Three minutes

The longest three minutes of my life wasn't a boring math class or an awkward silence. It wasn't a piece of unbroken silence leaving the leaves of the conversation drifting down through air. The longest three minutes was the time where the coffin lowered down through the wood into the fire. Three minutes and one song. The church was silent and the music was pouring through the rivers on peoples cheeks. The song I chose had perfect lyrics, the highs and the lows were exactly how I felt. I was the only one not crying, I don't say that to be brave. The seconds that passed seem to be ten memories all hitting my stomach in a flurry of pain.

But I held my own and kept watching as the coffin lowered. I knew this was a sight I'd never forget, I wouldn't have to stop to remember every piece of this image. Burned in the back of my eyelids. The atmosphere surrounding me was strange, my family were all grieving, some people were unknown to me. Some I knew too well to believe their dry eyes. Bubbles of colour encased the people sitting around me, each one had a different shade. The colours correctly corresponding to how they felt, but the bubbles didn't touch me. Cowered away from my skin. I was an outsider in my own bubble, I didn't want to be there. I'd rather be on top of the mountains, singing the song at the top of my voice. Instead of trapped between bubbles in a wooden room watching a wooden box slowly sink through a wooden floor. The song sounded like hollow wood too. If I knocked on the air then, I wouldn't be surprised to hear an echoing knock, as if I had knocked on a hospital door. The only door I had wanted to open, it would never open again. If I could change the smallest thing about those three minutes, I'd add more green to that room. I knew the man trapped in that wooden box wouldn't have liken the stark paleness. Unnerved by the lack of texture in the invisible bark, by the lack of bird songs and insects muttering, by the lack of soft moss underfoot. By the lack of sunlight peeking between green leaves way above. By the sharp cut edges of the people in the room, they'd have been softened by nature yet they shut themselves up in a pale wooden room.

The silence after the song was deafening. It rang in my ears like the sound of metal against metal, lowering a wooden box, down through the wooden floor.