Work Text:
Human lives are short.
I knew this. I knew this fact like the back of my hand, and yet I was still terrified of the day my end would come.
Not for the pain, no. I feared the oblivion.
To have my life, my body, my mind, my soul, my identity, and the very proof that I existed to disappear without a trace. The thought that I, and everything I had ever seemed to look forward to— my dreams, my aspirations, my relationships, everything that made me myself— would never be remembered in the lives of those beyond me.
To think of how many felt this way; how many lives we have cast aside, ignored, skimmed over, and only considered as part of a larger body than as an individual, a living being, a person with their own life? How many names have been lost to the fabric of time, never to be seen again, for our history deemed them as ‘unimportant’, even though the people around them knew them as a friend, a child, a parent?
Were they kind, were they cruel? Were they loving, were they wicked? Were they energetic, were they exhausted? Were they happy? Were they acknowledged? Were they loved? We will never know.
And I, as a person who has nothing to gain, nothing to lose, no proof to show others that I was a living, breathing human? The thought of becoming a ghost was terrifying. Would I ever have an impact on the world?
Or would I be forgotten and left in the ashes of time?