Tomorrow we will be gone

“We have the potential to live multiple lives.”

I die each night.

This is particularly unsettling as I gently ‘lay me down to sleep.’

As my head graces my pillow, I watch my life wash over me in waves of hope and hate beckoning me to my reckoning.

Like a Dickens ghost, the deeds of each passing day pull my soul into its nightly grave. As the lone caretaker and sole client, I am tasked with levitating cold earth to cover the deeds of the past day.

While digging, the events of the day twitch before me, like moving shadows around a nervous rabbit.

As I lean on my shovel and survey my fresh crypt, I pause and reflect on the twenty-five thousand or so tombstones which hold the mortal coils of all my bygone days. And I ask myself.

“Who am I becoming?”

Each joyful or sorrowful tenant of those resting plots is remembered by a tombstone and its epitaph that looks down upon the mound of comforting earth.

Come on, come with me and let’s take a stroll between the rows and rows of the past nights of my life.  

Look down upon these chiseled stone tablets and you’ll see the clues of an uneven life written in those inscriptions. Inscriptions that encapsulate the lessons of each of those days gone by.

Look at this one.

“Big sisters have long memories.” (A lesson every little brother learns.)

“Don’t stick screwdrivers into wall sockets.” (Once learned, once burned.)

“More is not always better.” (Especially when it comes to a two-pound box of Chocolate covered cherries.)

“What could go wrong?” (You’ll find a lot of these in my personal cemetery right alongside of:.)

“Have I made this mistake before?”

“Just because I know where I am going doesn’t mean I’m not lost.”

“I could get lost in her eyes.”

“Children are the toughest job you’ll ever love.”

Oh, and there are more, so many more.

Heck, there will be another one tonight.

As I mutter a quick prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, and I pray to the Lord, my soul to keep,” and then slowly nestle yesterday’s soul under the warm covers of Mother Earth. Within their dirt-nap they will dream of the cold souls buried at their side and the lessons they have learned.  

It is from their dust and clay of the lesson of the prior day; I arise anew.  

Now I’m under no illusion that my renewal would, in any way, match the rise of the mythical Phoenix from its own ashes.

Nope, I imagine my rebirth will be more akin to a hungover reveler awaking to a room filled with party shrapnel, reeling with a splitting headache, and vomiting out last night’s mistakes. A day sure to be crowned with the epitaph “Oh sure, I’ll have another.”

Has it ever happened to you? You wake up in the morning and ask yourself, who am I? “How did the day change me so?”

I bet it has happened to you.

Ever met a long-lost friend and over coffee and realized that you have no clue who is now sitting across from you? That the soul you knew is dead and buried, and this one has taken their place. And then you discover your friend is as confused as you are.   

I’ll never forget the night I fell asleep as a boy and awoke as a man. And no, it wasn’t my hairy armpits that clued me in. It was the realization, no … more than a realization, it was the yearning to find someone to love, an unconditional love. A love to make me whole, to find a yin to balance my yang.

On that morning, I rose like the Phoenix, feeling ashen and a little charred around the edges but undaunted to set upon the road less taken, the road of discovery and desire, the first step on a path of many steps, hoping to transform my soul into a more suitable home for that special someone.

Then that night I died.

Again, I dug his grave and laid him down to rest.

And ask myself what words I could inscribe that would encapsulate that day’s life lesson of hope and transformation.

It is the same question each of us must ask ourselves each night.

What epitaph would you inscribe? What words of encouragement would you leave for the new you, which will rise in the morning?

I thought long and hard until I chiseled this hopeful epitaph.

“Who you are now is not who you’ll be tomorrow.”

Because tomorrow, ‘the you’ of yesterday will be gone.

Sleep well.  

        

Listen to this story.

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