Rabbit Holes.

• Cassandra Raulinaitis, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2012

Only a little while ago did I begin to understand the concept of death and dying. I use to believe that as soon as we are born we are dying. Are we not growing older and older until we die? Is that not what dying is? Coming of the age when you eventually pass away from this world and into the next? I have always believed each and every person in the world is dying; the definition of it seems so unclear to me that we all might as well be destined to die. One does not chose their death, the time in which they pass from the Earth and sink into the folds of an endless sleep, or how some believe you are born again as another thing, person, animal or monster.

It was not until just a little while ago did I begin to see the true meaning of dying, the all-encompassing reason why we die and what it means to find your life flee you without a moments glance and a never ending sleep swallows you like the cool waters of the ocean and you drown. I was sitting in the graveyard, the place I go to think and weave stories of the dead so that they can once more become the living and have a life that is filled with joy, but also carries the sorrows that are drowning this world. I never made any of those imaginary people into heroes, none of them became anything other than an ordinary person, with ups and downs, grief and pain, and joys that they would never imagine as well as terrors that they begged to never hear of.

And their cries filled my mind at night asking me why I had created such a nightmare in their lives? They begged me in voices that whispered low and sinister. The cold folds of their words bored into me. Did they deserve it? What had they done? It was like a symphony of the most depressing type of music, pushing and shoving against my skull until I lay in bed, my eyes scrunched up tight, my hands glued to the sides of my heads, pulling at my hair to stop the pain that raged in me. When the pain became too much I would begin to cry and run out into the cold bitter night, to the graveyard where I would sob and scream and yell at them to understand, I screamed at them, my voice high and frantic, to see that they needed that pain, they needed that terror, and there was no good in the world when you did not suffer.

It was on one of these nights that I found out that answer to the question of dying. I pondered my reasons for a while and as the streaks of the morning light hit the sky, like candle wax striking an oiled canvas like a random array of stricken blobs flowing to form the bright orange ball of radiant light that is our sun and I smiled. The corners of my lips twisted ever so slightly, the curvature of my mouth soft and delicate almost saddened, but holding onto hope. Death does not simply begin from when you are born, it does not plague you all your life. I realized that you become the dying when in your mind you have ceased to see a new beginning and everything fresh and joyful has ended and all you can see is the end. Dying is when there is more end in your mind than there is beginning.