Dying before everyone I know prevents me from suffering. If it’s so sensible to assume that because I breathe I should respond to illness with fear then why can’t I? Every object in my house speaks moronically about me. I must be made of indifference, of apathy for gore, of no one knowing me at all; And I will set my face against you:
Everything looks like a movie in a way in this face-masked world of Spring. Beginning with the Hero getting his hands covered in air-dirt from opening the front door of his building. Prophecy after prophecy predicts his demise, but this hubris is a lot more simple: all it is is going for a run. The sky must descend anyway; first, it is only the front of the ankle that warns him, but he knows better than to believe that he won't get used to the pain. To reach his park it is all cemeteries and cars creeping up to the sun, trees not yet green behind flowers, and how he runs that interminable hill--
No one else runs at the park, people just lay under the reverb of branches rubbing in the wind. What difference does it make? Health is no longer something that happens outside the home. The Hero doesn’t care to breathe better, he only speeds up to beat one day his time mark, which falters every time his feet go unused because of rain. He reaches a sharp corner on the lake and smells it again, smoke rising out of cremation (Every time I’ve smelled this smoke there has never been a procession, a conversation heard, or even a face-mask littered on the grass after soaking up tears. One time the scent was so vague that I prayed for the person to get out of it alive. Then I knew that the corpse was me, a conclusion which I came to later on that same run, which led me back down an empty street which no one lived on, on which there was a minivan exuding black smoke from every seam, which I didn’t notice until I was directly next to it, which was a minute away from exploding, which did explode a minute later, which led me to beat my time mark that week from sprinting), smelling like stillness feeding green into the trees.
The Hero now looks up while running and it makes smiling so easy. This is it he presumes, he listens to the warnings of his lungs molting off: He accelerates to the speed of breathing everything at once, the air-dirt lines his body in a rage, that which consumes the eyes, and causes sorrow of heart. Then flat! He falls onto the ground, and rolls down the path onto a patch of grass where finally with a stranger he can watch the trees consume ashes from the smoke.
But even in the safety of my home, it’s disarming:
You invite someone in to break the edges of the room with some teeth, and what can they offer you? Asymptomatic liquor I suppose, undetectable weed, and such nice hair-- At the end of the day there are no lymphatic shields, just pills to avoid taking other pills, just medical certificates to prove that not this time, and your smile to their smile to simply smiling that this life could be worse, it could be the 80s, it could be fervently political, and terrifying, and everyone’s business. Luckily this time it’s not, this time being Spring all they did was drag dry leaves into your room.
Then even further in, where I’m not translucent enough to show you:
My doctor won’t allow anyone in my body anymore. Not until this is all resolved. You see, man oh man I am a man whom man still enters, whose nice is splendid and monitored. The truth is, I’m growing a child and we can’t have some dog poking his head. Look, look, let me explain, it’s more effective to despise the thing in silence than give myself a hard time. One after another I am
what I am,
sure, not
nervously enough,
just laughing it off,
however, strength is volatile: haven’t you ever been so heavy that the ground drums slow beneath you? This is exactly what I mean. Once, during the rainy season I fell into a creek of tadpoles with my burgundy suit on after trying to pick them up with my hands. It was sweeter than I imagined, the rain warmed the creek so that it felt the same as lying face up in the grass. So I laid there with my black children sticking onto the linen until my brother walked back up from the lake, and when he did we just laughed off, and I rose, and the tadpoles scattered silently over the grass.
Oh man! I should not suffer. Could it be that I am to be afraid that my plants, too, will turn against me? I overheard the hamper cough sickly from my sweat so I put my headphones on away from death and so it is, that even in illness I should be outstanding--
4/23/2020 7:40PM