Disappear

It’s been a week since you passed away and fragments of you are slowly fading. The next day you followed your mother and brother to the cemetery and watched as they lowered the casket unto the ground, your grave marked by a stone with only your name and dates of birth and death, no message, no endearing words, no «loved son and brother» or «may he rest in peace». Just a name.
They took a last glance at the patch of dirt as the other three people left, and they turned back to the car. You got in silently in the back seat. Five minutes later they turned on the radio and started chatting as they drove back home. The next day your mother returned to work, your brother went back to his studies, and part of you started to vanish.
It’s been a week since you passed away and the pictures of you in your mother’s house are already gone and replaced with framed photographs of your brother and her, of her wedding, of the family dog. Your room has been emptied and all your things given away, the place slowly being filled with your brother’s training equipment that had been stored in the garage. You are not remembered in your household anymore.

You walk the streets and you feel another piece of you slowly fade away, it hurts as you become even more translucent. You see your best friend sitting in his room talking on the phone with a mutual friend, he laughs and as he reaches for the soda can next to his bed he knocks over a piece of wood you had carved and varnished as a gift, the date in which you met carefully written in the bottom with the point of a knife that had resulted in blood pouring out from your fingers. The piece of wood falls under the bed and he doesn’t notice it, he continues talking on the phone and walks out.

It has been two weeks since you passed away, there is almost nothing left of you. You watched your father spill his beer on a clipping of your obituary, curse, and then throw it in the trash along other pieces of paper that filled the table of his small house. He had returned to the TV without noticing, just angry that the beer had been spilled. You watched your boyfriend buy flowers, get on his car again and drove towards the cemetery, only to turn left and into a coffee shop parking lot where another man waited at a table and greeted him with a kiss.You watched them dine and laugh and drink, and then you went to sit on your grave, almost completely gone.

It has been two weeks since you passed away, you sit on top of the tombstone, watching the sky. A woman walks up to you with a single white rose that she places on the patch of dirt, leaning down. You recognize the woman, she is at least twenty years older than you, she was wearing a blue cardigan the last time you saw her. A blue cardigan and driving a silver colored sedan. She had called the ambulance and then driven off, leaving you in the ground with just a small choked «I am sorry» to remember before she left.

She turns around and leaves the cemetery. You are alone. Completely alone.
No one else has come to visit the grave since you were buried except for the lady who ran over you.

It has been two weeks and two days since you passed away.
The lady of the blue cardigan, comfortably seated in her home, smiles at her newborn nephew.

You disappear completely.

 

Writing Prompt: «When you die, your ghost stays on earth until the last person who remembers you dies.» Taken from the Writing Bad club.