Mortal is Time
My father died early, and his death colored my view of life in such a way that erased my cognizance that one's life can be long and full, spanning multiple completely different lives even. My grandfather died at 85 when I was in primary school. Nothing of this fact seemed odd until I was old enough to realize that I, the de facto first grandchild in the family, was only halfway through primary school when he was 85. It may not sound particularly odd to a younger generation, but back when people got marriage proposals at 17, the math was terribly off. My family, the only family I had ever known, was actually his second. Or second and a half, because he also had multiple liaisons during his marriage with my grandmother. My mother's assortments of cousins are actually her siblings. It was common for people to care for their relative's children when they did not have their own.
He had another life on a different continent. He was of different class, before war forced him to abandon everything and began life anew as an immigrant stranded on a land speaking languages he never quite grasped. Forty years ago for an 85 year-old was forty five years of stories lived, of people met. I wonder how he felt when he had to trade the plush cushions of his ancestral home for coarse wooden benches, rotting with saltwater.
My father too was once young, brimming with zest, his eyes lit with adventure. He left home barely a teenager, something unheard of for a middle class family in this century. I want to see the world he saw with his eyes before he was forced to spend the rest of his short life tethered to a crummy sedentary job because I came along unplanned. I know he never resented me, but I also know that he had always wanted to show me that world, to once again trot the globe, unending days in the palm of his hands.
Every ten years, I feel like a different person. Every year, I step closer to the number on my father's obituary. It was said that young people, drunk they are in the spring of life, tend to feel they're immortal. For me, the one constant was memento mori, to everyone's consternation. What might ail this little child, who came home sobbing on the first day of primary school scared that they would die? My mother was puzzled, then worried, wondering if someone had fed me lies.
There was no one.
I started dreaming of death in the third grade. I would roam the hallways I came to be familiar with in the coming years. A long corridor. Liminal spaces. There were boulders. Wine cellars. Prison portcullis. A crumbling castle. Its landscape barren and neglected, my eyes making out faint shadows through narrow portholes. Dread. The falling sensation and the long silence following. Fear gripped me so hard I started attending religious services and served for the community. Looking back, the breadth of imageries my braincells were able to weave was hilariously prodigious. I barely could string together coherent sentences to describe the world, but inside the gears were churning to serve me with a tapestry of horrors night after night.
I make a good run out of life, but the spectre is always lurking, assuring me that one day we would shake hands as friends. I've never imagined myself old and wizened, though I had always admired those who age gracefully. Time stopped on my father's death, his smile forever frozen with his still-black hair, slightly unkempt.
Melodies of Life's closing verse was one I took to heart. It enamored me so the first time I heard it, and still dazzling more than two decades later. I think it's truer than ever. It doesn't matter when you leave as long as someone is there to keep you alive in them. All of us are layers of stories passed along. Together we make the life a collection of qualia. I am not you, you are not me, but for a single moment we can bask in this shared consciousness. Floating, being.
Mortal is time
We are eternal