Pen Pal

by J.T. Geissinger

When someone dies, you start counting all the ways you failed them.

I close my eyes and stand there wondering how a person would know if they lost their mind. But I force myself to stop thinking about it because the signs of insanity probably include imagining the rain is a burglar and fleeing for help to the home of the roofer you fired and turned down for sex.

How naïve we are when we’re young. How easily we trust that the sun will keep rising and setting, warming our days. And what a terrible blow it is to discover it isn’t the sun that makes things bright, but the people who love us, so that when they’re gone, everything is plunged into darkness.

“I know you think I’m strong. But the problem with strong things is that they’re brittle. They can’t bend under stress. They just break.”

It’s incredible how many different people one body can hold. We all walk around with a thousand strangers inside us, slumbering quietly until someone else wakes them up. Like the jolt of electricity that reanimated Frankenstein’s monster, all it takes for our sleeping giants to jump to life is a single spark.

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

I can’t believe I’m getting reprimanded by a medium wearing orthopedic shoes about the proper attitude toward my own haunting, but here we are.

What we call memory is the intersection between imagination and fact.

Memories are the stories we tell ourselves about the important events in our lives. In the telling, some details get lost, others embellished, until truth is closer to fiction.

I don’t claim to have any answers, but I’ll leave you with something Helen Keller once said: “Death is no more than passing from one room to another.” I suppose we’ll all eventually find out.