Vivid Still

Sometimes, it's still so vivid behind my closed eyes. The time, the place, the way I stood up by the broken wall of our house as my mother talked on the phone by the front door. The way she slid down crying. The feeling of something sinking inside of me as I heard part of the conversation. The way everything seemed to move in slow motion as I rushed in to support my mother. My uncles. My aunties. Everyone in that compound seemed to be crowding us as we listened to the phone call. Then suddenly my younger siblings were there in disjointed scenes. My cousin was talking on the phone, delivering the bad news.

And then the memory rushes to my mother, uncle, and I driving--such an excruciatingly long drive--while I cried silently to avoid causing more pain. Then another call telling us to skip the hospital and go straight to the morgue. And then the morgue. Filled wall to wall of bloated bodies, victims of the last typhoon just a few days ago. Some from another superstorm. The smell of formaldehyde overpowering everything else. And then the table with the unrecognizable body. Full of holes and lacking its pair of false teeth which distorted the jaw. And blood. There was still blood everywhere. The formaldehyde covered some of the smell, but one remembers the smell of spilled blood nonetheless. The crying and fainting. But not me. I couldn't. I had to be still. At nineteen, I had to be still like a tree and just absorb everything standing still.

I open my eyes. The tears come again. That sinking feeling that never left a part of me. That nineteen-year-old who will always be trapped, unable to fall, unable to give up. Sometimes I feel like I should quit. Maybe that would make the images fade away. But I can't. And maybe it won't.

The tears dry for now. And I close my eyes again. The images are still there, still vivid. But I'm a little calmer now. A little older. With thousands more miles to go.

A perennial nineteen-year-old tree planted by the fickle river.