They say life plays out in chapters. When a chapter wraps you reflect on it before starting the next one. I think they are wrong. Life is not a book. Books have endings. Closure. Life doesn’t have closure or a heroes journey. What it does have is a series of decays.
When you are a kid you see the magic and wonder all around. This is the first decay. The loss of innocense. It happens at a different age for everyone but it is inevitable. The sun comes up and the rainbows turn out to just be an optical illusion.
When you reach adolescence you experience the second decay. Your childhood dies. You are expected to figure out which of your childhood interest remain important while making room for feelings you don’t have the skills to understand. You go have to start taking everything seriously because the future is beating down your door witha crowbar and its ready to punch you in the gut.
Your first heartbreak is the third decay. It could be the loss of a friend, a loved one or that first special someone who took a chance on getting close to you. But it will end. No matter how good someone is for you, no matter how important they are, no matter how much they make life worth living, they will leave you sooner or later.
The rest of your life is just an endless string of decays. Your hopes fade. Your dreams turn into nightmares. Your interests become distant memories. Every day you get closer to the final decay. When your body gives up and your soul fades away. This is the curse of life.
It doesn’t end there. Once you are gone the decay of who you were begins as others forget about you. They might mourn you at first, miss you from time to time, then forget about you in time. That is the real death. When there is no one left who remembers you, your truly gone. Forgotten. faded. Like you never even happened.
