and so he left?

I don't understand death or its meaning – in fact, I am quite convinced it has none (except, of course, that the dead person is gone). They put it down to a lack of sensitivity, or feeling, my incapability to feel the loss. But I do! I am at a loss. What does it mean, to be dead?

It is not hard to see what dying means: You end. The world unravels and your thoughts with it. Some terror maybe, a little pain – perhaps a little more. And then? Out.

Then all that is left is us, the living – what was it for? Maybe nothing. Consider: In truth, what changed but the fact that a person you once knew (or thought you knew) irrevocably extracted himself from your life? It is a break-up, plain and simple. (The circumstances changed; it just didn't work out; it is nobody's fault; we've drifted apart.)

Which brings me to my question, the one which has bothered me ever since the possibility presented itself in an eleven-year-old mind: What difference does it make for the living whether I just leave – emigrate to Cuba, maybe – or whether I die? You can't see, touch, feel me, and would it break your heart? You say, yes, but why then is there a strange comfort in knowing that somehow, somewhere I am alive? Perhaps, this is why we invented heaven. Perhaps, this is why we lie about death and speak not its name. 

Perhaps, this is why I act so unfazed – because we've all been left before, and what difference does it make? I miss. I just don't think it's unusual.

slip

I was in a bad place. I was in a bad place, I slipped down from the lower branches of a cherry tree and dug myself deeper into the white. Until I reached a place, under the petals, far removed from any light. And then I woke up.
A stone-solid 5 clung to my neck, the choking sensation easily explained by its weight; a 3 of steel had me around the waist, tying me to a signpost that screamed its message in bright pink letters: Restroom. Here we rest, here we wait.
The 3 wouldn't let me go and the 5 was dragging me down – until my elbows hit the white cold and it was stone-solid and innocent, and I relented, I got bent, I bent over and arched to accommodate to the grasp of the 3, so natural!, that pressed into my stomach. 

After, I rested, in the ladies room, a bitter taste in my mouth, my head heavy with a number, my body worn out and distorted by another. I washed my hands, not in innocence, but from the red stains on the white that would give me away, that would speak to the fact I gave in, I relented to the charms of red cherry sweetness that had precipitated my slip.