Posted 6:42 PM by hx

it comes swiftly

i was looking through some old photos and was struck by the changes time has wrought. it's hard to imagine that some of these faces no longer exist, are dust and ashes in some cold urn on a bricked-up shelf.

the hardest photos to look at are those of my father in the last year or so before his death. he was always large, loud and vigorous. the cancer left him a wisp, a shell i could have lifted with one finger. all the cliches you read in books are true. in the last months, the light of his life burned so fiercely in his eyes. they shone so brightly, as if to make up for the flesh that was being stripped from his bones. that life still burns in those photos. it's hard to reconcile those last photos with the man i remember from my childhood, or the man i know now, post-death. i can never look at those photos for long, because of the terrible pity they arouse in me.

i don't really have any photos of my old boss, C. he was the nicest man in the whole place, and the sharks all looked down on him and made fun of him behind his back because he didn't behave as meanly as they did. he gave me my job, took a chance on me when no one else did, and he was always decent to me. the first time he had to scold me for something i screwed up, he did it so gently that i didn't even realize how serious my mistake was until years later. not a year after i left, he was dead of cancer, completely unexpectedly. i wish i could have been there for his goodbyes.

unreal. we're old, but not that old. certainly not at the age where we should be thinking about death, not in our generation. but already i have lost... how many people from my years in school? freak accidents, cancer... not things you expect.

i looked at T's photos. they were easier to look at than those of my father, because these were from back in the old days, when we were all fresh and young and healthy. or thought we were healthy. i didn't know him all that well. he was from a rich family and popular, and good-looking to boot. yet he was always very humble and nice, and never put on airs. apart from being schoolmates, the one thing we had in common was our birthdays - we shared the same date of birth, and when we found that out we laughed about it. now one of us is no longer here. i look at his photos and i can't quite grasp that he's no longer on this earth. perhaps it would have been more real if i had been back home for the funeral. as it was, i only heard about it through the old grapevine.

i wish i could have been there to say goodbye, even though we never knew each other that well. death makes us all comrades by default.

sometimes i'm very reluctant to go back home. i don't want to see how much things have changed from what i remember. i don't want to see the beautiful boys i used to have crushes on turned into men with greying hair and potbellies, mortgages and three kids. time creeps up on us so swiftly, and sometimes it seems that the only ones who remain the same are ourselves, or the dead.

(i know, i did it again. i'm just not very good at not being angsty when i try to think of something to write. sowwiee!! :)