Eulogy for an Apparition

Eulogy of an Apparition

I woke to the rancid odor of formaldehyde. My eyes heavy, I lifted a hand up to my face, my arms feeling light as if I were weightless, barely more than a petal on the wind. I sat up, looking blearily. Time dragged the moments it took for the voices to reach me, not my own, I realized. They seemed to be prayers, many, many incomprehensible prayers. Tears, by the thousands, all shimmering like tiny profound drops of stardust streaming crystalline milky way rivers from the eyes of loved ones; I could never remember all their names. All of them dressed to mourn, but to what did they owe mourning?

I searched the melancholy crowd frantically for just a glimpse of myself, a tiny fragment to connect me to this place, the people, their faces becoming blurred and disfigured in my haste. I ran and ran, and tripped, my hair floating down soft as ashes to my cheeks. And as I looked up, a horrifying, overwhelming, ebony coffin loomed, glaring back at me, its contents in the shadows. I gulped, I shivered, and I stood shakily slipping silently towards the open casket. Before I even glanced, I knew. I screwed my eyes up tightly, willing it not to be so as I twisted to lay eyes on the horrific truth that lay inside that fatal box of death. My heart jumped to my throat, beating madly, I imagined, my breath caught within my already breathless lungs. My eyes opened and my mouth followed, tearing into a soundless scream of horror.

There I stood, clutching white-knuckled to the polished brass handle of the too-large casket and yet, there I lay, tiny white and blue baby's breath and forget-me-nots like a mocking halo around my perfect golden-brown hair, curled just right for once. My lips pale pink glossed, simple rose tint powdered on my still cheeks, and tan dusted ever so lightly on lids long glued-shut, a blood-deprived visage, my own against a pristine, white satin backdrop. I shuddered viewing my own corpse, a morbid china doll in an eternal display case.

I stared at the explicit, naked, blunt truth, sharp as a pinprick on a fingertip. Those awful, horridly hideous, obsidian clothes I hadn't worn since the last funeral I'd been to, I wore now to my own.