Closed Casket

Wrote this in the middle of a test. Possibly not the best place for inspiration to arise, but who am I to deny the creative process.

It's yet another closed casket funeral. 

I sigh, a pitiful one at that. I hadn't been Max for long enough to make friends, but I'd hoped my colleagues would at least RSVP. They didn't. I refreshed the email over and over, and no replies. No reply from Dale- who's coffee I'd brought day after day, and who liked it black but with sugar. I thought his coffee choice was strange, but I didn't tell him. No reply from Janet- who's dog I walked when she caught the flu. I hate dogs, and hers only reinforced that.  

Neither of them new how I took my coffee, and neither knew that I couldn't stand dogs. Can't stand dogs, I correct myself. A funeral doesn't mean I'm dead. Too easy to fake.

Ultimately: neither cared to RSVP in regards to my funeral. 

It should hurt, but it doesn't. I suppose after years of such affairs- one grows impartial to the coldness of others. No matter how so though- one never truly grows numb to the unfair sting of the winter breeze. I hug my jacket tighter round my shoulders, as I sit behind my favourite church pew. My knees cling to my chest, and I cling to my knees. 

Wait! This isn't my favourite pew at all. I had thought it was, when I snuck in with the early hours of the morning, but its completely different. Colour, feel, and direction of the planks. I see that now.

This may not even be the right church, or even the right funeral for all I know. All I know, is not very much at all. I watch the odd mourner mutter a prayer, and I squint to discern names from faces. None arise. 

That's how it gets when you live the life of a coward, always running, always restarting. Coward. I must wear the title like a badge of merit- though it stands for the opposite- as to do otherwise only reinforces the fact. 

I suppose life just got claustrophobic again, suffocating. 

This is the seventeenth life I've lived, but I haven't really lived any of them.

The seventeenth funeral of mine. All closed casket for there's no body to look upon.

A closed casket funeral, for a man who refuses both life and death.