Us, the Living
It’s a tiny room with concrete floors and yellowish walls. I am here, on a cold, blustery Monday. The tasks are generally mundane- cutting paper, pasting together files, today I am putting the files away. I take each one in my hand, the shades of red, green, purple in a stationary rainbow. Reading each name at the top, I open the creaking metal drawers, slowly, as not to pull them off their hinges. L after M after G I put each one away. And then. I see scrawled on the edge in blue ink a phrase “end of life”. I shiver a bit, it’s cold outside after all. But I am piqued now, I open the folder slowly, secretively, glancing around to ensure I am alone. The inside of the folder becomes the coldest thing in the room. There are three pictures, a baby with an oxygen tube, one with its parents, and another with extended family. I put together the pieces in my head, reluctantly. This was the last day the child ever lived. Its parents, in an act of beautiful, tender pain, had their baby photographed. These paper images are all they have left of their child’s life. I don’t know what to feel really. Some things are too big to confine to any one emotion. Though now, the folder seems to emit warmth, like a crackling fire on a winter’s night. The little eyes of the baby, the ephemeral smiles of the parents, knowing each breath could be the last. And here I am, in the back of a storage room, all of this taped to a red office folder. I pull open a metal drawer, it creaks, something inside of me joins it. Just like that, M after L after G I place the folder away. Death, neatly stowed.
            Today is my birthday. I think about that baby. He had only one birthday, his very day of birth. I think about all of the times I have resented life. I think about how many times I have loved being alive. I think that both are natural, though one is preferred. I think about the sprawling-ness of life. It cannot be neatly stowed. It does not start here, and it does not end here. It goes on, bigger than us, composed of us, the living, us, the no longer living on Earth. I think about it all and I still don’t really know how to feel.
            One day I too will have my whole life in a red folder. But what happens before and after that folder, that is living.