The first funeral I'd ever been to was my grandmother's. She laid still and calm in the casket, the spot where she used to wear her smile had sunk into hollowness. They made us circulate around what was left of her before she was put into the giant flame that swallowed her whole. I cried the hardest when she was slowly glided into the roaring fire. I just couldn't imagine how her tiny body would handle the heat. I cried the hardest because I thought that would be it. It would be the last moment of her existing in this world. Her body would then turn into ashes, and there would be nothing left of her here. The second one was when my other grandmother passed away. They dressed her in funeral clothes. It was her uniform. She was a well-respected officer of the governmental revenue department in China. They placed her cap on her chest full of badges honored by other retired officials that used to work with her. My grandmother always taught us to live with integrity. They saluted her when her coffin was lowered into the soil bed. It was held in the middle of a quiet graveyard without any shelters. That day the sun was ferocious and we sweated our tears away. It was the last time I'd ever seen her, flesh and bones, right in front of me. Her husband, my grandfather, died in a car crash when my mom was still 17. I've never seen him in my life, but I grew up with stories of him. He went out to work one day and never came back. I guess that was my mother's childhood trauma that she never really seemed to be able to get over. There were no signs. No symptoms. No nothing. Another car just ran into his. BANG. That was it.
There's no such thing as a peaceful death. When you make that jump on Golden Gate Bridge thinking you would just sink into the water and dissolve into foam and never to be seen again, you're wrong. That's not how it's going to happen. You know what's it going to be like? You will travel through your mind looking for reasons that made you take that jump, and those that made you wish you hadn't. You will hit the water hard, and it may break your bones. You will immerge into another type of free-falling. It will be slower but you still can't control how fast it will go. In the deep blue you will exhale the last breath you held on that bridge. You will hold your breath thinking you could die just by suffocating yourself. You will twitch and a part of you will struggle to swim up to gasp for air again. Your mind will fight with your body. If your mind wins, you'll still hold your breath and try not to let water go into your system, because there's a part of you wanting to live. But somehow after a long struggle, your lungs will be filled with liquid. Your head and eyes will intensively be congested with blood and it may ooze out from your nostrils or your mouth. Your tongue will stick out and will be bitten. You'll keep twitching until you die. That's when you think you've dissolved into foam and stopped existing. It's not peaceful. Death is violent. All kinds of death are.
We were never gentle, to begin with. After the Big Bang, flints and bits and pieces of stones collided into one another and accreted the Earth. Some continents were made because they crashed into each other. The impact was violent. We were born after, not destructive, but vigorous circumstances. So basically, something was destroyed so that we could be created.
I took a long drag from the cigarette before I pressed it against the parking-lot-asphalt. A chunk of black ashes was stuck to the scorch mark of where I forcefully thrust the serial killer. Sometimes I would just put it on the floor next to where I sat and observe closely as it consumed itself. I used to think death was terrifying. I used to think that's how we lose people. Some say that death is not a real fear, because we're all going to go through it once, and if you're lucky enough, twice. But does it even matter if the things you're scared of are real or not? You're scared. And that should be the end of the discussion. Anyhow, I shouldn't be smoking so much. I could feel my lungs rotting away as I'd started to take shorter and smaller breaths for almost two years now. They twitched like the man launching off of Golden Gate Bridge. If I were to wistfully swim towards my death, they would be the only parts of me longing to stay.
"Ping."
"Pong," I said as if it was almost a reflex action.
"Pong," my friend said, only a nanosecond after me.
"Hah, was waiting for it," I smirked, "thank you." I said as one of them passed me the joint.
"You should be smoking less of those and more of these," they remarked.
I chuckled while I took a puff and watched as the substances dissipate from one end to the other. I held my breath and imagined how the smoke I just took in soothed out the vileness I contained, then I exhaled slowly like the way people breathed while trying to retain their composure during yoga. Tiny bits of burnt weed dropped to the floor next to where my cigarette was killed. From ashes to humans and from humans to ashes. In the world of mine, everything comes full circle. It will. It has to. And that's what most people would want to believe too, I think.
 |
| They say that good things take time, but great things happen in a blink of an eye. |
Before all those plate tectonics and all those flints crashing into each other, there was the Big Bang. Scholars still argue over the name, as some of them think it sounds misleading – The Big Bang wasn't very much of a BANG. It just meant the beginning of everything. Our universe started as nothing and it quickly grew bigger and bigger, until it could contain all these galaxies and planets and us. I wouldn't say the Bang wasn't exactly a BANG, because nobody really knew how it started and what sound it made, and how it could begin from zero. The furthest realm that humans' knowledge can reach is the part where we are convinced that everything must start from something. Some people think that there could be a celestial being, a higher power that oversaw all this, while some try to convince us the otherwise by proving the evolution theories. Sometimes I think that, well, maybe God is just a mad scientist, and the only angels I believe in are astronauts.
The outer space isn't the only thing I think about when my head's in the clouds. I immerge myself in another type of free-falling. It's dangerous in a way that it feels safe. I sink into the thoughts of repressed memories, of him, of us. It's the only time that's safe to think about him because there's a time limit. I know sobriety would drag me out of the suffocation when the time is up. And when I'm out of the water, I wouldn't remember what it felt like underneath. I'd be safe from it. I only allow myself to think about that when I'm stoned. There's a fine line between sanity and insanity, and I try my best to follow the rules of what I should and should not do while I'm in these states.
Scientists believe that there was another universe before ours. They predict it in retrospect that it'd ended exactly how this one started. In the previous universe, the vastness just shrunk into nothing in an instant; it went on until there was nothing more to consume. Then suddenly it ended. Humans predict things because we always try to find a pattern in everything. And we hope that by knowing the pattern, we would be a step ahead of what we're going through. We would then know how this universe is going to end, or not end. Humans tend to take control. We call ourselves "intelligent beings" because we fulfill all the criteria, designed by humans, of "intelligent beings", just as how Milan Kundera said in his book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
"The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse."
The universe is a strange place of which humans do not have the power to take control. By having this thought we would question the status of our existence. What if the universe doesn't have a pattern like how Pi never repeats itself? What if the universe has a mind of its own? It never makes us feel better to know that the universe doesn't follow a pattern. Humans are comfortable with repetitions. And that's why we always wonder if there would be a universe after this one where we could exist again after we die.
I have this theory that in order to fully know a person, you must visit where they have been and who they've met throughout their whole life. Not so much of being them, but just knowing them. Because being that person means visiting where they've been and meeting the people they've met at the exact same time. I believe that in every place and person we meet or just pass by, we take a little piece of them with us. The part where you take others' pieces with you is the process of becoming. The part where you give away little bits of yourself to places and people – it's existing. If humans were ceramics, the marks that the craftsmen leave on them would be what the pottery is going to look like. The clay that spun in the craftsmen's hands would be how they know that we were real. And that's why existing is not a place for dreamers. Speak of it, yes, but we need to BE of it more. Face life; question it; challenge it back; feel the universe's pulse. We shouldn't be a silent witness but we should participate in living, and that is how we connect to the universe and with others, I think.
Sometimes I think people come into our lives either as blessings or lessons. Then I thought about it the other way round. I wonder whose life I've gone into as a blessing and whose as a lesson. We exist in others just as much as others exist in us. We don't just stop existing even after we die. We still have some pieces in others. Existence does not stand on its own; it comes with consciousness and acknowledgement. My grandmother did not cease existing when she was cremated. She's still in the words that my family speaks of. But then she will really die, or stop existing, when we slowly stop talking or thinking about her generation after generation. So you see what I meant when I said, "you die twice if you're lucky enough".
I find myself writing about him and us sometimes, because I wanted to keep it alive for a bit longer. Existentialism proves that humans have to connect with one another. And it should be uplifting because we don't just live for ourselves; we're alive so that others can be. I used to think death is how we lose people. But really, we lose them when the memories of them slowly wear themselves out - it is as if death is calling your name using someone else's microphone. The reason I write is to explain my life to myself. I've also discovered that when I do, I'm explaining other people's lives to them.
Giving birth to a piece of writing is violent – you need to remind yourself of the open wounds or bruises that haven't healed. It's an intimate process to connect with the world and make sense of your existence in it. Scientists' proof of the universe starting from nothing and suddenly was born, came from the research that the universe itself is expanding now. We don't know when it will start shrinking and disappear into nothing, but we do know that the end is nowhere near us. In this immense space-time, it is possible that we exist as long as the day the universe dies. Before it happens, I'd like to meet as many people as possible and think about them as often as I already do. I want to write them down and keep them in the little eternity that we all believe in, even if some of them might hurt. I want to write them down in the sense that they will keep existing and I will keep becoming. And when people read what I write, I will exist in their existence too. When the universe really ends, it will not be us forgetting the existence of others; it will be violent – it will consume what's left in itself until it wears everything out. The universe will shrink but the planets and stars in it won't. It will become smaller and smaller until we're squeezed into each other and melted into the Sun or other burning planets in some galaxies far, far away. The flames will swallow us whole and we will become ashes. From ashes to humans and from humans to ashes.
I took another puff and passed it on to another friend. Time's up, I should get out of the water soon. My mind was fighting with my body; struggling. But that's not what I was afraid of. Because even when I died, this would be one of the proofs that I existed. You would be one of the proofs that I existed.
