By Xarnah Stewart
Editors: Ashley Yeung and Alloe Mak

I’m 19 years old and I’m driving to my best friend’s dad’s funeral by myself. On the way over, I thought about the boyfriend I had at the time, and then I felt bad about thinking about my boyfriend. Then I thought about my best friend’s dad and how I knew him, and how he used to ride his bike when my best friend and I used to hang out at the park. I thought about my grandpa who has dementia; he’s 92 and he’s dying. Of course he’s dying. He’s 92. Then I thought about God. I thought about God for the first time in a long time. I didn’t think about religion because I already thought about it a lot. I didn’t think about the God I was raised to know but thought about how people say that God is dead, because all of a sudden all these people around me are dead or they are losing people to it, and I don’t know what to do for them. It scares me because I love them. And I’m 19 now, and I’m driving to my best friend’s dad’s funeral and I want to tell her that everything is going to be okay, but I don’t know if it will be. That’s why I’m thinking about God—because I realize now why people believe in a God.

I grew up kneeling on church floors. I used to pray all the time. If I didn’t hold the door open for someone, I prayed. When I thought about someone badly, I prayed.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

I prayed because I was scared of dying and I prayed because I was scared of hell. My knees used to bleed with the weight of my sins, and my hands would become calloused with the wear of my prayers.
Now, I don’t even know how to say grace before meals. I sometimes forget how to open a prayer.
But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about God.

There are paper cranes above my head; cranes I folded myself when I was 17 pretending to be 10. Now, I’m 19 and everything is different—different from when I was 17 and different from when I was 10. My dad doesn’t check on me when he hears me cry at night anymore, and my mum doesn’t tell me good job. I’m 19 now and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’m doing.

My mother played “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen when her dad died after she found out behind the desktop computer in the living room. I found it strange then that a few hours before my mother learned of my grandfather’s passing, my older sister and I were pulling each other’s hair to see who got to play Club Penguin on that same computer. And suddenly my mother was sitting there by herself, crying. I had never seen my mom cry before. When I saw her sitting—so frail—crying to herself with no one to hold her, I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I wanted to make it stop because she wasn’t supposed to cry. I tried to make her laugh; I hugged her as close as I could, I cupped her face in my hands and gave her kisses all over—I did everything that she did to me when I cried to make me stop. But she didn’t.

Maybe that was the first day that I understood my mom to be someone other than just my mother—maybe that was the first day that she remembered that she was something other than a mother.
But now there are paper cranes above my head instead of the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars that my dad put up when I was a kid. But those eventually fell down one by one, and I painted over the purple walls of my childhood and I started to pretend like my ten-year-old self never existed. Because I truly hated her.
I don’t miss being 11 years old until I talk to my childhood best friend and remember how much fun we had at that age. I’m learning to miss who I was before—the way that I saw the world was beautiful and untainted. That me said silly things that I would never say now and she meant them. She loved largely and deeply and truly—different from the way she does now. She was scared, and she still is, but she believed that she could change the world. Her heart was bigger than her brain; every negative thought was followed by a positive one. Now, she is colder and quieter, and older but not wiser. She knew more when she was younger, now she knows nothing. Her heart is more shriveled now, but it’s still filled with love to give. She has always known she was someone to give out her love, but now she holds it close to her – she does not want to get hurt anymore.
And, lately, I’ve also been thinking about death, too.

Sometimes I feel like I am sitting in the corner of an empty room, facing the wall and wearing a dunce cap. The room is bare but the door is open. No one is telling me to stay but I do not move. I do not know why I was cast into this corner, but I am bound to it. It feels like I was created on that stool and, therefore, will die on that stool. So the world has never felt big to me—it has always felt small. It has always looked like beige, bare walls. I can always feel things happening right within my reach but never turn around to look.

The world is too scary.

But Death has always scared me more. I think that is what makes me so scared of life. I was never scared about running out of time or losing my own life too early; I was scared about what would happen to my friends and my family after my passing. I am scared of having to grieve. I believed, and sometimes I still believe, that if I lose the people closest to me, a part of me might die. I’m scared if it happens that I will never be able to move again because I love too big and too fast sometimes, and the people I hold closest to me now tether me to reality, to soil, and to the sounds of everything. If they leave me, what will I be? How will I be?

I’m 19 years old, turning 20 in January, and death still scares me. I pretend to be a kid when I don’t know what else to do and think about God sometimes. I drive to funerals now and forget the songs I used to sing when jump-roping as a kid. I’m getting older and I wonder, still, how to stop it.