Secret Stories from a Sad Heart
He was eventually going to read this blog, when I had the courage to share it. An English Literature major in college and avid reader, he caught a spelling error in my resume a few weeks back and it spooked me, I didn’t want him to catch all the grammar horror woven into my private thoughts.
He took himself out of the entire world this weekend. I can’t share movies or music or funny thoughts or good news with him. How cliché a time this is to think that I can see why people wish for an afterlife - a way of those who died to still be around us in some capacity. I don’t wish that for Brian, who, for decades, I called Brain. I imagined I’d tell the story about his nickname for years. Who would I tell it to now? Who would care now? An audience of none.
Dying young is unnatural. Trapped in time like an insect in resin, trapped in a time period and unable to experience new happiness, new pain and, new love and new loss. I look out my window, a scene I’ve photographed for him, once summer rain and now a new first snow. We move on, we keep changing, this will be part of my story now, this will be part of my change.
Truth is, I’m full of questions and rage. His last stop was me. His last hope was me. Yet, no note of solace letting me off the hook. Nothing to give me peace. His pain was so internal and he refused to share it. I am furious with those in his life that gave him the impression that he wasn’t valid enough to share his thoughts. Was it his parents? His ex-wife? At what point do we stop pointing fingers and just swallow the bitter pill?
The pacing has slowed over the last few days. He’ll never provide the answers. He did however provide me something he wrote in 2007. Rebirth, what a nice thought - here’s hoping he’s reborn in a world a little kinder than this one.
Brain’s story:
She awoke one morning to find that, in the night, her face had been hollowed. There were eyes, still, and yes, a mouth, but between was a void, a lack, a no-face full of insubstantiation. At first, the problem concerned her from a solely material standpoint – she still felt the sensations of a face, the itchings, snot & boogers, but how was she to blow her no-nose? How to scratch her formless cheeks? Worse, she felt the hollowness spreading, and by noon that day she was only lower-lipped and upper-lidded. The concerns grew – how would she taste (her tongue having also dissolved)? How would she salve her unceasingly chapped upper lip now that it appeared no longer amongst her features? With a start, she realized that these were only the beginning, the pettiest of her concerns. She had no nose, and could not gauge the proximity of impending rain; neither could she sense and avoid the danger of spoiled milk. With nothing but upper lids, she was unreadable and unknowable – how was anyone to guess her intentions or distinguish her solemnity from sarcasm without her eyes as meters? Worst of all, she felt her avenues of expression choked off with no mouth from which to pontificate, question, argue, no lips with which to kiss, no tongue to wag, no molars to grind in disgust. Drenched in vacuity, she grasped for completion and found potential within the remnants of her face. Eve was born of a rib; she could be reborn of a chin.