I am in my own mind, deciphering the world around me. I am alone, stuck between reality and fantasy. My questions about how the universe works, about how life itself works, repeat in my head like a racecar around a track, with each pass driving me more fatuous.

Such a question was asked as I gallivanted to the middle of the woods behind where I lived. I sat on a rock marbled with grey and orange, my bare feet in the dirt, fertile and dry as a bone. The air is light, smelling clean. I breath heavy while taking in the beauty of my surroundings. The scorching sun, and the blissful shade overlap my arms like tiger stripes. I notice a leaf attached to a twig in front of me. The leaf was brown with holes in it, and as I touched it, it fell off. It was dead.  I look at the trunk of the towering plant. I notice the roots above the ground, and moss growing along each root. A rotten stump of a tree that once was, right next to it. That tree had died, and a brand new one took its place. I pondered the idea of death, and it scared me. It scared me because death will never be answered.

I wondered if I would become like a rotten stump in the dirt.

I further examined each tree around me. Most were alive and well, breathing and standing tall. Some were smaller, which I knew meant they were younger than the rest. Some had bark peeling off the trunk and some were absent of leaves. Walking away, I see a creek.  Coming up to it, I noticed it veined out into the forest, like a complex of roads. Multiple streams, all connected to a single bigger river. There were no fish, but hundreds of large rocks that lined each vein. Each rock persuaded the water to follow a new path. I believe in Omens, and I have for a long time. An Omen is a telling of the future, whether it be good or bad. I wondered what I was experiencing was an omen. A rock, separating the streams onto different paths, meant to me that there was going to be a rock in my stream, and even though it will not stop me completely, but It will divide me. It will tear me away from the path I was going before, and on to a new one.

I did not know what that rock was.

I was unaware then, but my grandmother was ill in the hospital. She was battling a disease, that would eventually claim its next victim. Such a disease she had, made me wonder more than I ever did. As she slipped away, and was evicted from her body, I cursed all life, and what had created life. Why would this happen to our family, when we were good people? What would place this rock in my stream, and produce such a block in my life? Who would do this to a ten year old boy who loved his grandmother, who wanted nothing more than to see her face, and to hear her talk?

For a while after she passed, and ascended into another place far away from here, I did not ask questions. I did not wonder anymore. I stopped loving life, and I stopped loving myself. I shut myself out from the world. I was cold, and harsh. I did not want anything, I did not say anything. Nothing has tore me apart like what death did to my family. I still to this day, ask where she is. I ask how she is doing, and what she is doing.

I never hear her voice.

Though I never hear a verbal response, I sense she is with me. She is with me when I walk through the same woods. She is with me when I cross the river with many veins and the rock marbled with grey and orange. She is with me when I ask a new question, and she is the answer for me.

She is there, when no one else is.