I think this story makes a lot more sense if you read
this one, but I guess it can be a stand alone. This is not what I intended to post next, but I listened to a sad song this afternoon at work and ended up with this. I spent the evening fixing it up. Every time I swear off this world, I come back to it.
My Own Private Funeral My eyes opened slowly, naturally. No alarm clock woke me up this morning. I looked around my room in the darkness. The sun had not yet risen, although the faint beginnings of light were showing themselves. The sun was just below the horizon, waiting patiently to appear. Everything was still young, untouched by the aging light of day.
I rolled over onto my side and stared at the wall, my mind a blank. The whiteness of the plaster was going to be bright within half an hour. Bright like a fluffy cloud in the sky. Now, though, it was a muted off-white, looking no more appealing than the sky on a cloudy day.
I took a deep breath in and closed my eyes in order to properly picture such a sky.
I looked up at the grey sky and saw the light struggling to get through but failing. A slight shadow was cast on the land and the trees, but not a depressing one. It simply dulled the shininess a slight bit. People could hardly notice it. The uniform cloud across the sky was not threatening, but comforting. Protective.
I continued to stare up at the sky, imagining I could see through the clouds and out into space.
I looked back down to the land and saw trees, grass, and mountains. A river in the distance.
It was a foreign land that I had never been to, although it did not surprise me to be here. It was interesting. Everything smelled different and the mountains were huge. Much bigger than the ones I grew up around. I looked at them, awed by their enormity. The tops were capped with snow. They were impenetrable fortresses. The perfect border for a country with so much to protect.
The clouds that covered every corner of the sky seemed to bend and shape themselves around the mountains in a blatantly impossible disregard of the rules of weather systems and nature. I was not a scientist, however, so I did not particularly care. "It looks neat" was the best way I could describe it.
I carried on watching the sky. I saw a break in the cloud cover. A sole ray of sunlight thrust itself through, and as if setting a trend, more rays followed, seeming to widen the tear in the cloud. A bit of warmth emerged and touched my face. I smiled as the heat travelled through my skin and into my bones, heating them up in a pleasant way. I felt at peace with everything in the world. I was comfortable where I stood, comfortable in my skin. I was truly and simply happy.
My peace was shattered by a terrible sound - a loud rumbling like a train - making me cringe. From behind me it came like a charging bull out of control, rabid, leaving behind it a trail of dust so thick it could choke up an ocean.
As the plane passed overhead, it seemed to screech out words I could not understand. Maybe it was the people inside yelling. I watched in horror as the plane headed straight for the mountain. I knew that it would never clear it.
I was right when the plane crashed nose first right into the side of the mountain, high up where the snow started. It hardly made the sound I thought it would. It was so far away that it sounded like someone had blown up a paper bag and popped it and then muffled the echo. A few mini explosions occurred and I saw a small fire start up.
Watching the scene unfold, I stood paralysed with fear, my stomach churning and making me feel sick. I could swear that I heard screaming from the wreckage. People begging for help... But it would have been impossible to hear any voices from such a distance.
I was helpless. I could do nothing. I did not even have a cellular phone.
I overcame my paralysis and started to run, mapping out in my mind an impossible mission to scale a mountain with no equipment, no proper clothing, and no experience. Each step I took I felt the sinking fear in me become worse and worse. I was going to find something I did not like.
This did not stop me, though, for every step I took also made my sense of urgency increase tenfold. I needed to get to my goal. I needed to know some things.
I somehow scaled the mountain. It was like I flew. The wreckage of the plane was in my line of sight. We were on the same level now.
I crawled over to it, exhausted, my hands and legs freezing up in the snow that covered the ground.
The fire I had seen break out was on the opposite end of the plane. Conveniently, the side I was on was untouched by the flames. There was a huge tear in the body of the plane where the wing had once been attached. There was a perfect space beside it to crawl inside. I did so.
The plane had been tipped over so that the wall of windows had become the floor. As I reached the entrance, I could see bodies scattered along it. They must have not had their seatbelts buckled up properly. I ignored the disgust I felt welling up at the back of my throat and I crawled through the bodies, which I soon found were in fact dead bodies.
I kept going, looking for something.
I heard a whimper. I looked sideways immediately.
There she was strapped into her seat, hanging from the "side" of the plane like a dead rag doll.
But she had made a sound. She was alive.
I stood up quickly and undid the buckle at her stomach. She started to tumble down, but I grasped at her, my hands slipping unexplainably as I helped her down safely. I put her on an empty space on the windows, resting her on her back.
Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing. Shallow, infrequent breaths. She whispered something.
"What?" I asked, my voice sounding hollow.
"Water..." she rasped out. I could not help but break out into a smile. She could at least speak and evaluate her position. She felt thirsty. She knew she needed wa-
"W-water?" she repeated, this time in English. I frowned. "And... ex...tra blanket? Please..."
I felt her forehead. She was burning up. She was delirious with what felt like fever but what was more conceivably shock and pain. She did not know what had just happened. She was speaking nonsense, probably repeating the phrases from her
Learn English in 20 Minutes Per Day CDs.
When I brought my hand away from her brow, I noticed sticky blood on my fingers. There was a lot. Oddly, I did not feel hurt. I inspected my hand for a cut, but I could find none. I realized with a sinking heart that it was not my blood.
I pulled back to take a full look at the incapacitated girl. Her shirt was wet. Scared, I reached out to touch it. It was cold and sticky. When I pulled my hand back, my fear was confirmed by the blood that coated my fingers. This was why my hands had slipped about when trying to help her down.
I pulled her torn sweater and shirt up ever so slightly and peered under, almost gagging in horror. Something must have fallen in her lap during the crash. There was a vicious, gaping wound in her stomach that I knew could not be repaired in time. I pulled her clothes back down and looked for something to stop the bleeding. I found a blanket and pressed it into her stomach. I am sure that was not what she had wanted when she had asked for an extra blanket.
"Just keep breathing," I said quietly as though I were a paramedic.
"Water," she choked out, this time in her native tongue. Then a miracle happened - she opened her eyes and looked right at me, tears of pain in her eyes.
"Help me," she pleaded in a weak, pathetic voice.
Gone was strongest girl in the world, replaced by a feverish child who could barely breathe on her own. My heart, had it not already broken, would have broken at that sight alone.
What did you say to someone when you knew her fate was sealed? She knew what was to come, too. I could tell. The fear in her eyes was not born from nothing.
I nodded and I could not help starting to cry. The tears overflowed and fell as I blinked them away. My vision became blurred from too many tears. I had to wipe my eyes quickly with one of my blood-covered hands. My other hand took hers and squeezed.
"I'm helping you," I cried, my voice breaking.
"Water..."
I shook my head.
"I don't have any."
She suddenly gripped my hand in a surprisingly tight hold and looked directly into my eyes, her eyes wide open. With a reserve of strength like that, maybe she would be all right and pull through...
"Mama," she whispered. "Mama, I'm scared..."
I could not even begin to react to being mistaken for her mother because her hold on my hand slackened in an instant and she stopped breathing.
I shook her gently and then put my ear to her chest. I could hear nothing. No heart beat. I put a hand over her mouth, but nothing happened. No warm breath emerged.
She was dead. No hope.
I knew it. I knew it before I had reached the crash site.
That is why I did not scream out her name, nor tell her to hang on and demand that she wake up. She was fated to have gone, and nothing I could do would change it. I resigned myself to this fact.
I touched her forehead once and then stood up, looking down at her. She looked like she was in such pain. Her eyes open in terror, her body twisted in an awkward position.
But she did not feel a thing. Not a thing anymore. She was off somewhere, flying to some other place where nothing could hurt her anymore. Somewhere where she did not have to remember the pain she had just gone through. It could be endless darkness and nothingness or it could be eternal light and bliss. I did not know and did not presume to judge what did or did not happen after death. All I knew was that she was there and I was not.
I left her body there. I was not meant to bring it with me. I walked out of the plane and out into the cold mountain winds.
I walked away from the plane. I knew that it would eventually burn up. The remaining fuel in the engine's tanks would make certain of it. It would convert everything in that small flying machine into the elements that would float up into the sky and become smaller parts of the universe once more. In a way comforting, in a way upsetting.
I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked out across the Italian Alps, mountains being all I could see. The sun had fully emerged from the curtain of clouds that had held it hostage, and it now warmed my cold hands. The blood on them began to dry and crack. The snow below me became saturated with little red flakes. I knelt down in the snow and put my hands in it, scrubbing them vigorously. The snow at my knees turned a pale red. I stared and thrust my hands deep under, keeping them there until I felt such burning that I had to pull them out. Tears of pain came to my eyes, but I ignored them.
I stood up and looked behind me. The whole plane was on fire. I could feel the heat on my back. I watched as Aya's body floated up to the sky as smoke.
Bye bye, I thought. I blinked away more tears.
It was like my own private funeral. Saying goodbye. Burning the body. Seeing off her ashes.
All the things I never had a real chance to do.
I opened my eyes. I had dozed off and had the same daydream.
Correction. It was a new dream, but it was a variation of an old dream of eight years.
The wall in front of me had become brighter. The sun was peeking out over the horizon, signalling a new day.
A sad day for me. The anniversary of a loved one's death was never a good day. It seemed my subconscious was trying to help me overcome some of that remaining grief by giving me a sense of closure (albeit a strange one), but the grief would never be fully removed. It could never be.
I turned over for the second time that morning and looked at the sunlight coming in through the blinds. I lay in bed lazily, wishing that I had someone that would come in and yell at me for being so lazy.
But the one person who I would allow to scold me like that (besides my mother) was gone. She had burned up into tiny atoms and floated into the sky along with two hundred strangers and a few tonnes of metal and fuel.
Maybe at night when I looked up at the stars, the brightest ones contained a bit of her in them. She had always looked over me and taken care of me. Maybe now she was in the position to take on the duty fulltime from above.
This was how I comforted myself. Or maybe tricked myself.
Because I knew deep down inside that my dreams meant nothing. My thoughts had no effect on the outside world. Romantic ideas of souls surviving and guardian angels watching over me would get me nowhere.
So I heaved a sigh, rolled out of bed, and went to brush my teeth. It was all I could do. I was living in the world.
The End
bedtime.