You never know when it could be your last day. Living, breathing, alive and well. You never know when you’re going to breathe your last breath. It could be today, tomorrow, tonight, twenty minutes from now or ten years down the road. No one knows how or when they will die. But its funny how everyone takes life for granted and laughs at death. Let me ask you something. When you die will you be laughing?

Someone once told me that life was too important to be taken seriously. Now, as I look down on my little sister crying, curled up in her bed, I know what they mean. I watch her cry holding onto the teddy bear I had once gotten her. Sometimes I hear her whisper my name, and sometimes I hear her ask me why I am gone. I try to reach out and tell her but helpless because she cannot hear. She is destroying herself because of me.

“You let me down. I thought you were stronger than that!” she screams. “You told me I would never be without you. You told me you would never leave. Now you’re gone and without me.” She continues as she throws herself face first onto her bed flailing and screaming her pain, her hurt, her abandonment. But little sister what you do not know is that it is your turn that comes.

She sleeps peacefully, under her covers. Her heart beats ever so slowly to the sound of her clock, ticking down the minutes, the hours, the seconds until she will be in my arms. For now I can do nothing but watch, while she is unprotected, and I am no use to her for what is to come.

I scream to her, hoping she will hear me tell her to wake up and run. Run to a safer place, run to lower ground. Just run! Her eyes still closed and her breathing getting heavier, she jumps out of bed. She takes a second to look around the room, and as if she has heard my plea she starts to run, as the world my innocent, naïve sister once knew crumbled around her.

As she runs, she is looking for anyone, or at least something to protect her. She finds no one; she is alone.
*****

The sky a jet black as the stars sparkled and glistened with their last faint light. The sun was as if it had never been. It was a hole that enveloped the nothingness in the atmosphere. The world itself was afraid. I could hear as it weeped and moaned because like myself, it had let people down. The tears of the world fell down to the ground like gum balls unable to be controlled, or slowed down.
****

As I looked down on my little sister soaked with mud and water, I cried. She was screaming for me hoping I would appear, but of course I never did. As always I was helpless to her. I watched as she crawled into a sewage pipe, barely big enough for her to fit. She made it. She made it to safety, still alive, well and breathing. But still she cried. What I did not realize while she was running was that she had gotten injured. She had a gash across her heart that went deep in her from one side of her heart to the other. Like an X marking the spot on a treasure map. Except my sisters treasure was death. She was huddled over screaming as she tried to hold on with everything she could. It was then that I realized that my little sister would soon be with me.

“Close your eyes,” I whispered reaching out to her. “You will soon be with me.”

She laid down in the pipe, with tears still dripping down her cheek. Her heart a once steady beat was now slowing down. Beating to the soft drips of water falling, just a few feet from her. She lays there now starring up at the ceiling waiting for it all to finally be over. She breathes softly in and out, and as she takes her last breath she whispers my name.

“Marianna,” and death takes her into its comforting arms.

****

The day my sister died the world went with her. The world we both once had known was now a puddle of hurt, and lost love. From those I left behind and those the world had killed. Sometimes I think it is my fault the world died. I guess I should have taken my life a lot more seriously and treated it as if it were a lot more important to me than it had been. If it wasn’t for my mother who carried me at birth and held me when I died, I would have never realized anything anyone said.

Now that my little, innocent sister now alive and well lays sound asleep in my arms, I understand what life really means to me.