About two weeks ago I saw a possum that had been struck by a car, lying dead on the painted center divider on Truxtun extension. For a week I passed by that possum, watching his little body get flatter and flatter. I passed by him every weekday and wondered how he came to be crossing that main road alone, and who struck him on the center divider. Why hadn't animal control come to clean him up.
One night I woke to the sound of rain and I started to think about the possum. I thought about his tiny body decomposing as the water dumped on him. Did he have a family? Do they wonder about him? Was a possum waiting for him on the other side of the road?
He was still there today, just a flattened carcass. If you drove by today, you wouldn't know he was a possum. He's got a story. He lived a life. Then one day he was killed, and he never even got a proper burial. It's like he never even mattered.
That's gotta be the worst thing. To die, and disappear, and it's like you never even mattered.
For the first time since he passed, I did not go to the cemetery to visit Gabriel's headstone on Thanksgiving. 'They' say visiting the cemetery isn't as important as keeping his memory alive. And I know that Gabriel's memory lives on and that I am the one keeping it alive. But I hate the thought of him not having flowers at Thanksgiving. I hate the thought of somebody passing by his plaque and thinking, "That poor little baby. He only lived ten days, and now, he's forgotten. It's like he never even mattered."
Because he did matter. He was my whole world. The whole world ended the day that he died and while I managed to crawl from its ashes, I'm living in a whole new world, where love is fragile and guarded and life is uncertain and the rain pours down on a possum who never even knew what hit him.
