyone can die young, instead of only the assholes? Any moment, any person can die, due to any reason. A world in which anything and everything is possible sucks. We are lucky we don't know what we're missing. If we did, we'd all just kill ourselves this instant, 'cause this live would be pure misery compared to that. This is hell and we are all in it, we just don't see it and we are vain enough to think that we have the good lives. Being born a poor kid somewhere down in Africa isn't hell, being, period, is hell.

God, I feel like crap. Writing this did not help AT ALLt. Diaries suck, I was right in never keeping one. When I have kids, I'll make sure they never ever get one, and when they do, I'll burn it, I swear to god that I will.

Love,
Charlotte