I woke and thought about dying. I didn’t feel right or like I might expire.
There was no pain or discomfort, just a sense of something not working or not wanting to anymore. I changed sides but the feeling remained.
I was just going to end here. Not even a whimper. It was hard to get back to sleep.
“How are you doing?” Yeah, well, I have this thing with the night sweats and being unable to stop my brain and not knowing what the hell is going on with my life and thinking I’m just not where I should be. But aside from that, well, yeah, all is good.
No one wants to hear about it. I sure as hell don’t. Nobody does. Not even the Facebook algorithm. (They blocked my previous post about the Anti-Wilhelm Grunt, implying that I was suicidal. Got to think about that one.)
I knew a guy from Croatia named Milan who complained about everything.
“How are you doing, Milan?”
“Well, I’ve got the rash on my arm. And my knee is a little tight. And my digestion. Never been worse.”
I never asked him again. It’s just a pleasantry and we should just all get it together and move on. It’s a new day. We’re alive and the sun is shining. Even if it isn’t.
Post a lovely picture of food and talk about an exciting new series. And what about getting laid! There’s music and dreams and amazing new things to come. And what about getting laid?!?! Who cares if we all sound like cows in the field waiting to get slaughtered? Relax. Look on the cud side.
So, yeah, it’s okay to be down. It’s okay to talk about it. Just nobody will listen. Including me.
What’s the point of knowing anything when you know that you’re going die?
There is no knowing in any of this. There is only a little pouch to crawl inside, keep others away with intellectual scorn or firearms, beneath our mother’s downcast grin, drink in hand.
I left, half expecting her to be beside me, but she wasn’t and I found myself alone on a darkened path going toward the harbor. I listened to the sound of my shoes on the cement, sharp and clear and then gone.
There was always death, an expiring, a no longer. The world as only I know it – my memories – all of that done. Then nothing, a stone, dead and gone. Whatever I did, good or bad, it was just some story.
I’ve seen death hanging about lately, mostly in odd faces and dreams. Not Death death. More like vice principal death, the sort that stands there, arms crossed, desperate for attention and has a bad temper.
Anyway, amidst my physical therapy appointments and travel plans, death cropped up in my messages. It wasn’t a surprise, given the many mortality-based messages I’ve opened as of late.
The message from death was better news that I had expected. A room had opened up with a view of the desert. And so I booked that.
A letter from death in Jose Saramago’s 2008 novel Death with Interruptions:
One day you will find out about Death with a capital D, and at that moment, in the unlikely event that she gives you the time of day, you will understand the real difference between the relative and the absolute, between full and empty, between still alive and no longer alive.
And when I say real difference, I am referring to something that mere words will never be able to to express, relative, absolute, full, empty, still alive and no longer alive, because, sir, in case you don’t know it, words move, they change from one day to the next, they are unstable as shadows, are themselves shadows.
Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.