Carapace Sails
There is, here, a dwelling scene taking place right where I'm short of breath on the hospital bed. I will remember this forever, though that's probably not saying much, depending on where I go from here.
Have you seen the light today, a priest asked me. He asks me everyday and my answer is always none of your goddamn business. He asks what's with me and breaking the ten commandments (I would laugh, but the cancer holds me back). I tell him I might as well since purgatory's only for catholics and I am not. He shrugs, maybe he's not one to judge after all.
A brief conversation follows. A joke or two. He is used to my cursing and I am used to his reproach. There is the quaint sense of comfort and ease between the dying and the living, the sinner and the saint. With no need to impress we are finally - maybe for the first time in our lives - ourselves.
I sit up, anchors in my ribs want me back to shore. I struggle, my elbows shudder like a sun through cloud cover. There's something I want, I have the vague feeling that this may be the last time I ever see him, maybe anyone. The sail's down. His hand on my shoulder, he asks me why. I feel the storm start and I try to stop it but instead it comes and I wonder. Why. Shipwrecked, I tell him to jump out. Save himself. I'm overdramatic even when dying.
But he won't. He makes me lie down and I feel the sails rise and the water settle, a little. The surge ends like one lifelong wave fallen in one stroke, my bedsheets ripple. He tells me to be careful with myself. It's not already too late? He shakes his head.
I sit and listen to another long speech about salvation. I am too tired from sitting up to tell him to stop. I could have recited my own salvation speech by now. I could have done so at any given point in my life.
I don't need to hear this. Again.
When he is finished I have finally regained my breath. Barely. Enough to ask him how he could believe. He sighs, says he doesn't, but if I'm going to die the least he can do is try and save my soul, you know, in case God really does exist. Never has religion seemed so depressing as it does now. I tell him so. He says if I think it's so bad imagine how he feels, being a priest and all. I tell him for the love of God, don't make me laugh. It hurts. He stifles a grin and holds my eyes still with his.
"Tell me what you have had."
It occurs to me for the first time, how little I have told this man of my life. From dwelling scene to dwelling words, no real discussions ever took place. My sisters paid for him to come in and preach, the same thing he got paid to do on Sundays. I'm sure he would have listened but I never really had anything to say unless I was telling him why he was wrong.
So I decide if he is going to be the last person I ever see (which I am sure of, now) that I might as well tell him what I have had.
"Not half of what I could have."
The first thing that came to mind was Heather. Of course, the girl. The lost love. Here I am, on my deathbed, with a priest in a chair at my side, talking about the girl. I feel like a best selling author's dream, the ideal character; nostalgic at my death. Notsalgic about the girl. I sigh in the inevitability of dying with platitude. But I suppose sometimes life is so.
There's pictures of her, in my desk. Pictures of her in Paris, riding the cobblestone streets on a motorcycle. And with her father, in New Jersey. There are pictures of her in a sailboat, where she asked me to join her but instead I stayed here. Plunged in cigarettes and oil paint. A working artist, I was. No room for me on a sailboat; I paint people not waves. She said I could always paint her. I never told her I already have. I have painted her with the streets of Paris. New Jersey with her father. And our sailboat.
We met at college. Never got close but shared that college student idealism that fades just after graduation. Kept each other encouraged, aspirations in apex. Had an art class or two together before the air of Europe swept her away. Letters exchanged and phone calls lingered until the sailboat. She said she was going to take a trip, didn't know when she'd be back. Wherever the waves took her. Something poetic like that. She always wanted that kind of life, moved by the curves of colors and the currents of their shades. Something I couldn't do. She never told me how long the trip took or where it took her. Until one letter, one day, said she had found someone who would sail with her. I took that as a hint. I didn't reply. She never wrote again. My pride fit the decades of silence like tiles in a turtle shell. And here I lay on my deathbed, upside down.
Through the letters I believe it was something like love that I fell into and felt. I clawed at her handwriting, opened up my chest and shoved it inside. I repeated the words written before sleep, imagined. It is possible that between us was nothing. That the emotions were adjectives and the waves were commas, all of my own design. If she said I miss you, that meant I consumed her longing. If she signed a letter "Love, Heather", it meant she loved me. If she told me I should join her, she meant it. I didn't want to consider that sometimes people just say nice things.
Feeling all of this only after she left - not while I was actually with her - was like hugging irony. Which I have been doing my whole life. A tightly wound embrace, never letting go. Sometimes for the sake of being histronic, sometimes because I didn't know any better, sometimes because of what my grandmother would deem bad luck.
After her I took my desperation elsewhere. But there was no comparison. Maybe if the others I had met moved across the ocean it would have been different.
If only I had taken up sailing, I keep telling myself.
So I remained single. Never married. No kids. The last of my blood which shall ever be coursed is pumped by this diseased heart and when I cease to exist it will be final, it will course nowhere else. I had no concept of the purpose of family until after decades of cigarette smoking instead of lovemaking caught up with me.
He looks down, he feels empathy, not sympathy. His naked fingers clenched, his eyes like rings; the purpose of family hollowing his cheeks as he sighs, regret flossing between teeth with a precarious breath. Pure mouth suddenly longing for taste. There is another surge, this time his. He closes his mouth, tight, looks to me. Shrugs. Tells me he doesn't know what to say. For the first time since shaking my hand.
Have you seen the light today, a priest asked me. He asks me everyday and my answer is always none of your goddamn business. He asks what's with me and breaking the ten commandments (I would laugh, but the cancer holds me back). I tell him I might as well since purgatory's only for catholics and I am not. He shrugs, maybe he's not one to judge after all.
A brief conversation follows. A joke or two. He is used to my cursing and I am used to his reproach. There is the quaint sense of comfort and ease between the dying and the living, the sinner and the saint. With no need to impress we are finally - maybe for the first time in our lives - ourselves.
I sit up, anchors in my ribs want me back to shore. I struggle, my elbows shudder like a sun through cloud cover. There's something I want, I have the vague feeling that this may be the last time I ever see him, maybe anyone. The sail's down. His hand on my shoulder, he asks me why. I feel the storm start and I try to stop it but instead it comes and I wonder. Why. Shipwrecked, I tell him to jump out. Save himself. I'm overdramatic even when dying.
But he won't. He makes me lie down and I feel the sails rise and the water settle, a little. The surge ends like one lifelong wave fallen in one stroke, my bedsheets ripple. He tells me to be careful with myself. It's not already too late? He shakes his head.
I sit and listen to another long speech about salvation. I am too tired from sitting up to tell him to stop. I could have recited my own salvation speech by now. I could have done so at any given point in my life.
I don't need to hear this. Again.
When he is finished I have finally regained my breath. Barely. Enough to ask him how he could believe. He sighs, says he doesn't, but if I'm going to die the least he can do is try and save my soul, you know, in case God really does exist. Never has religion seemed so depressing as it does now. I tell him so. He says if I think it's so bad imagine how he feels, being a priest and all. I tell him for the love of God, don't make me laugh. It hurts. He stifles a grin and holds my eyes still with his.
"Tell me what you have had."
It occurs to me for the first time, how little I have told this man of my life. From dwelling scene to dwelling words, no real discussions ever took place. My sisters paid for him to come in and preach, the same thing he got paid to do on Sundays. I'm sure he would have listened but I never really had anything to say unless I was telling him why he was wrong.
So I decide if he is going to be the last person I ever see (which I am sure of, now) that I might as well tell him what I have had.
"Not half of what I could have."
The first thing that came to mind was Heather. Of course, the girl. The lost love. Here I am, on my deathbed, with a priest in a chair at my side, talking about the girl. I feel like a best selling author's dream, the ideal character; nostalgic at my death. Notsalgic about the girl. I sigh in the inevitability of dying with platitude. But I suppose sometimes life is so.
There's pictures of her, in my desk. Pictures of her in Paris, riding the cobblestone streets on a motorcycle. And with her father, in New Jersey. There are pictures of her in a sailboat, where she asked me to join her but instead I stayed here. Plunged in cigarettes and oil paint. A working artist, I was. No room for me on a sailboat; I paint people not waves. She said I could always paint her. I never told her I already have. I have painted her with the streets of Paris. New Jersey with her father. And our sailboat.
We met at college. Never got close but shared that college student idealism that fades just after graduation. Kept each other encouraged, aspirations in apex. Had an art class or two together before the air of Europe swept her away. Letters exchanged and phone calls lingered until the sailboat. She said she was going to take a trip, didn't know when she'd be back. Wherever the waves took her. Something poetic like that. She always wanted that kind of life, moved by the curves of colors and the currents of their shades. Something I couldn't do. She never told me how long the trip took or where it took her. Until one letter, one day, said she had found someone who would sail with her. I took that as a hint. I didn't reply. She never wrote again. My pride fit the decades of silence like tiles in a turtle shell. And here I lay on my deathbed, upside down.
Through the letters I believe it was something like love that I fell into and felt. I clawed at her handwriting, opened up my chest and shoved it inside. I repeated the words written before sleep, imagined. It is possible that between us was nothing. That the emotions were adjectives and the waves were commas, all of my own design. If she said I miss you, that meant I consumed her longing. If she signed a letter "Love, Heather", it meant she loved me. If she told me I should join her, she meant it. I didn't want to consider that sometimes people just say nice things.
Feeling all of this only after she left - not while I was actually with her - was like hugging irony. Which I have been doing my whole life. A tightly wound embrace, never letting go. Sometimes for the sake of being histronic, sometimes because I didn't know any better, sometimes because of what my grandmother would deem bad luck.
After her I took my desperation elsewhere. But there was no comparison. Maybe if the others I had met moved across the ocean it would have been different.
If only I had taken up sailing, I keep telling myself.
So I remained single. Never married. No kids. The last of my blood which shall ever be coursed is pumped by this diseased heart and when I cease to exist it will be final, it will course nowhere else. I had no concept of the purpose of family until after decades of cigarette smoking instead of lovemaking caught up with me.
He looks down, he feels empathy, not sympathy. His naked fingers clenched, his eyes like rings; the purpose of family hollowing his cheeks as he sighs, regret flossing between teeth with a precarious breath. Pure mouth suddenly longing for taste. There is another surge, this time his. He closes his mouth, tight, looks to me. Shrugs. Tells me he doesn't know what to say. For the first time since shaking my hand.