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Living through death

Survivor's guilt they call it. The unfortunate part about it is that you don't really survive, you die too. Others just can't see it and it's not quite as formal a ceremony and no one leaves flowers by your head when you're sleeping. And you go on, crippled and detached like some veteran of a foreign war that just can't get past the slide show of horror he must repeatedly view on the movie screen embedded in his retinas. People can't figure out why he is the way he is because the war is over and he's not in that rice paddy anymore and why can't he just shake it off and turn the page? Oh, he can turn the page, as can I, but the next page is exactly the same and there is no conclusion, let alone a happy one. There is but one theme: Grief, repeatedly.

I think it was William Faulkner who said something like, "Between grief and nothingness, I'll take grief." I'll take nothingness, thanks. I know grief, perpetual sadness and that residue of sorrow that resides in the marrow of my bones quite well. Loneliness grows in the gray matter of my brain and my meninges harbor misery. Nothingness I cannot attest to ever knowing, perhaps aside from a chance encounter on one of those nights where my sleep is not in fitful gasps. Isn't nothingness supposed to be Nirvana, the afterlife sought after by Buddhists, but rarely attained? Nothingness is a form of paradise, not a plight to avoid at the cost of unending anguish.

Of anguish, I too am well-acquainted. I cannot be awake for more than 10 minutes before the malignantly recycled and hauntingly trite thought processes that have clogged the cogs of my mental hamster wheel begin to coagulate and stymie any progress I had selfishly hoped to make that particular day. My mind reverts back to that same tired conversation with itself about how I should have been the one to die that night seven years ago and not Corey. I can't deny this; he was a better person by nearly every account with much more potential than what I have borne out thus far. But obviously there's not much I can go and do about it at this point. He is dead and we were friends and we were high that night and he offered to drive and I said, "Okay."

There's really nothing else. Nothing but the tree, a twisted Oak tree that hung out into the narrow winding road of the long private mountain drive that housed the party we were coming from and now stood as a makeshift memorial to Corey. Even now, at the base of the scarred Oak, flowers are placed every Tuesday by his still grieving family. My blood is probably still somewhere on that tree soaked up into the bark where neither rain nor sunlight can cleanse it. I don't know for sure, but I've seen a crime scene photo or two and our blood was indistinguishable from one another's and tattooed that damn tree with human ink.

I've never been back to that place for obvious reasons. We were both smashed that night and should never have left the house party, but we had to get the car back or that was it, we'd be screwed, grounded, busted. It's that ironic fear; the fear of your parents' judgment that makes you do what your parents fear the most. And so, like most teenagers, we knew we had to get home and we figured we'd make it-always did before. Just not this time and just not Corey.

I think Faukner undoubtedly wise, but give me nothingness. Give me blank page after blank page until eternity versus this indelible ink that fills these volumes I am bound and destined to read with hollow eyes until the day I will no longer qualify as a survivor.

Learn more about this author, Joshua Murphy.
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