On death.
Some songs just make you feel. They transcend everything and take you to places within yourself that you never even knew existed. The simple act of people hitting things, making sounds from nothing, speaks a million different words to a million different people and tells tales of life, and death, and endless emotion. There are certain songs, mainly classical ones, that seem to hit a certain note - a funny bone if you will - that makes me think about the oddest things, and triggers memories that I never even knew I had.
Music is the one thing that makes me think there is something else out there. Not a God as such, but some energy or form of higher power. Something that links everyone together and gives everything a meaning. There is so much of ourselves that we will never even know, things that remain hidden from everyone, even ourselves, that for us all not to have a purpose in life would ring so hollow. I don’t want to exist for nothing. I don’t want to die in vain.
Because death… death is something I think about a lot. Since I was little my Dad would always tell me that he would die before he was thirty - that he would rather kill himself than be old. See, my parents were really young, nineteen/twenty years old when they had me, literally babies themselves. To my Dad at the time, old age was worse than death. He could think of nothing worse than getting old and ‘uncool’ and because of that, old age scared me. It still scares me. Even though my Dad is old now, and married (another thing he said he wouldn’t do), and has clearly demonstrated that his words were those of youthful ignorance, I still think thirty is old and won’t date anyone above the age of twenty-five because I think they reek of death.
I think of death late at night when I’m lying in bed, trying to sleep. I try and imagine how it might feel, how it might happen, and eventually I think of my best friend who passed away… and of the gaping hole of emptiness she left behind. Of the stark realisation after she died that there really is nothing there when you do. There’s no heaven, no hell, no afterlife, just a hole in everybody’s lives where you once were. Yet I regularly dream of her as if she were still here, and the dreams are so vivid that I almost think they are real. But our imaginations are such a potent spirit and dreams are a seductive drug. I welcome the dreams for now, but one day I will have to face the past, my future. Fate is in-avoidable; one day we’re all going to die.
