(no subject)
Among other things last night I dreamed of a kayak adventure. Lonely, but not solitary, across a glassy plain of water, with only mountains to break the still. It might have been cold or only seemed so from the colors, ice white and crystal cliffs. I knew nothing about the water except that it was deep, and on the surface still, but full of under-rushing stories. As it ever is, more than it could seem from one angle, and me precipitously aware of my position, like a leaf, gliding along the surface, making such small contact as to be almost totally negligent. Knowing how small and useless my limbs become, encased in fiberglass, pushing paddles. How quick going seems glorious, but dangerous too. Like bike riding fast in traffic, knowing there's little between you, an accident, and the end of everything as you know it. Momentum to throw you to the end, or just as easily to the abyss.
What is the end of an era? How do we say goodbye? Last night I watched the end, the very last of Six Feet Under and I know this ship has sailed for most of you, but I started watching this show with my mom six years ago and I have not watched one episode out of order. I got the first season on DVD and borrowed the rest, slowly, one at a time from TLA and then Netflix. Beth and I used to hang out and watch them but then I moved to a different side of town and we got busy and eventually I had to go forward without her and finish them. Now I am truly done.
I seems strange now to be without that little wondering of what-will-happen. I keep picturing moments from the last episode and they feel seared into my brain in a way I'm a little embarrassed to admit but I shall be honest. I used this show as a way to look at things which terrified me and I did not want to see. I cried during every single episode. That awful droning summer after my mother died was when I got the first season to re-watch. I put it on and sobbed for days and days. I also got very morbid and went on the internet and learned all about what they do to bodies when you die, or should I say when you are embalmed. Let me therefore state it here that I never, ever want to be embalmed. Please burn me. Please burn me and scatter me in the Lake. I remember touching my mother's face in her coffin and it felt like a rock. My mother had the softest cheeks. It was a terrible moment. The last thing I touched was her hand. Paper-smooth skin over bone, that's all. It was only marginally redeeming but it was something.
I know I talk a lot about her. I know I talk a lot about death, and being afraid, and nightmares. I'm not a sad person, generally. But I find myself obsessed with why we as people come together, and come apart. In this respect her being gone means everything to me. Why would I be separated from the one person I thought I could not live without? Because that is just what happens. Every fear you harbor, you live through. Any thing you cannot bear to be without, you will. Eventually.
I begin my nights: one side of the bed, one half mine, sort of, but tangled up as people get, two to a mattress. I begin my mornings: middle of the bed, shored up close, close, as close as I can get, oceans of empty pillow space in my wake. I don't mean to but I cling to him. All that leg and arm and long long body, so much to hold on to, so soft and undercover warm.
So you know the contradiction. My resolve, strong as it is, to want nothing, keep nothing, harbor nothing that may be robbed of me. No theivery without possession. But my sleep, my quietest self, hurls a storm and I grab on. My high school boyfriend once told me people clench their hands, curl their toes when they fuck - why? - so you don't fall out of the tree of course. Yes, when we were monkeys. Laugh! We were monkeys, we remain them and our bodies won't forget. Our hands and feet and backs, our eyes, our teeth and skin and bones. We are sad little confusions we can't help bringing home. We own that.
And so February very clearly has become a time of goodbyes, much as I hate to admit it, much as I try every year to deny my cold reunion with these salt-strewn paths. The one month I know I will be reduced to foot-travel, bike travel giving way to cars giving way to trains giving way to the power of my own toes to bring me from A to B. If you shall recall this was the month I tore my knee, on a day I have always described as one of the most perfect of my life, until the moment of breakage. Perhaps it was even so afterwards and it's only my shallow view making me think otherwise. What a thought. Perfection. Perfectly symbolic, breaking grey and snowfallen, a breathtaking view, well-fed and better loved, with fruit and honey and warm socks and smiles, and cell phones left, and if even for that one day worry silent, desperate hope abated, only leg-on-leg on ski lift, cold but for the other. A high crest, a silent mountain, an endless view. A smiling goodbye and a promise to meet later. And then, gone. A split-second decision, a quick spiraling movement on an icy slope, a sound like no other, a connection rent and never to be healed, only replaced. And what became of it afterwards, with blizzards and pizzas and pain medication, tears and longing and trying to sleep, of blame made and blame felt, of guilt, and mistakes, and a long drive home, of jokes, of loving attempts construed otherwise, and a thousand things unrelatable, only lived.
And now this, also unrelatable, only felt. My grief is a mystery still, how it comes without warning, what realizations uncovered, what wounds, unhealed, laid wet and bare. Set out in the light to dry. Some people never leave your sights, they only move slightly to the side and it's any day you could glance and find them. Find them how? Keeping on, telling their own stories, becoming better hopefully every day, more like themselves. I wish for nothing else, and if that's a lie, it's a good one, the kind designed to make me more like myself, or at least a version I wouldn't be ashamed of.
Nothing is forever, but you were, beautifully, to me, then, more than you could have dreamed.
De Occulta Philosophia
Evening sunlight,
Your humble servant
Seeks initiation
Into your occult ways
Out of the late-summer sky,
Its deepening quiet,
You brought me a summons,
A small share in some large
And obscure knowledge.
Tell me something of your study
Of lengthening shadows,
The blazing windowpanes
Where the soul is turned into light-
Or don't just now.
You have the air of someone
Who prefers to dwell in solitude,
The one who enters, with gravity
Of mein and imposing severity,
A room suddenly rich with enigmas.
Oh supreme unknowable,
The seemingly inviolable reserve
Of your stratagems
Makes me quake at the thought
Of you finding me thus
Seated in a shadowy back room
At the edge of a village
Bloodied by the setting sun,
To tell me so much,
To tell me absolutely nothing.
-Charles Simic
What is the end of an era? How do we say goodbye? Last night I watched the end, the very last of Six Feet Under and I know this ship has sailed for most of you, but I started watching this show with my mom six years ago and I have not watched one episode out of order. I got the first season on DVD and borrowed the rest, slowly, one at a time from TLA and then Netflix. Beth and I used to hang out and watch them but then I moved to a different side of town and we got busy and eventually I had to go forward without her and finish them. Now I am truly done.
I seems strange now to be without that little wondering of what-will-happen. I keep picturing moments from the last episode and they feel seared into my brain in a way I'm a little embarrassed to admit but I shall be honest. I used this show as a way to look at things which terrified me and I did not want to see. I cried during every single episode. That awful droning summer after my mother died was when I got the first season to re-watch. I put it on and sobbed for days and days. I also got very morbid and went on the internet and learned all about what they do to bodies when you die, or should I say when you are embalmed. Let me therefore state it here that I never, ever want to be embalmed. Please burn me. Please burn me and scatter me in the Lake. I remember touching my mother's face in her coffin and it felt like a rock. My mother had the softest cheeks. It was a terrible moment. The last thing I touched was her hand. Paper-smooth skin over bone, that's all. It was only marginally redeeming but it was something.
I know I talk a lot about her. I know I talk a lot about death, and being afraid, and nightmares. I'm not a sad person, generally. But I find myself obsessed with why we as people come together, and come apart. In this respect her being gone means everything to me. Why would I be separated from the one person I thought I could not live without? Because that is just what happens. Every fear you harbor, you live through. Any thing you cannot bear to be without, you will. Eventually.
I begin my nights: one side of the bed, one half mine, sort of, but tangled up as people get, two to a mattress. I begin my mornings: middle of the bed, shored up close, close, as close as I can get, oceans of empty pillow space in my wake. I don't mean to but I cling to him. All that leg and arm and long long body, so much to hold on to, so soft and undercover warm.
So you know the contradiction. My resolve, strong as it is, to want nothing, keep nothing, harbor nothing that may be robbed of me. No theivery without possession. But my sleep, my quietest self, hurls a storm and I grab on. My high school boyfriend once told me people clench their hands, curl their toes when they fuck - why? - so you don't fall out of the tree of course. Yes, when we were monkeys. Laugh! We were monkeys, we remain them and our bodies won't forget. Our hands and feet and backs, our eyes, our teeth and skin and bones. We are sad little confusions we can't help bringing home. We own that.
And so February very clearly has become a time of goodbyes, much as I hate to admit it, much as I try every year to deny my cold reunion with these salt-strewn paths. The one month I know I will be reduced to foot-travel, bike travel giving way to cars giving way to trains giving way to the power of my own toes to bring me from A to B. If you shall recall this was the month I tore my knee, on a day I have always described as one of the most perfect of my life, until the moment of breakage. Perhaps it was even so afterwards and it's only my shallow view making me think otherwise. What a thought. Perfection. Perfectly symbolic, breaking grey and snowfallen, a breathtaking view, well-fed and better loved, with fruit and honey and warm socks and smiles, and cell phones left, and if even for that one day worry silent, desperate hope abated, only leg-on-leg on ski lift, cold but for the other. A high crest, a silent mountain, an endless view. A smiling goodbye and a promise to meet later. And then, gone. A split-second decision, a quick spiraling movement on an icy slope, a sound like no other, a connection rent and never to be healed, only replaced. And what became of it afterwards, with blizzards and pizzas and pain medication, tears and longing and trying to sleep, of blame made and blame felt, of guilt, and mistakes, and a long drive home, of jokes, of loving attempts construed otherwise, and a thousand things unrelatable, only lived.
And now this, also unrelatable, only felt. My grief is a mystery still, how it comes without warning, what realizations uncovered, what wounds, unhealed, laid wet and bare. Set out in the light to dry. Some people never leave your sights, they only move slightly to the side and it's any day you could glance and find them. Find them how? Keeping on, telling their own stories, becoming better hopefully every day, more like themselves. I wish for nothing else, and if that's a lie, it's a good one, the kind designed to make me more like myself, or at least a version I wouldn't be ashamed of.
Nothing is forever, but you were, beautifully, to me, then, more than you could have dreamed.
De Occulta Philosophia
Evening sunlight,
Your humble servant
Seeks initiation
Into your occult ways
Out of the late-summer sky,
Its deepening quiet,
You brought me a summons,
A small share in some large
And obscure knowledge.
Tell me something of your study
Of lengthening shadows,
The blazing windowpanes
Where the soul is turned into light-
Or don't just now.
You have the air of someone
Who prefers to dwell in solitude,
The one who enters, with gravity
Of mein and imposing severity,
A room suddenly rich with enigmas.
Oh supreme unknowable,
The seemingly inviolable reserve
Of your stratagems
Makes me quake at the thought
Of you finding me thus
Seated in a shadowy back room
At the edge of a village
Bloodied by the setting sun,
To tell me so much,
To tell me absolutely nothing.
-Charles Simic