Alive, But Dead

By Zaina Starr

The day I lost my mom, the day she died, was the day I learned what it meant to actually cry.

An unbelievable tragedy, to ever have to experience and to be the one in charge of all my deceased mothers left over business.

The first day I knew what it was like to become an adult; making decisions for a parent instead of them making the decisions for me.

Holding it all together for all my little sisters and my Nannan, I still don’t know how I manage that.

Then years later, that seemed a whole lot less, losing my nan, my best friend, the navigator of my troubles I’ve had in my life.

That’s the day I knew I would and could not ever be the same again.

This time I grieved more and longer, when no one else seem to grieve at all.

A connection that day was lost; a feeling of missing something and the desire to continuously search for it and never find it, every minute, of every day, since Nanny left me and went to be with my mommy.

How to beat normal again?

How to get anyone to understand that I was just a nobody here left without a soul no longer a purpose.

I’m just present, here, now.

I don’t see the future any more no more it have desire for a future either.

How my pain, my tears, and my emotions built up into flames, and that to extinguish the fire, I just stay here, in the present with no desires, no purposes, no more life in me to live.

Alive, that dead. In other words, hell.