Aftermath

A black feather floated down from the sky onto the soft,warm grass. A young girl in an equally black dress picked it up as a tear slid down her cheek. She quickly stood back up and ran through the rows of chairs that were slowly filling up for a funeral. My funeral. Another man, in his later years, stood at the front of the isle, reading the casket: 'Alexander Richard Dameous; 1990-2005,' before slowly meandering back to the seat he had chosen earlier. A group of adolescents also dressed in black, although their baggy, shabby clothes made them look like punks, were murmuring in several of the back rows about what happened. I remember them. They were my only friends. My mother and father were also there, sitting in the very front row, crying, wishing I hadn't done what I did. This is when my regret begins to take hold.1

As the funeral began to take place, I began to realise, my thoughts and suspicions had been correct, among other things. Throughout my life, I was not a religious person, and will never be. However, what happened to me then could not be made worse, even if the so-called devil himself was in charge of the punishment. I thought to myself, maybe it was a dream, maybe I would wake up in a hour or two and realize that I had just scared myself shit-less for no reason. But I knew it wasn't, I remembered what I had done. I remembered the blood and the innocent screaming. I thought it would make everything better, but instead it placed me in a casket that was now being placed into a hertz before my very eyes. As my small group of mourning relatives left in their cars and vans, a tear fell from my own eye. A tear hadn't fell from this eye since over eight years ago, since my grandmother died. A tear fell from my eye because I realized that however untruthful religion still is, this was my hell, this was my punishment.2

When I finally arrived at the marble hallway that was to be the place of my burial, everyone had all-ready gone to their meal. I decided to take this chance to read my tombstone, a cold, marble tile that had all-ready begun its eternal rest above my body. I almost laughed as I read aloud 'Alexander Richard Dameous; Man of little words, and yet much music.' I suspected that my parents wanted the best for me even then, as they always had, just in ways that did not suit me. I smiled for my first time in weeks remembering when my parents always denied things that they did, such as when my dad denied screaming at me to do my work, then soon did afterwords. Then I frowned again, realizing that it could never happen again, and I had always complained about those occurrences anyways. It is quite strange, the specific things you miss when you are deprived of them. I then realized I wanted to see what was going on at the meal and listen to what people were saying about me. Even being as I was, I wanted to hear if people missed me, or were just crying at the funeral out of respect.3

I took the time on my walk from my tombstone to the lunch hall I took the time to remember my death; how it had happened.4

~incomplete~5