As much as life and death concern us, as much as we snip and thread together, as much as mortals pass through our hands so do their memories. When talking about us, most forget that not only souls can leave the world, but concepts, too.
Not only souls die, but feelings, moments, senses, all of it dies, too.
Maybe their threads are not individual, not a strand of red wool that pulls at our fingers, but rather the fibres from which these mere threads are made of. Like ingredients, these fibres are twisted together to create the thread of life of every single individual that passes through our hands, without these, their lives are meaningless.
Take this man, for example, he is not dead, and neither is his family. He is a man that escaped hell on earth, a man that found an outing in the hands of a royal who promised protection in exchange for reassurance. This man has not grieved the loss of a loved one, not as one would expect, this man griefs for his sister, griefs for their times together and for their connection, as twisted as it turned to be.
This lonely pianist will spend the rest of his days regretting the choice to leave his own blood behind, the only one in his bloodline who ever cared about him, the only one who has ever tried to protect him before that royal ever came into his life.
This pianist will always play tunes that lack heart strings, his songs will be lacking half of their soul, much like their player, for he has lost a part of himself the moment he chose to leave that woman alone.
Take this girl, for example.
She was yet too young to ever lose her innocence, to ever realize the weight of being alive. She was just condemned to a life of loneliness, and so the only thing her mind could possibly do was talk, and talk and talk until this little girl questioned the foundations of humanity itself.
She isn’t grieving a loved one, she isn’t grieving herself, not exactly. She’s grieving the small, ignorant girl who she could’ve never been, devoid of all notions of existentialism and madness. She cries not for death but for loss, loss of a self she was never and will never be, loss for the woman she would’ve become had she not come across the truth so young.
Take this young woman, oh how her losses pile up, really.
The threads knitted so close to her own were too tight, and too intricate, it was a surprise when they became undone by her own hand so easily. She grieves for the girl she was, for the people she was with. This young woman carried a black veil on her head not out of death, but out of loss for that girl with wild hair and bubbly laugh she once was.
This girl, who lived in pure bliss, who lived for life only and who discovered that life was worth living in her hometown far too late, and abandoned her privileged land far too quickly for the materialism of a successful education. This young woman will live in heartbreak, always recalling the golden memories in which she used to part take, always recalling she had loved, and she was loved, always recalling she had a place to call home but never finding any of it again.
Take these lovers, for example.
Their grief is odd, but not unheard of.
They lost their love, lost the force that tied them together. Loss after loss, error after error, these lovers who swore to spent their lives intertwined had won nothing but heartbreak and numbness out of lack of attempting to actually love each other.
These lovers forgot, in between court papers and busy schedules, how to love each other. Not to say they stopped loving each other, but as time went on they forgot how to show it, how to let that love be known, how to avoid a golden alliance on their fingers to be the only thing that represented their love.
They will carry this burden to their graves, knowing that they became lethargic to working on the only relationship that would’ve ever given them happiness.
And now, take a man.
One sole man who hasn’t lost anything yet, but who soon will.
This man has grown to resent humanity for all its crimes against their own, and he has a right to do so, but also lacks the understanding that humanity thrives on the living and the dead. Humanity is a dual concept, much like the creators of it.
Humanity needs hypocrisy and cruelty as well as honestly and kindness to exist, it cannot live without it. Much like Janus, humanity needs both sides of its soul to exist, and even if both sides resent each other, like snakes intertwined together, they can never separate themselves from one another in any shape, aspect or concept.
This man can rage all he wants, and can condemn at his own kin as much as he pleases, but he does not understand that he is one with them.
As much as he recoils on the thought of it.
Humanity cannot exist without its two sides.
Life, Death.
Loss, Gain.