It’s a new year but no one has told the many tiny machines inside of me.
The ocean still threatens to swallow me up in my dreams. [Feist-The Water].
Life is so exhausting. I could never explain the way it pulls on me like gravity and surrounds me like atmosphere. Death to me was always the end of that. Don’t confuse it with suicidal thoughts. I always thought death is meant to be earned and hopefully deserved. That was the ideal.
It hasn’t been a productive 2009 so far. I’ve spent too many hours of too many days trying to tie down the tingling feeling inside. It’s a hint; it’s wispy and smoky as one would imagine a soul set free to be only it doesn’t dissipate or float away. Maybe that’s just what it is, following me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people who’ve left my life (so self centered, I do after all mean they parted with their own as well). It makes me think about death in a strange way. Like spirits and lingering. For me that’s strange indeed. I’m the type that always said a pine box is just fine as long as it doesn’t cost too much because we already have so many trash bags under the kitchen sink. In any sense, you’re going to burn me, it’s cheaper. Today though it occurred to me that I might not be able to leave my wife’s side. I imagined hanging over her and crying on her – crying on the memories of me she’s cupping in her hands and smothering herself in. If I die I do betray her.
I’ve always expected death. Not in the someday sense, in the today sense. I guess maybe I’ve pushed the date back and that’s begun to change everything. I tend to believe that even if souls exist I probably don’t have one. I’m quite sure if I did I scared it away as a child. But if I did, err, do: If I do have a soul I don’t think it would move on. I don’t think I would turn away the chance, although fear of likely going one direction over the other should probably make me hesitant, but I don’t think it would occur to my pretend soul to leave. In life, if I believe in it, I would cling to it in spite of any resistance or unimaginable coercion until my fingers wore down to irritated mangled nubs and I simply couldn’t anymore. Then I’d just start to follow it around. I don’t have luck, good looks, money or talent in any appreciable sense. I get my sense of purpose from my willingness to martyr myself for the few things I can be sure of like no one else. I know I’m sure of her in that way and I don’t think any idealistic, concentrated, more purely me than I am version of myself that my soul would be would ever even entertain the notion of moving on.
She wants plots together and I fear, although I once gloated about, dieing first. Only in these last few days with these ideas of a foggy essence inside me that lives after my body have things taken this turn. I fear, now that I won’t be burned in trash bags. I fear that I’ll be aware in some way. I imagine the experience of all my cells simply letting go of each other instead of holding on like I’d always lead them by example. I imagine my mind melting as my physical brain does. I imagine the smells in my box and the pain. How raw it must be. I imagine it taking so long it feels longer than my life itself was. The reason it’s so awful though is that I’ll finish. I’ll be nothing but the dank in the air filling my narrow box by the time she joins me. I’ll be unable but still existing. I’ll hear her, her silent new suffering that I will know so well is worse than anything imaginable. I won’t be able to console her even as much as to tell her it’s what happens to us all. I’ll go through it again, only worse, because it is for her. She makes her pretentiously fake frowny at me now and I don’t melt, I don’t bend to her will, and I don’t even wrap around her finger. I curl up and I cringe and close my eyes until it’s over. I’ve begged her to stop for frivolous things because it actually hurts for some stupid reason. I’m not cold with her. I’m not distant. And I’m not stoic. With her I’m none of the things I’m so often accused of being. I just can’t fucking take it. I can’t take her frowny for the thought of her suffering. I don’t want to die before her, or after her, or with her. I don’t want her to die, ever. And I don’t want to die now either because I know whether or not there is anything after death, we will suffer. We will not suffer the loss of our lives, but the loss of each other so much. Love can be so crushing.
If heaven and hell exist. She’s the type to go to heaven. I’m so different from her. I find myself hoping more that if I end up in hell she can’t hear my screams than actually hoping to make it to heaven. The safe bet isn’t the long shot.
But it’s making me weird, the dreams, the thoughts, and all they bring… I watch the sunrises and sets and feel like everything that has ever been is walking right through me like I never existed. At the same time it’s hard for me to believe it hasn’t all existed for me to have her for this blink in all time. As if existence simply doesn’t know that simple fact as it should. It’s all I get. She’s the one thing for me when everyone else gets to have everything else there is. And it’s ridiculously self centered but in my world nothing is more important than me. In my world it’s all just a playground for me to have her in. Death is the asshole that will inevitably come and hew half of it away in a fell swoop. It will linger and scrape away at whats left until it’s mangled and unrecognizable from what it once was. That’s what I fear for her when I die first. And eventually death will consume even that.
As much as it may seem I’m able, to anyone who’s felt this way it is obvious that I can’t manage to put even the smallest blurriest part of it into words.
…And I’ve been this way for days.
[Rise Against-The Good Left Undone]
“-All because of you I haven’t slept in so long. When I do I dream of drowning in the ocean, longing for the sure where I can lay my head down. I’ll follow your voice.”
-this all needs so much editing. maybe later.
