I want to write an
honest sentence. I don't want to exist, he said. To want not
to be: two positives and a negative. Negative wins, masquerading
as member of a team clutching its trophy for the cameras. Digital
immortality is brief, though it comes around like days of the week.
He sat down to draw a Valentine; what flashed before him was a
sketch of himself ascending to heaven. At least there were wings.
That was before the image of him lying in the tub, covered in
blood. We pay attention to the film more than to the screen on which
it dances. The film pierces us with need. His
son's ideation involved using his friend's gun at a shooting range.
If our father could do it, so can I, one
woman reported, having lost
both father and brother. It's
not something we commit,
except to other's memories. Her friend, dead these 20 years, still
appears in her dreams, telling jokes. Ithi stands by Starbucks with Rawi, each clutching
a large bag.
Suicide is a stay to time, its straight jacket. At the end of Poetry:
Shi, the audience sat quietly in
the dark theater, as if to
take in the braid of dementia and suicide. Outside it was sunny and
the Pacific Ocean was turquoise and people were drinking coffee and
shopping. Everything as it had been. The death toll is a bell
that rings
for thee, and thee. A verb and its negative are the enjambment that
breaks statement into counter-statement, a moment of being into one
of ceasing to exist. “The horses are" was
Plath's best line, my teacher said. I'm afraid to see what came next. And
he is and they are yet. I feel cleaner now, he says, having told us
the story of a grandfather who liked little boys. To hear is to take
on but some of the weight, and to carry it away. The road's shoulders
bear the strain of wanderers, men and women who walk. (To walk is to
place one foot before the other, and the other after.) You can see it
in their eyes, the unsettled stare. Theo wondered if our colleague
had died by suicide but I said no, he was quite happy. His last
glance resembled one.
--24
December 2017
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