Lets take a trip down memory lane.
Little snippets from front to end.
I always remembered, the sweet summer days and those very rare blistering winter storms.
Those fights we had as kids with each other over the littlest things.
The first time my father showed me around the car shop, his wild face of jubilation in explaining his craft. The acrid smell of automobile fluid and gasoline. The sounds of pneumatic drills drilling and air compressors compressing. Such things define you when there's so little in the history known as you. I sometimes still smile thinking about my father's face covered in motor grease.
I remember the firmness of my handshake with the Dean at my college graduation ceremony as he handed me my diploma for Mechanical engineering. The first step in a long and fulfilling career of designing a multitude of different machines for different industries from aerospace to the automobile industry.
My parents embracing and congratulating me a thousand times over for making it through school. I remember each of their embraces during their final hours as well, my gratitude for their love was given back a million times more.
The tenderness of my wife's face, I remember that much more than many other things.
How I would love to dance with her one last time, spin her around before pulling her back, embracing her. Then and now, I miss her.
Robby’s first bike ride, wobbling like a spinning dreidel about to fall over. But he never did, and I was proud of him for it.
Sonia dressed up dashing in a scarlet threaded blouse with checkered skirt, walking away with her date to prom. I remember standing by the door, listening to her plastic gem encrusted high heels clop down the walkway. She never looked back, and I recall feeling bittersweet.
The births of my grandchildren, the circle of life repeating ever onwards.
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You blink once and suddenly you have everything you ever wanted but time.
I remember all the bad as well.
The death of my wife, long since passed, and Sonia, a slow struggle against Parkinson's until she too was snatched by deaths grip. There are many others, a life can't be so incomplete with so little misery but these things are very much the worst of it.
These struggles between happiness and suffering is what proves we are human.
He had experienced so many different things and remembered so much but it was time to try something new, death.
Nothing too drastic of a thing, simply the end of a natural process.
I had made it to a 100, old and dusty, more wrinkles than the number of years I had been on this earth. Dying of old age in a hospital bed, surrounded by my children and their children, what more could one ask for. Little bittersweet smiles, holding hands and the beeping sound of the monitor slowly slowing down until it was but a drip. And then it stopped.
And so did I with it.
……………………..
Contrary to my expectations, there was a continuance after death, the body was gone but the mind was still awake adrift in the sea of nowhere. Blackness, a void, the in-between as I would later call it.
A strange experience incomparable to anything I had ever felt. Then, like a searing branding iron, words scrawled across my mind, burning the message there like a torch amongst his memories.
Your gift, your curse, a tool of chaos
A bringer of change, do not pretend
Mend the world before the end
Befriend the one of aquamarine and fiery red
Head to the east, keen spirt and death reap
Then there were was noise and pain and lights, sounds of children giggling and men dying. The ground shook with the reverberation of an earthquake. My body, no my soul was being twisted and compressed, pure agony alighted my existence with no end in sight.
A woman whispered in my ears, a voice of soothing comfort, “You will be alright, sleep now.”
And the man formerly known as Mark Holland was whisked away. To a new place and time, a new journey. For this was not the end, but the beginning of a new story in a world Mark could hardly imagine.