Faded Memory: An Essay about Worries, Depression, the Present and Death.

You may feel like your world would fall apart. Sometimes you would cry worrying about your future. You always spend your days getting by. Every single time, you worry about what tomorrow would bring to your plain old life. But I have something to tell you. If you haven’t realized it yet. You will just die. Maybe not soon or later. But you will. Trust me. The day would come that all you’re working for would be burned to ashes. Just like your memories. Just like you.

One day, you’re not going to be a doctor, a teacher, a nurse, a domestic helper, a pilot, a frustrated writer or dirt on somebody else’s shoes anymore. You will not be that person forever. You will not stay at the top or at the bottom either. Because soon you’ll be nothing.

If you’re lucky, you would be a memory. A faded picture. A blurred face from the past. You’re going to be a twisted, recollected, incomplete fragments on somebody else’s thoughts. A glimpse of what had been. And then after a few years, you will be forgotten. I’m bloody sure you will be. You will be forgotten. That faded picture will crumple and be dusted by time. There will be no YOU anymore. You will fade like leaves in autumn. You will turn into a collection of ashes inside someone’s expensive jar, or a tiny particle of the wind somewhere in the east, or most likely be a box of bones under a silent village. Which is nothing to be exact. Because that’s not you. That’s just what you have left behind.

You can say you’d be missed. Maybe you will be. For all those years you’ve spent, someone would look back on who you have been. They will reminisce you as long as their brains could take you back up from the bottom of their memories. But how long? How long will your memories stay on someone’s fragile mind?

Not for long.

No one’s going to be missed forever. Because that person would also not be around to remember you. They’ll soon be nothing too.

One day, you will be nothing but a name. A collection of words embedded on a marble plate, on a headstone decorated by bird shit. All your tears today, all the sorrow, all the pain will soon be nothing. Because we will all be nothing on this earth one day. A part of once upon a time. Just one tinny tiny little part of the past. But no one will remember everything we had been. More like because we’re not that historic, are we?

Not all of us could be too legendary, being printed on books, passed on to generations, names floating in the air like ghosts, which they probably are. Not all of us can be that epic. Not everyone could be heroes or be overly rated people that are praised and have their names written in the stars. The nearest I could be is be a name on a vandalized wall. A name that has letters but no meaning. Most of us will just be a person who lived and died. That’s all.

So why live when soon you will die? Why fight a war you’re sure you’re losing? Why try? Why fight the tears brought by today when someday all these tears will just amount to nothing? When we’re born nothing and would die nothing?

But isn’t that the exact reason? That soon we’ll all just die. We will soon be forgotten somehow, someday. So that makes today a miracle, doesn’t it? If tomorrow you’ll be nothing, why not be something today? Why not worry today? Why not laugh, cry, and laugh again, today? If we will all soon die then why not live? At least we did. At least we tried.

Even, one day, you’ll find yourself lying on your resting place, at least you can say that you have lived your life and had everything before nothing. You cried, you laughed, you’ve been crazy, been weird, been hated, been lied to, been loved, been happy, been cheated on, been a wreck, been fat, been skinny, been ugly, been big, been small, been mad, been sad. Been living. You might be forgotten in the future but who cares? You had your chance and you took it. You may have made a mess in your life but at least you’ve made a mess in your life. You did things. Made things. Destroyed things. But isn’t what we’re supposed to do? We do what we do today. We live for today and not for the future. It depends on the future if they’d choose to remember our nothingness.

What’s important is what’s right now. What we are today. What are you doing? Are you spending today on what’s making you happy? Or you’re just playing around because you know the sun would still shine tomorrow? But what if it wouldn’t? And the morning you wake up, before you knew, before you realize, you’re nothing. And there will no chance to be something anymore. There are no chances left to live because you’ll soon be nothing but a faded memory. A lifeless body. A regretful soul.

thatwallflowerjen