To become old is to preserve you
There was this trend on TikTok weeks ago, where people put on the “aged” filter as it replicates the older version of them. When I took a turn to join the trend, the tears piled up at the edge of my eyes, because then I saw you, after a long time, breathing, and the memories that made you, you.
Remembering you is a reminder to always be good to people in our life, to be then framed among flowers after we withered.
Remembering you is to realize that love can transcend between life and death, it keeps alive far much longer than its person lived.
But remembering you is a hollowness when I caught neither of my nieces and nephew knew you, moreover loved you as much as I do. Then it means that you, your stories, memories, and even the love would end in me, my sisters, and my cousins’ generation, it would stop there and evaporate as we lost the last of our breath. You will then be erased: a person that I love, and will always love, even when I kept holding you back.
In the movie, Coco describes it as The final death. As cited from Pixar Wiki,
The Final Death is an event that occurs in the Land of the Dead if nobody in the Land of the Living remembers them. They will become weaker as the last living person who remembers them begins to forget them, eventually fading into oblivion as they are forgotten.
The love couldn’t be cascaded to them, because they would never know you nor feel the love that you overflowed into our hearts.
I’m currently on a quest to find the reason why people need to bring another soul to this predicted shattered earth. How can I be so blind to notice that we’d never actually cared about the child. We care for our souls, scared that one day it’ll be forgotten, and so do our memories, of joy and sorrows that filled in. We are scared to learn that the pain that we bore throughout our lives might be…
meaningless,
Hence we need another soul to sustain our stories, lives, and failures. To put the weight of fixing it to the generation after us because we have failed.
We have failed our lives.
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I remember the day you were gone.
I was in the shower. It was the day of the field trip that my friends and I excitedly waited. But the day didn’t come to me, as I sat in the car, not with a giddy adolescent spirit that filled in but with the gloomy silence that I couldn’t put into a word, until today.
I remember feeling perplexed and slightly bitter to leave the one and only field trip out of three years of JHS. I don’t recall crying, although I kept telling myself to cry since it’s the right way to respond to the death of your loved one but I can’t, I didn’t (yet) and I punished myself for not shedding a single tear during 5 hours trip to your kampong.
I didn’t see your last face, what expression you imprinted as your last, nor conduct the prayer to guide you back to god’s embrace. But you waited for me, at least to escort you to your final place on earth. You sent me the brightest full moon I’ve ever seen. In the murkiest path -almost like a jungle- the lights cleared the way to you, fostered my courage to let go of any spookiest visions I had, and I never set foot there since then.
I remember crying toward the moon, at how it beams like the warmth and smile you emitted every day, even when your sickness rocketed. That’s the reason why I never understood when people said “At last, she’s not struggling with her sickness again” because, in front of me, you’ve always kept your heads up and smiled, and never I witnessed your face show any hint of struggle.
Letting go of you was seeing my father’s back, dropped, as in his gravity. The first time I saw his solid back turned frail. He stood still, as the crowd receded before the rain until it was himself alone stood atop of you. I tapped him to go back, and he answered a couple of minutes after he wiped his tears and drops of rain on his cheek. I never asked what took him so long at that time to turn back, Was he somehow able to communicate with you? or did saying goodbye to you, his first love, take a reality out of him?
Missing you was reaching on top of the bed with the lights off. You know it so well that I can’t sleep with the lights completely off, so you began telling the same old Sundanese fable, “Sakadang Kuya jeung Sakadang Monyet”, for a hundredth time, though I never knew what the ending was, since it’ll be ended on me, who dozed off not long after that, or you who continued the story in your dream.
Having you is having a motherly presence that sent me to bed, laughing with me, and never giving a single hint of hatred toward my body. Hence being around you was a warmth that I longed for, too attached to the heart, it created a void after it was gone.
Missing you was seeking your photographs that were scattered, nowhere to be found, and knowing that there’s no guarantee that my mind will still remember you well in the next 3 decades.
Hence, preserving you is loving myself getting older, as my cheeks went sag and the lines get more distinct, but I’ll becoming you, a woman that I loved, it’s an honor for me to be blessed with your features.
You are one of the reasons I’m keeping myself alive.
And God, please let me witness the day when I saw you at 13,
let it projected onto the mirror’s reflection of myself.
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And I’ll prolong your life.
as Barbie’s saying,
“Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.”
This story is one of the many realities of you, that are preserved in the form of an idea for others who don’t know you.
Although you have already ended,
But I promise you won’t be forgotten,
and I promise you’ll live forever in this,
in a collection of words whose praises you, poignantly reminiscing you.
-Love you for eternity, Nek.
