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May 01, 2005
Mayday
Here it is, May 1st.
Here it is, snowing in Minnesota.
Here it is, 29 days until I graduate from college.
Here I am, meeting people to whom I will have to say goodbye in less than a month.
Here I am, living every college experience for the last time.
Here I am, not knowing where I'm going to be or what I will be doing in June.
The washing instructions on one of my shirts said to wash inside out. Without thinking twice, I stuck my arm in and pulled the neck through the waste in one swift motion. Then time froze. Sunlight rushing in the window illuminated what appeared to be dust billowing from the sweater. As I wondered at the strange beauty of the spectacle, I realized that the dust must have actually been dead, dry skin from my body that had been transfered to the sweater after I removed it. Now it had been released, and was floating free in the atmosphere, randomly and chaotically.
We are dust, and to dust we shall return.
A friend changed his Instant Messanger profile recently to include random "bet you never knew" facts. The first one states that the average lifespan of a dragonfly is 24 hours.
I had a nightmare the night before last. It was the end of the world, and people were dying off one by one. Before long, I heard a shout, and I knew what had happened. I ran around the corner to see that my mom had fallen to the floor. I grabbed her hand as I watched her eyes glaze over. "I love you," I whispered. She mouthed the same words back, and then I watched her die. When she was gone, I wailed at the top of my lungs. Halfway through my breath, I woke up with a start.
I cried for at least half an hour. I knew it was just a dream, but that was no reassurance. My mom's death will occur someday, and I can only pray that I can be at her side when it does.
A slightly less troubling thought is that my own days are numbered. I am not frightened by the thought of my death as much as I am humbled with the reality that I will not live forever. How often do I treat my time as if it will eventually run out? It is, after all, expendable.
I have no neat way to wrap this up. A nice way would probably be with the hope of life after death. But let's face it: no one knows what that will be like. No one can come back and tell us how it's going. (Unless you believe that John Edward character and his Crossing Over show, in which case, I'm very sorry.) But I know I'm going to savor the time I have with my family and friends. And I'm going to try to stop doing stuff just to do stuff and think a little more often, "I'm living, thank God."
Posted by Megan at May 1, 2005 10:55 PM