Death.

Death doesn’t just come when you’re old. It comes when you are a child, barely awakened to the world and now well-acquainted with its grief. When it comes, it never leaves. You know it earlier than you should and you have no skills or tools to deal with that pain. So you suffer. It becomes part of you in so many hurtful ways. You dread closeness because that means there will be emptiness. You are scared of love because that means loss. But you don’t know how to deal with this as a child, so you just become scared. That scared pours into everything.

You start talking to God because you were taught He could stop bad from coming to get you again. You start believing that if you are good your people won’t die, God won’t punish you or teach you that lesson. You start performing rituals to assure yourself and show God that you are good, your people can’t die. If you’re good you don’t have to feel that again.

You stop allowing yourself to feel the grief because it’s too much to handle. You shut off the emotion. Just focus on your rituals and they will protect you. Then you grow up and lock the grief further away because that child who hurt is still inside you and is still scared and doesn’t have the skills to handle that intensity except to ritual. Keep ritualing. But you’re still afraid. And your fear finds you every morning and every moment you are alone. You crave people to keep the pain away, but you are scared to bring them close because that means they will leave again and you can’t do that again.

By now your mind doesn’t let you remember the details of the death you experienced as a child because it is too much. You couldn’t cope except to shut it out and let the memories go. But your body remembers. It remembers to be tense and prepared, but your mind can’t unfeel the emotions locked in forgotten memories.

You grow up and become stuck in a place and time you can’t remember, but you can feel in every new thought and every new experience that looks and feels similar in some way, no matter how small. So the pain stays always present in your mind, but hiding just there, somewhere behind thought. You can feel it hiding in shadow. That fear is enough to keep you from engaging in the day for fear of disturbing what’s hiding. If you look at something maybe a thought will cross your mind and it will touch the shadows and wake the pain. So you stop looking. You stay in bed and perform your rituals—going over every thought to make sure it’s safe, going over every possible happening in the day that hasn’t come yet to make sure you’re ready and prepared so you won’t wake what is scary in the shadows in your mind. New things become scary because they could bring something unexpected and could awaken the pain. And you still can’t handle the pain, not that primordial pain. Not again.