Goodbye

    That black car, why does it look so familiar?
    There's a word coming to me... hearse....
    I don't even know who is standing next to me... my entire being is completely focused on that black car, the world is compressed into that black car... and yet... a voice, a female voice, somehow reaches me... from just beside me...
    "Where is he?"
    Then the whole world and the black car compresses into the pale wooden crate inside the black car... a coffin... flowers on the top.... on the top of the coffin... The whole world, in that coffin...
    A surge rises up inside me and explodes, in less than an instant, like the Big Bang I guess.. in that less-than-an-instant the realisation floods me and the dams burst.
    "He's there!" I cry, staring at the coffin, the hearse, the black car, my entire world in that black car.
    I sob, I cry, I scream. My very existence trembles under the immense force of my tears and my shrieks and my grief. My insides are pushing towards an escape, but there is no escape. My mouth is too busy screaming, my eyes too busy crying, my heart too busy bleeding...

    I wake... gradually or suddendly, I'm not aware. All i'm aware of is the pain. I wake quietly, I am not sobbing nor crying nor screaming, but my throat, my insides, my very inner being, is still trembling, shaking as if I had been. My insides are trembling, my hands... my eyes are dry, but wide... the room is dark... no coffin, no hearse.... that black car...
    It wasn't real.
    But it was.


    I'm haunted by this to this very day.
    The source of my pain stems from 10 years ago.
    I was only 7-years-old at  the time.
    I have no idea where I was, what I was doing, how I was feeling.
    The source of my pain stems from 10 years ago, on the other side of the world.
    The source of my pain has nothing to do with me, nothing at all.

    But it rips me inside out even in my sleep.
   
    I love you, my friend. You weren't, but you are.
    Rest peacefully - more peacefully than I.
   
    Goodbye.