death, pt. 5

Eleutheria.

When I fled my old life, I spent a lot of time in solitude. I tell people it was "quiet contemplation" but I'm not sure if I was really contemplating anything so much as I was basking in the silence, learning to accept that it was okay to do nothing but exist for a while.

After a while I began to imagine that I had died. That was reason it was so quiet in my new apartment, why I didn't answer my calls or my emails or basically anything. Eventually, the calls and emails tapered off, and only a few dedicated individuals--my sister, mostly--kept trying. I thought that was fitting, really. The dead aren't something we think about. This world is made for the living. When the dead depart, we pay our respects, then we forget.

Once I emerged from my tomb, I started writing again. They were sad stories, stories about death and mortality and isolation. People started wondering if I was depressed (because when I was actually depressed they just thought I was being weird), but it seemed important. It wasn't until much later that I realized I was writing a eulogy for the life I'd led.

Is that so strange? I felt that in some way I truly had died, and some new self had moved in to replace the old one. The habits and quirks of my old self were gone. When I finally realized that, I asked my sister over and we held a wake. And somewhere in the middle of all this I realized I no longer felt like a ghost.