A Little Late For Unicorns

When I was five years old, the son of some close family friends committed suicide. I don't remember being told about this, or even being aware of his absence, but I do remember one thing. My sleepless nights. Laying in bed, willing sleep to come, I would begin to think. I wondered what happened when people died. My family isn't at all religious so I didn't have a belief of heaven or God to cling to in that time of uncertainty. The only outcome my 5 year old brain could come up with was nothing. Nothing happens when you die. You float in the abyss for eternity. You can't see, speak, touch, love, feel anything. For a little girl who still clung to her mom's leg when she attempted to drop her off at kindergarten, this was terrifying. Inevitably, night after night that this happened, I would begin to cry. I would cry until my sister would yell for my parents, or they would hear me as they passed by my room. They would come in my room and ask what was wrong, and through my sobs I would explain it to them. I'm not aware of any parenting books that prepare you for when your 5 year old has a metaphysical crisis, so they did the best they could. I had a calendar on my wall, cartoon pictures of ponies and unicorns, bright pink and glittery, stickers adorning the pages, marking what I felt were momentous occasions. My mom would tell me to look at the calendar, look at how happy all the unicorns are, and look at all the fun things you have coming up. You aren't going to die for a very, very long time and neither are we. They would tuck me in and leave, and thankfully their words were enough to comfort me, at least long enough to fall asleep.

These days I have a lot more to worry about, although the whole death debate still makes an appearance quite often. I'm hoping for reincarnation, because the thought of just "being" until the end of time is not only frightening, but seriously depressing. Plenty of things have made me cry in the last year or so; the suicide of someone close to my family (yes, this is a different one), the deathes of two classmates senior year, betrayal in so many different forms (cheating, lieing, stalking, verbal abuse). I can't seem to find anything that comforts me the way cartoon unicorns used to. Instead these thoughts and worries seem to fester in my mind, growing like ivy up the side of a building, slowly but surely engulfing every one of my thoughts. I need something that can take away this worry, or at least push it back a little bit. I need new unicorns.

I Would Rather Sleep Forever...