Whitewashing the Sepulchre.

So in the back of my head, lingering like the aura of pheromones on the cuffs of a teenager (literally - from my own stab at being 14), I've had this idea about what it means to die.

There's the immobilizing fog of grief that slowly turns into rage and hatred and eulogies and tributes and toasts and drunkeness. There are the empty stomachs that slap into ribs as bodies rock in the night pressed close to pillows being pelted by sobs, temporarily embedded with the musk of depression. There are the foundations, the buildings, the hospitals, the libraries, the orphanages and the subsequent naming boom. There are backs to be rubbed and calories to consume and ignore and streets to wander and laps to be made into head rests. There are monuments. There are wars. There's confusion. There are embryos to nurture and dollars to be birthed and spent and donated to your namesake. There's the blaring silence of an undetectable disappearance. There's the next year. There's the next month. There's the next week. There's tomorrow. There's acceptance. There's triumph and defeat and resignation and perseverance and the veritable phoenix preening through the ash. There's a tightness around the holidays. There's nothing. There's the waste of something.

All this, as a child, and not a thought about finality. About forgetting as you turn to face the empty chair, the chair is empty. Nothing about an unmanned email address becoming a virtual vortex of lost thoughts, empty promises and broken plans, collecting kbs only as the autosave updates the timestamps. There was nothing about the expansion of the soul to absorb and muffle the blows... A transcendence out of reality just to check-in to a new day.

That said, I never thought I'd live past 17. I couldn't imagine being older than that. I stood in front of a mirror when I was 14 years old and searched for my 17 year old self and I decided that if I couldn't even know myself in three years, how could I know myself in 10. Sometimes I think I was unprepared for all this. Like every day that passes I'm surprised by the very life-like things that crop up. Like rent. Every month. Surprise! Like my 26th birthday. BIG shock.

But I'd never want to be 17 again and I'm glad I've stuck around to see 26. I mean, at this point, go big or go home, right? Because who wouldn't want to juggle all the shit that comes with being alive? At least it gives you something to think about. What does it mean to be battling the slow death of the soul as you slip into a routine you didn't plan for in a year you didn't think you'd see? What does it mean to never have acknowledged an afterlife but be constantly aware that you're always looking to refute it? To always remind yourself that your thoughts are chemical and they manifest very corporeal reactions and you won't find anything eternal in the process? Like you don't WANT this to go on, endlessly. What does it mean to want to accomplish something significant, someday, and yet be lost in an abyss of today? Like tomorrow isn't a big enough adventure to prepare for but 'someday' is?

My father once posed, on a particularly long car ride to one of a thousand Brookfield Bullets soccer games, "What matters, in the face of infinity?" And though I'm sure we haven't spoken about that conversation since I struggled, an idealistic 12 year old, to prove that SOMETHING mattered, I remember the conversation like I've had it with myself a million times since. Predictably, I wasn't able to sway my devil's advocate of a father from his, now I see, easily defended argument. But in his insistence that I did not matter (obviously extrapolated from the idea that 'nothing' matters) he gave me a lens with which to scale the impossibilities of life.

I'm now embarassed to announce that despite a 15 year incubation period, I've only recently learned to use this lens-tool as I grapple with being 26, adrift in a drying sea of potential, challenged by the people I love in ways I never thought I'd have to grapple with alone, trying to figure out what it means to be alive by having recently been exposed to a situation wherein I could only be relieved that the love of my life wasn't dead. I guess I've realized that in the face of infinity, we can only hope to matter, but how we're gonna make it through tomorrow is probably a much more useful exercise.

So I don't care what the numbers say, today I'm the oldest I've ever been and I sure hope I can stick around to be perplexed by tomorrow-- and death, while an interesting process that to ignore would be like ignoring how ovaries work, is definitely not the only way to understand life after 17...

Oh, and last night I had a dream about nursing an infant. What. The. Fuck.