Nothing impacts life more than death.

Death has been something that I feared my entire life, because it was a world of the unknown. The only people that know how it feels to die are no longer living to tell of its mystery.

At the beginning of the year 2015, death finally made its way to my door but it did not come for me. It went to a loved one. It came for someone that I was extremely close with, someone who shared half of my genes. It came for my mother’s nephew, my younger cousin.
I felt so betrayed.

I felt every hair on my body stand up and I jumped up and down as if I was being electrocuted. I did not want to believe what was happening and I wanted to know who gave death the order to touch my family. For the first time in my life, I knew what it meant to be alive.

Death made me sober.

For years, I never valued life, I never saw it as a gift, I never saw myself fortunate enough to have it. I always lived as if tomorrow was promised and I always lived as if I had time to get things right. I took everything for granted. I knew of people passing and had distant relatives die within recent years, but I’ve never experienced death of this magnitude. To be with someone the day before, only for them to be gone for eternity the very next day, puts everything into perspective. This was something I could not run from, but something I had to face.

I had to face death and acknowledge how very real it was.

This was not a bad dream that I could wake up from, this was my reality. I hated my reality and went straight into denial. I felt as if I was floating for one week; I still catch myself floating, sometimes. At just twenty two years of living, my cousin’s life was done. All he had was twenty- two years to be alive. Twenty- two years to make his short life worth living. Twenty- two years to carry out goals. He never knew how much time he had, but he was always busy as if he knew his time was running out.

There are so many people who have life but are dead on the inside. They have forgotten what it was like to be alive. I was one of those people…

I find myself within recent years lacking motivation and always sleeping. No longer did things to excite me, I was just going through the motions, waiting for something grand to happen. Waiting for something to give me a reason to be alive. I had no clue that death would awaken me in years and weeks to come and now I have entered a standstill.

I feel as though, I’ve been living my life so very wrong for the twenty- four years that I have been on this earth so far. I’m not sure how much time I have but I know if my life were to end today, I know that it would have been a wasted life, full of potential.

There are many things that I am talented in and I take for granted the gifts that have been placed within me. I give up for fear of failure rather than cultivating these things that can possible change my life for the better and give me a new meaning of what it means to be alive. I am no risk taker, I play it safe every single time.

I no longer want to be these things, I want to be alive, I want to live my life and have so much to show for it. I no longer want to be scared of death, that it cripples my ability to live.