Nitawa

when the world feels like it’s over, do you keep going?

There are a lot of things that don’t get taught to you in school. There are a lot of things that the adults in your life don’t get around to explaining to you or warning you about.

Some of those things you will experience and be too young to really understand. You might even experience a few of them more than once

One of those things is death.

Specifically, the death of someone you really love.

They don’t get to the part where one day is going to be the last day you see their contact blink across your phone. Or to where one day is gonna be the last day you send them a funny video you saw. Or when one day is gonna be the last time you lie around in your favorite underwear, drinking ice-cold Cokes and eating UTZ and smoking cigarettes, watching true crime TV and napping in between all three.

To top it all off, what they REALLY don’t tell you is that after they’re no matter how many more ice-cold Cokes you drink, and no matter how many of that favorite cigarette you smoke, you’ll never get to do it with them again. In fact, you might not ever want to drink or smoke one again, on the off chance you get that god-forsaken lump in your throat and have to blame those tears and weird looks on the sun or the wind.

Nobody mentions the fucked up constant heartbreak of picking up the phone to call them, or saying to yourself “I haven’t talked to ____ in a while…”, or opening your chat log to get slapped with the date of the year prior because OOPS they’re, you know…

Don’t get me started on the songs that make you think of them. The ones you never want to hear again but can’t stop playing on repeat for an hour until your eyes and nose and throat are desert dry and you feel like you could never cry again even if you tried.

Or feeling like you need to scream, but when you do it’s never quite loud enough,

Or letting yourself cry and it never quite feels long enough,

Or the wondering when it’s all going to stop feeling quite like this?!

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I suppose if anyone really had an answer to it all, it would be wrapped in a bow on a Barnes & Noble shelf with “DEATH FOR DUMMIES” in big yellow letters, right? Even if it isn’t, a little heads-up about it all would have been greatly appreciated.

So, I guess what I’m really asking the universe at the end of it all is, where do I go from here? I assume there’s still so much time left. But how do you go on when half your heart is gone?

Solange said she tried it all, and nothing made it better, but maybe I’m built different? Surely I can drink it away with no problems later.

Of all the things to never learn.