At the juvenile age of fifteen years, I became fearful.
I grew through an absurd phase involved in fright of the plentiful use of the word “last”. The realization washed over my in my sleep, as though I had dreamt I was swimming in an ocean under a blue sky when suddenly the clear water surrounding me transformed into a tsunami.
Everywhere I went the word was thrown at me unexpectedly, and I’d wince each time it escaped a person’s lips. Last.
The word meant more than it was defined as in school. The word last was not a small enough word to be described as “coming after all others in time.” The word last meant The End.
I came to the awareness that there would be a last time for everything. Maybe this morning, when you spoke out of cruelty to your mother, was the last time you’d ever speak to her at all. Maybe last night, when you didn’t reply to your friend’s text, was the last time they would ever acknowledge you. Maybe yesterday, when you saw the gleaming smile you fell in love with, would be the last time. They say you die twice; once, when you stop breathing, and a second time, a bit later on, when someone says your name for the last time.
I don’t mean to scare you, but you have a right to be scared. What if this is the last time you ever read a word? Or the last time you ever stared at a page? What if tomorrow you wake up unable to move, and you regret the last day you spent sitting at a desk reading this? What if this is the last time you’ll ever be able to see a color, or the last time you’ll ever speak? Then what?
You can see why I trembled at the feet of such a word, because it meant more than anything else. It meant more than the “bad words” we’d created that we weren’t supposed to use. The word last was a word I never wanted to hear, and people kept saying it as though it meant nothing. “This is your last chance to turn in this assignment,” they'd say. “The last time I saw her was in English,” people’d tell me. It was excruciatingly painful. I didn’t want a last this or a last that. I wanted something that lasts.