it\'s the satisfaction of thick, sticky blood when your first tooth falls out. it\'s the old ticket stub from your favourite movie. it\'s the look your mother gives you when she sees your test grades. it\'s your darkest, softest bruise from finally climbing the top of the tallest tree in your backyard. it\'s every single scraped knee from trying to ride that old skateboard that you found in the garage last summer. it\'s the burn you feel in your muscles when you came in first place for the race. it is a sweet and sour revelation! it\'s the half-legible story you wrote on someone\'s car window during a road trip. and it\'s the quick beating of your teenage heart from being in a room so dark you can see your thoughts. death will not be the end. death cannot be the end. this assumption is illogical, for those who have died said to me that death is nothing but a traveler: not the kind who knows where he belongs (or even where he wants to be) like a free-spirited hitchhiker or a confused college student. death (in all of its irony) is more like a dollar bill. he is picked up and handed to people without a second thought because no one truly knows what\'s to happen next. death may be known by many names and many forms, but death is singular. death takes infinite journeys and we -- in all simplicity -- are one of the many to come, but soon to be forgotten. death does not calculate his own route; he uses only a broken compass, and each soul that death encounters is an individual shard of that compass. death\'s adventure will not be completed until every speck of this compass has been collected. once he has politely graced your soul, he leaves a trail