A Single Day

By: Bea Maspat

The night before I turned thirteen, my sister taught me that when you die, you die three times.

I was crying, upset that I was about to meet the age that I once dreamed of being, but in a state which I was so insecure: I ran from mirrors in public, but in private I would criticise every part of myself which I could see, and my sister was just trying to distract me.

Despite the hundreds who told me that my mind was far beyond my years, I could hardly grasp the theory.

And not until a single day, in the first year of my ‘teenage dream’, which I have lived so many of, did I finally understand what she meant.

You first die when you take your final breath.

When you have met the end of your life – wherever or whenever that may be.

I’d love to die in the comfort of my own home, if the universe allows me to.

But some may die in the midst of losing battles, or as the sacrifice for a winning one. Some may first die painfully at the hands of beautiful things – drowning in a glowing cave's subterranean lake, or poisoned by the sweetest-looking berry.

Maybe a few of us will die by our own hands – overdosing on the drug prescribed to save us, or jumping off the bridges which we feared to fall from as children, fear we had at the age which we were the safest from what this world had to tell us.

Alot of deaths can be prevented, their hearts planned to beat for years longer. But they stopped. And regardless of how unforgiving or unjust the reason, nothing can change.

No amount of denial will change the course of time – you can’t go back; you can’t save them.

The second death would be when you’re buried: your loved ones, or strangers who would’ve kept you so close to their hearts if only a butterfly had flapped its wings the day before you died, lay you down into the ground.

A place where the sun can’t burn you, but only grow the grass upon your grave. Or where the rain must soak the dirt above you to only polish the wood of your coffin. Would you call this relief? Where the things which you were so fascinated by in your youth can’t even touch you.

Those who miss you, or simply are just the bereaved passing by, will only see your name and the age at which you were frozen in time.

Your third, and final, death is when your name is said for the last time.

A moment in the future, or, for some, in the past, the noise which defined you is last made.

When the letters which you turned your head towards at the sound of, or which you were bullied for, come out of a human voice within a second, and then know silence forevermore.

You’ll know rest.

But should we pity the greats? Princess Diana, or Martin Luther King, up to Heath Ledger or Kurt Cobain? Will they ever fully die, or will they live only partially as they haunt those honouring, or pondering, them?

Or is this death a blessing? You won’t properly die until those who you’ve loved have met acceptance – in spirit you can be with them at the worst of their mourning, watch them as the cry over your grave, listen to the speeches they make at your funeral.

You’ll only die when they find joy, when they no longer tear up at the latest photo of you, smiling at them through the thirteen years you had been gone, having lost the privilege of growing up with them.

Someone told me ‘To be loved is to be known’.

If that’s true, the quickest path to genuine death is to live without love – the fastest route to resting in peace is to be unknown. The best way for your name to be forgotten is to never have said it in the first place.

My favourite colour is red.

And it would’ve been all over my kitchen floor if I didn’t find the video of me on my thirteenth birthday.

I was in the first sixth of my ‘golden years’, already feeling like I was wasting time as I scrolled through the pictures of girls younger than I was on dates, at tournaments, performing on huge stages – living out the fantasies that I quit dreaming about years ago.

I was lost in the ‘friends’ who never chose me first and tests which I only barely passed.

The video was of me in my home’s small kitchen, blowing out the candles on the cake which my sister baked me – holding in my laughter at the icing, written shakily in a nauseating yellow was the nickname I was loved for.

I would’ve died first in the room which I ate that cake, celebrating what would’ve been the final year of my life, stabbed with the knife I used to cut each slice.

My second death would’ve been full of my favourite songs, which I would’ve played on repeat that weekend, it would’ve been full of my favourite quotes from the books which I was gifted, and full of the guests I invited and which sent me cards.

My full name means ‘She who brings happiness’. For a while after my death, I would’ve brought grief, but my final death, when my family and friends have met peace with my absence, I suppose I would’ve lived up to my name.

I’m fourteen now, I’m living in a year where I am not hopelessly upset by the fact I was known but not popular, smart but not a genius, pretty but not ineffable, complementary to many friend groups but never in their group chats, spoken to at school but never invited to parties, and not at the top of anybody else’s priorities,

because I saved myself.

Not my ‘best friend’, not the girls I sit with at lunch,

I did.

And I have so many more candles to blow than the ones they blew out, that single day.