Late Eighteen

37| Chapter thirty seven

You people must hate me by now, but please don't. I don't even have any excuses to give, just school stress and trying to adapt to a new environ as usual. I'm not willing to make 'empty' promises and tell you to expect an update everyday, but just know that things will go back to normal with time.

Patience my people, patience.

P. S. I got into Uni in January. I'm planning to write my first personal book after completing late Eighteen, that's like the most exciting thing of all.

Ezekiel's POV (Point of View)

I feel completely dead inside.

Lost in the shadows and waiting for the wind to take me away.

Dead in the sense that, though my belief about life and second chances is still apparent, yet just wishing to end it all. What's the meaning of life when the bedrock and standing foundation is nowhere to be found?

I remember just a few days ago, when my mum, laid sick out of her spirit on an hospital bed, she tapped my arm- soft, just like how a mother would. Small, gentle and serene- and asked me what my deepest fear was. And just like any concerned and hope-filled son would, I had told her that my deepest fear was to lose her.

Wrong.

Thinking about it now, I must have sounded like a child. Still eighteen, just a few days ago, but Eighteen and few months before turning a year older, I feel unexpectedly more wiser and older. As if those few weeks of my mum on an hospital bed transformed me, and gave me another view to life.

The deepest fear of my life isn't the fear of losing someone- more particularly the person I love. It's the fear of never having to experience that person's love anylonger, never having to notice the simplest of details about such person. The never of never having to say 'good morning' and having to leave everything to memory to conquer and digest.

Death is inevitable and unstoppable, the memories linger behind, feeding and chewing on you- Your mind, heart, and every key to the door in which the memories are locked- just like a termite would to a wood.

And now she's gone, with absolutely no way to convey my true feelings to her. She must have being in pain, in distress to carry all of that burden on herself- to have them live in you like stone age- till the very end. She must have had a lot to say to me, to say to us-myself, my dad, and to the family as a whole- but the evil claws of death had snatched her before she could.

I miss her, but I'm in pain.

It's been a month, yet it feels like I've had to live without a part of me for a lifetime. Everyone second of my being since her demise has been filled with nothing but pain and regrets- leaving me to live with the words I wish I could have told her, with the emotions I wish I could have conveyed to her.

But it's too late, and that thought hurts like hell.

I have no words to say and I watch in pain as the doctors cover my mum's corpse with a white sheet of cloth. And to think the color white used to be my favorite colour, I used to think it symbolized vibrance, now the colours reeks of darkness and death.

A very foul combination I tell you.

I watch the doctors converse with my dad, yet I hear absolutely not a word from their conversation. It felt like I was there in body but not in spirit and soul- my soul must have gone on a journey to join my mum wherever she is, leaving just my empty body behind. In a way, I envy my soul, atleast it's got a chance to see my mum one more time.

My eyes are trained on my mum's still body as a group of people in white overalls- be it nurses or whatever they're called- wheel her out of the room she occupied before her deat- No, not death, sleep- into the mortuary with tears in my eyes. It's sad to think I'd never hear her voice again or even watch her scold me in that typical African mother tone.