Survival

The year of your death is all spent on your own.

You wash ashore on that faraway land that is and is not your home, the place you will never belong to, no matter how many times you escape to it. You are drawn to isolation by the same force that makes you breathe, mouthful after mouthful of winter air.

You stand at the heart of the garden, the one you only ever saw from the windows of your study. You let the cold in, the icy wind that is just starting to envelope Europe, and its hands tie knots in your lungs — you need it to freeze your entrails, to descend in elegant swirls, until what is left of you chooses if surviving is really worth it.

You let it get to your fingers, rigid beneath useless gloves, before your mouth opens on its own. For the first time in almost sixteen years, you can scream.

And you never want to stop.

You need weeks to pass before your eyes can open again. You must follow the fireplace, in its languid, ephemeral state, to snap out of your constant waking dream. You find yourself studying the irregular dance of the flames, those strands of yellow that flicker and vanish just to give you warmth.

You watch it a little bit longer, every day, writing down whole years of answers in its light. From something consumed, new energy. From a whole world in cinders, a new beginning. It reminds you of what you could be.

You understand, to its fullest extent, why you needed to die to be reborn.

When the evening falls, you focus on the cinders. You dig in with your fingers, spread them on the floor, until all you see through the lamplight are black and silver twirls. They match your eyes and your hair, darkened with sorrow, with faith. You let your thoughts slip, and you understand.

To burn brilliantly in fire, and rise from the ashes. It takes effort, when you can afford none. It takes faith, even without anything to believe in.

But you were never supposed to start with nothing on your hands.

You return to what you have with the spring, and as nature awakens, so do you. You are destined to reunite with your future — or so you think, as your plane drifts through the air like it would in a dream. You know it will be hard, as everything in life is. But you still cannot imagine how.

One year later, you go back to the origin and the end of it all, just to find you were wrong about countless things.

You find yourself swallowed by his pain, fighting to save a life who, unlike you, did not have the opportunity to choose. Only then, as the two of you struggle against the coils of time and fate, can you fully embrace the effects of death on others.

Deciding to live is a luxury that few can afford. And, for the people who are left behind, choice weighs so much more than an accident.

You see through your error gradually, but each time is a pang of regret. You never really knew he cared, or how much, or for how long. You could never see it until now, when it cannot be helped.

You realize you don't have any right to ask for a chance to start over. He gave you the greatest possible chance, one year ago — a chance you almost threw away. But you find, soon enough, that he knows no different path to follow. He will keep doing it, for the rest of your lives.

There, in a true matter of life and death, you are left alone with a choice, the one you still have to make. It looks complicated, and with too little time left — yet, when you find his eyes, embracing your own path comes with the flow.

You don't need to make it impossible. Neither of you has to do this alone.