Hold my hand/Won’t forget/The hourglass of sand/Won’t bury it

I furiously scribbled the haunting lyrics. The lead on the tip of the pencil that was gradually wasting away was dull, making my painstakingly written cursive foggy. Each letter lacked a definite edge, the word fading into the paper. I flipped the pencil upside. Grasped tightly in my fist, I erased every letter.

I started again, on the remnants of the first words.

Hold my heart/Sing me a song/As we drift apart/Until everything is gone

I erased the words, my way of pretending that I could delete my memories, that I could write myself a new past. I began again. Erase. Write. Erase. Write. I kept it up until there was a hole in my paper.

I guess that was my way of expressing the chaos that was trapped in my head. Something would happen, someone would spit out those terrible words that I’ve been hearing my whole life; freak, psycho, monster. Then I’d go back through my memories, think of ways to cope, but the easiest method was just erasing. I kept erasing and writing and erasing and writing until my mind was nothing except a hole in my head.

There’s a little boy up here. He’s the only one who really talks to me. Even in the afterlife I’m a loner. I don’t mind though. The others don’t need to know, they don’t need to be burdened with my past. I may be a freak, a psycho, a monster, but I’m not selfish. I don’t want to have my memories floating around in someone else’s mind for this eternity. It’s bad enough that I have to.

The boy comes up to me and asks me how somebody becomes insane. I don’t know if he knew the stories or if it is just an innocent question. I guess it doesn’t matter either way, so I answer.

“Little bits of your mind just drift away over time,” I explain. I don’t anticipate on him understanding so I keep it simple. The less words I speak, the better.

“Why?” The boy has huge green eyes. I feel like they have voices too because when they stare at me, they plead and beg, their innocence breaking through the barrier I have built up.

“Some people don’t know how to handle bad things and their emotions build up. When rainwater is added to a full lake, it overflows. But eventually, the lake evaporates, drop by drop. Sometimes, if the air gets dry enough, it disappears altogether. That’s what happened to my sanity,” I reply. I feel bad. This kid is young. His youth had been halted by a horrible fate. Maybe even Death gets desperate sometimes. Maybe he gets desperate enough where he’ll take any life, no matter how young it is.

The boy nods. “Sometimes I feel like that.”

Feel. Present tense.

“Why?” I don’t want to pry. The kid doesn’t need my questions. But I want to know. Sometimes, when I was down there, I could almost promise myself that nobody else was feeling what I was feeling. I still hoped, though, that I’d have someone to explain it all to. Now somebody does, even though it’s too late.

“I died young. I’ve got questions, the others here have questions, and sometimes those questions are just too much,” he replies.

This place is just a huge community of wandering souls. All of us are happy on some level. The newly deceased ponder their previous lives for a bit but they begin to accept their deaths and move on. From there comes the happiness. I do like it here though. Here, everybody wanders through their idea of a happy place. And mine is a park. And now, it’s just me and this boy on a bench, in a beautiful silence.

“I’m sorry,” the boy says.

“Me too.”

“Does your past haunt you?” he asks.

“Yeah. My past is a ghost. But so am I. It’ll go away soon,” I reply. “What about you?”

“I barely had a past,” he replies. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but my memories weren’t haunting.”

I nod. And we sit on the bench in another blissful silence. I like the boy. I like the fact that he doesn’t feel the need to talk all the time. Silence is necessary, and he knows this.

We talk. We talk for what seems like an eternity, but what is really just short of an eternity. He helps me forget. He helps me remember, though, too. He tells me stories, of his family, of his past. He listens as I tell my stories. He sits through the saddest ones, the ones that led to my insanity, that led to my ultimate death. But he helps me remember the good ones, too, the ones I had forgotten about because my insanity had begun to eat my brain. He tells jokes, funny ones. He reminds me of somebody I used to know, but I can’t quite think of who. He is a friend, though. And he helps me bring back my lake, drop by drop.

And that’s all I could ever ask for.