Rainy Day

That Familiar Story

Have you ever seen someone that depicts death. Someone whose skin is drawn and stretched over their decaying bones as if they were more dead than alive. When their eyes sink into their skull and their cheekbones resemble ebony black caverns as dark as their soul.
This was her. The woman I saw trembling and pulling her withering legs across the pavement with what little energy she could muster, using it up in every step. Her body was disfigured and mangled as if she had gone through some awful torture. Her face was pale, lifeless and pockmarked and one sollumn tear rolled gently down her cheek. At first, fear was the only emotion I could feel, but the closer she managed to crawl towards me, the more I saw that she was simply a frail old woman still clinging desperately to the last threads of her life. She wouldn't do any harm... Look at her? She was nothing. I wished she could die so I wouldn't have to fill my heart with such great pity for the frail old lady.
But then I realised why I was so petrified of this wasting woman. She was the fate of us all. She symbolised the bitter end of this dreadful life and the fact that no matter how strong we think we are, we will be broken down into a sollumn speck of dust that gathers on all your forgotten pictures and memories. Discarded and replaced a hundred times over.
***
This fear is something we all know too well and the only way we can dispose of this feeling is to forget everything we have been taught and go back to our roots. When we were young, simple-minded and wide-eyed. I remember being young and my earliest memories were of me pouncing around my grandmothers garden acting like an absolutely deranged idiot. I remember the glowing green grass, trees and the sun beaming down harshly onto the patio in the blistering heat in contrast to the immensely blue sky. I had no care for anything (or anyone) in the world, the only thing I had to worry about was which toy was I going to play with that night. So naive... But in those days, ignorance was the only thing that kept me safe; In fact, I relished on being hidden from the world. Because deep down I knew that ones who were free were the ones with the deepest meloncholy and the darkest secrets.
I had a vague idea of the beauty to be seen in the world from the wondrous stories that my mother used to tell me everynight before I went to sleep. Stories of great gods up in the sky and impeccably strong heroes. This made me entanced with the idea of everything sublime and divine. At first, my beliefs were the barrier between me and all the monsters and fears lingering in the shadows of my bedroom corners and under my bed at night- until my mother told me how I am simply a slither of insignificance compared with these magnificent beings. Telling this to her own child, who would ever do that? To replace hope with sadness and dreams with reality.