An Introduction - perhaps a beginning?

Warning that my post will have some heavy themes

The gray text in the box told me to write my story - which seems pretty apt everything considered.

The day of writing is the very day of my 25th birthday, heralding with it a quarter-life crisis (Which may sound ridiculous and borderline offensive to some - but I assure you it's very real)

Earlier this month I was sectioned under the mental health act - I had strongly considered taking my own life. I had it all figured out; even the method - once I'd vetted the ones with the least success rate. For nearly thirteen years, I've struggled with anxiety and depression.

To look back on such an existence at a stopping point of my life and the entry to a new decade, I asked myself "What am I doing?" and I didn't have an answer. I didn't have an answer for what I'd do tomorrow. Or the next week. Or the next year. And lingering at the end of it all was a fear of mine - that all life on earth was a mistake. A coincidence of chemicals.

But I was not and am not an atheist - no - rather, an agnostic. I don't know. I don't know if life is a coincidence. Many people will take me to one side and tell me a different truth - or a belief of theirs - but all I could think of, was the fact that I may never again see the ones I lost. Especially my dearest grandma.

To say this month has been eventful is an understatement. It's funny how from 2016 to 2019 passed for me without any real event and this month has felt like a lifetime. Just yesterday I went around my surviving grandma's house - in tears, to tell her that I don't believe in heaven; that all suffering is for nothing.

She asked me, calmly "Do you believe in spirits?" - I rushed to tell her, no. She got up quietly, walked over to a corner and pulled out a picture. She showed me a picture of my deceased grandma's grave in the middle of the day - a tree had fallen over onto it. But that was not the strangest thing of the picture; there was a white mark. My aunt had taken the photo in 2017 to show that the grave had been hit by the tree trunk and was going to show it to someone so they could get it cleaned up. She was going to delete the photo when she herself checked and saw the strange mark in the photo.

Even now, I don't know what it is. I'm a cynical person - it must have been a fault of the phone's camera, a reflection of light from somewhere (Though I don't know how) or perhaps my aunt had edited it in? She's not a very religious person, we're not even a religious family and I don't imagine she'd do such a thing.

She told me "I went to see a medium and she told me that the white mark is in fact two spirits. One for your grandma, one for your grandpa. They were buried together. We didn't tell the medium that, but she knew - and it was true. They're both there, making sure their grandchildren are okay."*

I held the photo in my hands with a sort of reverence and appreciation unfitting of a cynical and pessimistic person such as myself - to me this had meaning. I wanted to doubt it, but I didn't. Perhaps I was convincing myself a convenient lie; but a strange sensation in me told me that death is not the end. It couldn't be. I breathed. I could feel the air in my lungs. I could see with my eyes. I could feel. And somehow I know I'd feel again. I don't know if I'll meet those lost on the other side when my time comes - but in the infinity of existence. like a Rubik's Cube with countless tries I shall exist again...And if I can exist again. Perhaps my grandma isn't truly gone.

I went home with a severe headache, shielding the precious photo from the rain as I was drenched. It's still here on the counter next to me as I type this now during the night. The only noise in my small rural English home the gentle whirring of my laptop's fan and my cat Dawn lapping up her cat food beside me.

All I can think currently is that everything will be okay. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. I don't know what will happen a week from now. I don't know what will happen next year. If it truly is oblivion that awaits us all we will never feel it, we will never suffer.

If there truly is an afterlife, be it reincarnation - to know of such a thing with certainty would soothe my mind to no end. If it's a form of heaven? I'd like to speak with the manager.

Since I have plenty of requests of him.