Alyssa

Grief. It was everything they told us it was.

Isn't it funny-- how we always think that the rules and generalisations of the ordinary world do not apply to us; to assume that we are unique; only to realise later that we are no different; that perhaps in the grand scheme of things, we are all one and the same? All the life lessons we overlooked, all the collective experiences we have as a society over the years neglected, all for nothing. All for merely meandering at this moment, pondering how all life would have pivoted if only I realised I was just one among the millions that once were and soon would be. Only another forsaken soul to walk the forgotten grounds of a forbidden planet.

Alyssa once asked me whether Earth, with all its pain and suffering, was indeed the torturous hell we were always warned about. I did not have an answer for her back then, and I am unsure whether I still have one. The eternal burning portrayed in the books, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps it was only the romanticisation of yet another lost poet of how our hearts sear in pain as we traverse from one chapter of life to the next. Sometimes I wonder if this piercing pain is what it means to be alive. Or whether we are repaying for our sins from a past life, one we lived long ago and can no longer remember the details of. A hell within us, where we chain ourselves to a harrowing heaviness, forever threatening to carry us into the void.