In Addition to Dying

            When we die, our bodies are lowered not into a grave, but into the back seat of a car one of our best friends drives. We are looking down, trying to light a cigarette, but the wind through the windows keeps us from doing so, and so, when we look up finally, after that infinitely long trip through the black, empty streets, we find ourselves in a cushioned position with the parking break on in the parking lot of the hospice our favorite aunt and, in some sense, second mother, died in when we were eighteen.

            We remember copulating with another body we thought we finally loved for the first time the night after our aunt’s soul left her body. We remember thinking we don’t know what we’re doing, “but the sadness will make up for it” while we try to keep quiet because our parents are asleep down the hall. We remember thinking how “all the porn added up to this?” Suddenly, the hospice building shrieks through our sight and conception of the clock and we somehow realize we are moving backwards or forwards through time. It is difficult to determine which, and depends on when we arrive upon this realization.

            Some of us will revert all the way back to the pictures we saw of our first birthdays. Though we don’t honestly remember this moment, we vicariously experience it, giving a strange, inexperienced existence to those memories we don’t recall. Our fathers are somewhat drunk in the corner, wondering how they even got the girl they have convinced themselves they love pregnant in the first place. We are their third living child (fourth, technically) but, by some awkward epiphany, they have only come to think of this now.

            The time in second grade when the girl we thought was cute and convinced ourselves we were in love with finally talked to us passes as well. That elementary school we grew up in is blurred by the movement of this passing we are experiencing, but we can still recognize it as such.

            Because we have become prone to thinking of all our milestones in terms of schooling, we don’t remember any of the times we spent at a friend’s house at the end of the block, hearing stories about the Gila Monster he had, alive and well, living in his camper on the side of his house, or the time he threw rebar like a tomahawk into the flat part of our faces. We don’t remember how our English teacher told us we would never amount to anything, but that passes easily through the sieve of our thoughts because we are no longer the person we were.

            We are now, and will, from here on out, be something we can no longer conceive. We are ideas. We are the thoughts we once had as living beings. All our memories pass through us as though we are smooth rocks lying dormant in the rush of a river we held a girlfriend in once to keep her warm. We are the cooling wind on our own skin we felt in that window of spring, which exists for such a short time in Arizona as the valley lets itself become submissive to the summer. We know we are fleeting but we cannot accept such a fate. We want a god to cradle us and tell us we did well, that we were good and faithful servants, but such an afterlife does not occur. We become a foreign version of nature as our bodies pass into a form of our memories, but we are still unexpectedly happy that such an afterlife exists, no matter how quickly fleeting it is.

Dying

            The afterlife does not exist. When we say rest in peace, we, as life-filled humans, mean it. The black ether, void, what-have-you, welcomes us in as we are descending. Though we are still alive as something we cannot understand while we are breathing in the bodies we inhabited, which have stopped doing so, we now understand the darkness that is waiting and a smile creases our bloodless, pale lips. Our eyes are closed by a family member with their sad, little fingers—if they found us in a room after our suicide—or our eyes closed by our own power on an unfamiliar and despondent hospital bed because we were so tired from all the living we had to endure.

            When we hear, “Rest in peace,” or see it on our own gravestones as an abbreviation—our heads tilting back to see what message our loved ones chose for us through the coffin that is invisible—we know it will be thus. We know that finally all our work will be paid off.

            We laugh at the pre-mortem thoughts we had of meeting the creator we thought existed. Finally, we realize how ridiculous it was to think that our maker would want all of us—after all the red wars and random fights with ex-girlfriends or boyfriends—in the heaven it has created up there with it. We know that we are not ones to be saved by some savior we have created. Whether or not it exists is no longer a concern. We feel the peace bouncing off vocal cords and landing somewhere inside of us.

            That first fistful of clumped soil is tossed onto our faces and we accept that it is the closure and answer we have been looking for during our entire existences. We smile, if only to ourselves, cross our arms over our chests and feel the emptiness coming for us as a pastor we never honestly liked recites some Bible verse we knew when we were children who would believe in anything. His voice fades as we escape.

Fishing

            There was no beer to make the sun drag its body faster. My father never drank beer in front of me. I’m honestly not even sure if he’s ever had more than one beer in one sitting in his entire life. It is ironic how things change when parents’ habits reach a dirt fork in their children’s minds.

            “You’re tying it wrong. Let me do it”

            My father never revealed himself when he was supposed to. It was almost as if he would only crack the seal when he knew there would be an unspoken time limit on the subject—which was good, because he easily drifted though incongruous topics.

            “Your granddad and I caught a lot of fish with these rods.”

            I nodded enough to resemble a listening son, but I thought about the crawdads in the lake-water shadows, my kind-of girlfriend, my summer vacation waving as it passed, etc. I was bored.

            My hopes for catching a fish would have put me at the edge of the rocks my ass now resented, had I had better luck in the past. Having never caught a fish in my life, I was wary of my father’s excitement when, weeks before, he triumphantly handed his waders and our poles down to me from the attic. He was gentle with the goods and cautioned me to treat them the same as if we were taking them to the Antiques Road Show to have them appraised. We both knew the rods—along with the rest of our rusting possessions huddled in the house—weren’t worth anything, but still, there is some pride in that alone.

            “I think I got somethin’.”

            Why do all fishermen say that? Just a nibble. Story of my life.

            Maybe he resented me for not talking. He always has been and always will be a talker, a “people person.” I always have not been and always will not be one. However, I congratulate him for attempting to pry open a treasure chest of conversations that never existed to begin with. It was, and still is a noble task; ask my ex-girlfriends.

            He worked his summers as a boat boy until there was nothing left: tying boats to the dock; bringing engines out of the boathouse for hobbyists, retired men, and lonely women using fishing as their antidepressant (I know…it’s strange.); and getting “cute” girls’ phone numbers. Five, two, zero, five, two, four, seven, something, something, something. (Up North, any girl who doesn’t weigh over 180 pounds is cute. It’s a different standard, which might explain the insurmountable list of divorcees now living in the Phoenix area. Go up North, find a cute girl, get hitched, move to the city, find cuter girls, get divorced, miss the girl who used to be cute. A cycle.)

            My uncle—he’s my second cousin, but I call him my uncle—now runs the boathouse my dad worked at. It’s been in our family for decades. My great-grandfather used to run it. For a small period of time, I even considered following my father through the vaguely lit stories he still lingers on, but once back in the city, the idea did not appeal. (The cycle had not caught me, yet, or maybe it did, just in a peculiar way.)

            “How’s your girlfriend? What’s her name, again?”

            “She’s good.”

            Years later, I found the lyrics to a song my dad wrote in my late granddad’s dulcimer case. He taught my father how to play, though my father still doesn’t know how to all that well.

            I never used to sense jealousy in him (hell, I wish I could catch fish like that), but as the great Father Time wore into us, things nestled like parasites in our spines, and the cycle hit us both in a different way.

In Between

            Now that the world is at a point where love is not so apparent and blinding, we will all live freely of one another, given enough laps around the numbers on the clock. Humans will no longer spend nights with their pillows, or dogs, or favorite movies crying over what could have been, since there is no longer a “what could have been.” These humans will have finally realized that there is no key hidden in any possible future with any stranger they meet. They will no longer wander at night, or even during the day, hoping someone who fits their quarks and can laugh at those quarks with them is any one of the infinite souls they see in a day. They will hardly ever fight, because we humans only fight over things we love: money, steadiness, even love itself, etc.

            These humans spoken of will be our children’s children, of course, for we have too many weighted, overstuffed suitcases to unpack in this new apartment we have found ourselves now sitting in. We will sit in these new places and still think of all those we loved, whether for the shortest time ever recorded or the longest. Our children will see us crying while making dinner, but they will not understand because this concept of love, which we cry over, is drifting out even more in their minds. They will come to us as elementary school students, frustrated that a girl or boy won’t talk to them, but it will end at that extent. They will not stop eating because their crush did not accept their valentine in class that day. They will not despondently lie in bed through their several alarm clocks, ignoring their obligations because their high school sweetheart broke up with them. They will not spend multiple paychecks on a crafted piece of metal with a useless, shiny rock on top, only to realize that their feelings of monogamy have changed as the first year of their marriage bore into them. They will have no need for these useless emotions, though they may feel a residual tinge now and again, caused only by us.

            Their children, however, will feel a joy neither our children nor we could ever imagine, and they will never question why they are so indispensably jovial. When they sense a connection with another human, they will recognize it as simply that and nothing else. They will be logical and much smarter than we ever hoped even our children would be. One day, with all this knowledge and lack of such deep pains and regrets, these grandchildren will visit us in our nursing homes and, ironically enough, be the ones giving us advice as to dealing with such wrenching heartbreaks. But because we are so panged with the bruises of living, we will not listen, and it will only be another fault to learn from.

Waiting

The pores are open on my hands. Some hair grew there some time ago, but mostly age. Cracked skin marks my years the way the rings on the tree stump I rest on do. We were both cut down around the same time. Now, people just use us as a reference—a timeline for their own existence.

            The grandchildren don’t visit. Even my own children don’t. I live too far in “the middle of butt-fucking Egypt” as they so tactfully put it. Phone calls still exist, but not often. I mostly sit, waiting for time to wave as it passes on its fall to the water waiting for impact below the bridge.

            Even Time wishes not to be around this long. It’s too much waiting. Sometimes there’s a war, and the piles of gutted, dry blood-painted bodies take on the occupation of keeping a count on things. Sometimes, a political race—to where, I still don’t know—keeps track of the money spent, the votes. Sometimes there’s a death in the family and the relatives measure how long they themselves have left. Most of the time, though, time is spent waiting for dinner to be cooked, waiting for school to be over, waiting for sleep to find us, waiting for the sun to rise, waiting for the end of something—anything. I’ve lived long enough to know at least that, but I haven’t lived long enough to understand what all the waiting is for. Death, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem too fair, does it?

The moments, which don’t feel as though I am waiting, are usually spent with someone other than myself or are those in which I am creating.

             Upon realizing that it is a process, I was happy. Upon realizing that all the goals I had set for myself were really nothing real, I held back a tinge of regret at the time wasted working towards them, but finally, my joy gutted a laugh out of me, I laid on the frizzing carpet, and exhaled pointless worry. When I inflated my lungs, I thought about all the things I could work on. I thought about fixing my car. I considered sketching a mug shot of someone I had never met, probably never would meet, and didn’t care. I didn’t even care that no one other than myself, the occasional nosey girlfriend, and my best friend would ever see it. The dreams of fame faded along with the hopes to be published and noticed for what I had done. The fact that I had written, painted, drawn, sculpted, invented, or fixed whatever it was, was good enough for me.

Off Balance

            Though scientists, physicists, microbiologists, what have you, have long thought the earth was kept in balance and on course by the tilt of its axis, total mass, and the battling speeds of revolution versus rotation (certain religious groups may lay claim to it being the hand of god, however that was debunked long ago) new information has recently surfaced, which completely denies such allegations: it is the distribution of people on the planet that keeps the balance.

            All of our tiny little bodies spread out everywhere buying cars, shooting out bullets and hairspray, cashing checks we received from the jobs we hate, lighting cigarettes and incense and candles—all this is what evens things out on this sopping wet orb floating through the ether.

            There are no deity-created archetypes of perfection to strain after other than keeping our (here, the question of ownership must be raised) oversized sphere from knocking heels, boots, or any other type of shoe together with the other pool balls out in this cavity we have aptly named “space.”

Now bereaved of this higher order we thought existed for so long, memories and various nostalgia may adhere where they shouldn’t at times. For instance, when eating a fudgesicle, you may have visions of nursing homes, catheters, and miles upon miles of pills to keep your body healthy instead of the summer where you and the other neighborhood children cooked eggs on your driveway—being only nineteen years old, this may shock most teenagers who slide their tongues along those frozen, chocolate-brown sticks. At other times, what once, as a forty-five year old, reminded you of the camping trip you took with your father after your mother divorced him, may now inseminate a slideshow of the digital camera you filled with the fourth boy you thought you loved during your sophomore year of college. And post realizing the real reason for balance we will, just like these misplaced memories, often find ourselves kissing the lips we previously found grotesque or even allow lovers inside our souls who we know will break our hearts, given enough time.

            All this being said, there is hope, or so some think, but disappointment follows stoutly. It is a decision left to the deciders as to whether they desire a glimmer snuffed by a sour downfall or just a mediocre, level and balanced existence as they attempt to keep this world from being drawn into that mammoth fireball so far off in the distance.

A Heritage I Make

Upon realizing that I have never been anyone’s first choice (and every time subsequently) I decide to partake in the cultural festivities of “barhopping,” except I sit in one bar, next to the first man alone and over fifty I see, so we can talk shit about everyone honestly participating and how they think they’re in love. If I talk of enough before-my-time references, he will eventually warm to my presence and on my way back to the bar from the bathroom, he will have ordered me another whiskey for my topical conversations, circa 1953. The bartender, to my hopes, will have forgotten where exactly I was sitting—because I slid my empty glass closer to the space between the rugged drunkard and me—and placed my new, free of charge full glass before the seat next to said worn body. I, acting so drunk every barstool looks the same, lay my weight on the cushion next to him, full well knowing he won’t bring it up because he enjoys the human giving him attention and because that would just be awkward.

I ask him about things I will never experience. I ask him about his parents, particularly his father, because everyone becomes impassioned about that. I ask him about religion and the freedom we have as masses of matter. I ask him to tell me stories and he does. Seven or eight drinks in—what was I drinking, again?—I start to see my granddad in his eyes. The warmth of a loosened bloodstream makes him familiar, and though I know it is not sincere, I believe it is. I make connections and warp the stories my parents told me of their fathers for hours until I see the coagulating terms drooled out on my jeans. I don’t mind. I don’t mind because I am sitting with a dead family member who only slightly remembers me and he doesn’t mind either.