my brain hurts. there is an image forever imprinted into it.

today i saw a dead person. i have never seen one before. i do not mean for this to sound crude. but right now my brain is fizzing and wondering what to do with the image it has received.

i went tonight with joe. i sorta dragged him there. but i needed someone who was stronger than i was. there was a long line to see her. at first i couldn't see anything because there were people in front of me. and then someone moved and unexpectedly i saw her. i will not ever forget that. i cannot put it into words. for some reason i thought she would look the same as she did when she was alive, but now she would look like she was sleeping.

she did not look like she was sleeping.

her face was rounder and it was this unnatural color. there was make up on to make her have a warm glow. i wonder who puts that stuff on. jordan had warned me that she did not look the same. but i didn't know. her lips were slightly blue. at first i couldn't get near her. but i went back a second time. as i got closer to her i half expected her to sit up. i expected her head to move. she was so still. anyone reading this is probably like, well of course she's still, what do you want. but i just don't know. she was so stiff. there was a picture on top of her. so haunting. there you could see her as she was. and then you looked at this girl in front of you and you think, this is not the same person. this is not a real person. she looked almost like she was made of wax, like they had tricked us and she was really waiting somewhere, laughing, being alive. it was there that she became a dead body. a corpse. all these ugly cold words. i remember looking at her up and down seeing if she would move. her hands folded so peacefully, her face forever in that position, her body so still and permanent. i wanted to touch her. i wanted to open her eyes. i know that sounds sick but i just really wanted to.

it made me think of the human body itself. her heart had not pumped blood for three days. her lungs had not worked. her brain did not respond to anything. i don;t know why i think about these things. i always thought the human body is fascinating. it's just so weird though. it's like, why can't we turn her back on? what makes death so permanent? why is it we can clone an ear or give someone a new heart, but can't bring back life? what if someone just came in there and said don't worry folks, once i give her this pill she'll be okay. your body works. it is alive. what makes it stop being alive? i am just thinking about her cold veins. about her blue lips. there was no taryn in them. taryn and taryn's body are two separate things. i never fully realized that. it makes me believe in life after death all that much more. when you die, it's not just your body shutting down, but it's your personality leaving. and without your personality your body is just a shell, and that's what i felt i was looking at tonight. a shell in a pink sweater.

i kind of knew it would be like this, but i didn't know exactly how i would feel and what she would look like. i just still can't get over how she looked. so unnatural. if you sit and stare at someone sleeping you know they will wake up sometime. but no matter how long i stared at her it was the same. i don't know why that is so weird to me. why it bothers me so much. a piece of me is going to go with her, even though that might sound stupid. the part of me that really didn't know anything about life, the part of me that thought things went on forever. i feel like this is something i needed to know. one day this will happen again. in her death she has taught me more than any class or college or book could have taught me. she woke us all out of our it-doesn't-happen-in-ramsey cloud. it can and it did happen in ramsey and there is nothing that is going to make it any better. i can't say that i'll ever stop thinking about her, i imagine it will just get less and less over time. at the funeral home i learned that another person who was in the accident had died. somewhere another town was going through this all over again. and when i heard it it made me think but i could not feel these feelings for that person. i can only take so much. tomorrow she will be buried. i guess tomorrow it will be like the "end." but for everyone in this town, it will never really end, and right now i really don't know what. it's amazing how one person affects so many others. i hope she realizes that, wherever she is.