And before me lay the vast desert of an entire roll of film, so filled with unused frames and a nervous energy that could only be dissuaded with liquor and mouthwash. The clock, whose arms stretched farther away than I was willing to imagine, whose usually steady cadence washed away the ground underneath my feet without noise or effort (so as not to illicit the screaming in my head some may call resistance to change) was unusually staring down into me with a great and unsettling patience, waiting intently, intensely, for me to extend my arm away from the safety of my body and move my first piece.
And instead I was behind me in the bony cavern I nostalgically called home planning the last moves I will have ever made.
There I went, flitting between the frequencies of of color and sound sliding breathlessly into the next explosion of information and waiting for the crackling of bone and sizzling of flesh to push me into the light, the photonic ocean of everything and anything, where the narrow space between my house and yours push against each other from the inside of the other, two palms of many, intertwined and desperately holding fast against the whirlwind of infinity howling all around the edges of everything it couldn't be.
This is serious. This is real life.
Every breath is a lure, every exhale an anchor. But not even the enormous gravity of my physicality can keep me from recoiling from the responsibilities laid in front of me so certainly by...
by whom?
Was it I, venerated, wrinkled, barely seated, filled with the life that I myself had yet to live and unwilling to expose himself and the person he'd become for fear that usurper may arrive before the caterer's did? Of course I'd plan a party for my own death. Was he hoping that I would be his guest of honor? Speak his last words? Give a toast to his last days? Make light of some things he may have done in jest, and perhaps, hopefully, without the better judgement of a scolding parent? Would I idolize him, give a treatise on the effect he's had on how I walk down a sidewalk holding my shoulders back and my gaze forward in a pantomime of self-assured security? Should I denigrate him and the way he's let himself become a doting fool, too engrossed in the meals of others he doesn't see the poison being served on his own plate? Could I just present him as the man he always was, the bastard child of an amalgamation of decisions he was never privy to and the sum of choices that he understood with the intimacy with which a mother knows her own child? Was he just another person waiting to put under another column on another page of another notebook where I dichotomize the world around me into another set of mutually exclusive ten-dollar words?
Fuck him, whoever he is. I've got my own problems to deal with.
He opens his mouth mirthfully, throwing his head back and clapping his hands together in a thunder that bursts me in half through my front door, a threshold I vaguely remember crossing.
I'm holding a small rectangular cardboard box with crushed corners, the black and gold printed design faded, webbed by creases from too many times being taken into and put back into jacket pockets, every time less useful and less significant. Inside is the smokey silhouette of someone who can't let go of "it all."
It looks better in a wastebasket than on my nightstand.
