"Death exists -- in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust."
-Haruki Murakami,
Norwegian Wood
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8 months ago; November, 2018
Time takes away everything that matters to you, without apologizing in return.
I heard the news only minutes before the sun would shine its first ray in a world without him. His sister had the misfortune of discovering the body.
From the bits and pieces of conversations I heard from the people in the funeral, I got a general idea of what happened.
After waking from a nightmare, as usual, Destiny walked over to her brother's room. She was intending to hear some words of affection from him, recieve some pats on the head and maybe even get a place in his comparatively softer bed. She was sure he would be awake, like he always was in the nights I wouldn't be beside him.
But she discovered otherwise.
The light was turned off, which was another unusual thing. He was afraid of the dark, after all. She walked over to his bed and called him, but no reply came. She called him again and again, but his body remained still.
Worried, she turned on the light, to find the sleeping face of her dear brother, the only difference being the white liquid rolling out from the side of his mouth down to his pillow.
Perhaps the sound of her scream reached me, or it only managed to lightly knock on my subconscious mind, but it wasn't enough to wake me up. Though I'm a light sleeper, I was very emotionally exhausted that whole day, for reasons I couldn't figure out. However, my parents—both light sleepers as well—were up in an instant.
The people in the funeral said that his father had been awake owing to his insomnia.
Hearing the scream, the forty-something man woke up his wife and immediately ran over to the room of source, expecting anything but the overdosed body of his ever-smiling son.
By the time the mother had reached the room and a second ear-splitting scream reverberated across Richardson Lane, his father was shaking his body violently, hoping for a sign of life to appear, and my parents were running up to their neighbor's door.
There was no need to take him to the hospital. Before dawn arrived, my Dawn was already gone.
Seventeen sleeping pills carried him away to an unknown corner of the world, so he would remain seventeen forever. What more would an insomniac like him want but to peacefully fall asleep?
The first few seconds, minutes, or perhaps even hours after hearing the news, I had felt a surprising amount of calmness. I processed the chaos outside, the chattering people, the high pitched wailing of Dawn's mother through my brain, but my body refused to move an inch. Even long after my brother came to my room and informed me about my best friend's death in his usual monotone of a voice, I was still sitting like a nonfunctional robot. I didn't glance at him, only stared at some point and blinked after long intervals. I didn't notice when he exited the room.
He came in a second time to tell me to dress up for the funeral. Funeral. A word I had heard so many times in my life. I had imagined the funeral of my own parents many times just to prepare myself for the inevitable. I had visited the funerals of several relatives I didn't care about. I had read about funerals in books. However, the funeral of Dawn -- no, that had never crossed my mind. That was never possible enough to find place in my limited ability to imagine. It was never possible enough to materialize in my pessimistic brain as a thought.
It was never possible, but here it is now, a reality. A reality I am too exhausted to accept, and too exhausted to run away from.
I remember there being a weird empty feeling inside my chest, as if some flesh was suddenly missing underneath. Perhaps to fill in that space, the skin of my chest was being pulled inwards, making it so tight it hurt to even breathe. I had a terrible headache, spreading from my temples to the back of my head. My hands were ice cold, but my face was burning hot. There were no tears forming in my eyes. No tears at all.
I don't remember getting up from my bed, taking a shower, putting on a white shirt, black trousers and a black coat. I don't remember the walk to the graveyard. I don't remember anything that happened before I saw his pale and lifeless face lying in the coffin.
I walked far away from the crowd shortly after catching a glimpse of my dead friend's body.
In a turbulent corner of my mind, I thought about his smiles, that were so wide that they reached up to his ears, making his eyes smaller. Sometimes these smiles would be accompanied with flushed cheeks or red ears, especially when he would talk about an actress he found attractive or would get complimented by someone. I thought about his eyes bearing the same green as emeralds, which sparkled to the point of tears every time he laughed.
Then I thought about how I would never see these small things again, and felt a strong insanity growing in me, blurring my vision, swallowing me whole. It didn't fully take form, perhaps due to how exhausted I was.
But I had the deepest urge to hurt myself.
All the hours in a day I would spend with him -- not once did his face show even an ounce of pain. Where did he hide all that sorrow?
I'll never know now.
No one would. From his life to his death, no one could ever understand what he was truly thinking.
And hence he quietly left, questions remaining unanswered, tears forgetting to fall, broken promises turning into debris, and all the love I had for him could not stop his departure.
I didn't notice when the sun rose, intending to spread brightness all around. My life, turning into a shadow so dark it denied all sources of brightness, could no longer grasp that sunlight.
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Hello lovely readers!
Thanks a lot for picking up my book! Sorry for the extremely emotional beginning, but it's important. I promise you that there will be many light parts too.
Special thanks to TrizzyThe1st for helping me in making a better prologue through their comment ❤
Thank you for reading! Hope you loved it enough to continue to the next chapter <3
Goodbye for now~
- Poma