Death.
My twelfth Christmas… it was actually the day after: Boxing Day; we were visiting my father’s side of the family. We pulled into the visitor’s parking lot at my relation’s apartment building. A police officer stood in the frigid outdoors guarding a blanketed bundle beside him. Throughout the day, between gifts and hugs and visiting, I sneaked peeks at the hustle and bustle of the different emergency personnel that had been converging in the lot while we celebrated. There was something that kept drawing me out to the balcony and kept pulling my gaze to the ground… it wasn’t gravity either, it was a far more powerful a force. And for a brief moment that morbid curiosity was satisfied. Some inspector must have arrived on the scene and the blankets were pulled away…
I heard later that the man who fell that day had slipped while trying to affix something back on the balcony above him. He had fallen some seventeen stories, nearly double Phil’s fatal decent, but it’s still his twisted corpse I visualize when I think of how Phil died. Unnaturally bent and twisted with a graphic display around him that I dare not try to capture in print. That remains the closest I’ve come to fatality… coffins are too far removed.
There are some things I need to come to terms with. There are also some terms I need to define. Ambiguity will ruin me. This is the epitaph of hope. Frosty died when he ceased to hope. I’ll die if I don’t cease to hope. Hope for me has always revolved around a person, rather, a relationship with a person. I named that person ‘Hope’ in order to protect myself. I can deny an identity if it remains anonymous. I can pretend that it won’t hurt should Hope read this and hate me for it, or laugh at it, or do anything but see the truth I’ve poured into it. Then I could pretend that she was not Hope at all…
All I really want is to be the me I am inside.
We, people in general, are a selfish lot. This is one vast generalization I’ll adhere to. There are no exceptions to selfishness, especially if Christ worshipped God and was who he said he was. Children don’t lose any time in learning what it means to possess. Maybe it’s not so bad, but I’ve seen too many smiles and tears evoked from the presence and absence of things. I think if we could learn to become selfless in our actions we would live in a perfect world. I’m an idealist, though. I aspire to absolutes, or my own understanding of objectivity, so I guess my Idealism may as well be selfishness. So might everything. That must be why it’s better to love than to deceive ourselves that selflessness is even possible of being a virtue worth practicing.
I moved a few months after Phil died. I was living at residence in school but the institution had administrative problems that led me discontinue my enrollment prematurely. I had lived with my mother for a few years and was planning to move in with my father after the school year. I ended up making the transition sooner than I had expected to.
I had lived in the same city for twenty years. I knew that place like the back of my hand. In my lifetime the population had probably doubled and the boundaries too. I lived in six different houses, three apartments, attended eight educational facilities, and probably as many religious ones in those twenty short years spanning my life thus far. Everyone I knew, everyone who knew me, my old workplaces, old hangouts, old everything, was left behind. When I left my mother on the porch she wept. I left all of my personal history without a second thought. It’s only hard to leave when you feel like you have a home. After Phil’s death a sense of urgency struck me. Not that Phil’s death drove me away or opened any doors, but it unearthed a sense of desperation that was in the process of surfacing for a long time. For years I’d felt like I didn’t belong. I tried to look ahead and remain occupied in studies or employment but everything just seemed so temporal and trivial. I graduated high school without any resounding milestones to mark my way, and proceeded to university as though it were just one of the innumerable roads to drudgery. My dime a dozen dreams of fortune and fame were being crushed under the burden of so-called reality. I was stuck in the mundane morose ‘real world’ and I knew that greater things existed elsewhere. I was lost in a labyrinth of directionless choices and futile opportunities and I knew that my only hope was to get away. Besides, Hope had my heart for months already, and if home is where your heart is, mine was nowhere near my place of residence. I risked my comfort for two reasons, hope and Hope.
I buried a lot with the handful of dirt I dropped on Phil’s coffin. I buried dreams and ideas, some of them have been resurrected to new life, some have been resurrected to new death, some have remained buried and some have yet to be buried. Sometimes we don’t realize the magnitude of an instant until we distance ourselves from it; time is a necessary spacer. Phil’s funeral was fairly quiet. No trumpets, bagpipes, or twenty-one gun salutes, no nationwide moment of silence, just bereaved relations, a few inconsolable classmates and a few like myself who stood in an eerie pensive confusion. It rained; even if it was only misty drizzle in the cemetery, there was a torrent in my head. It wasn’t fair. The world would never know him. The world would miss out on an incredible human being because it rained one day in May. Phil would have liked that. He would have come up with some diminishing perspective and reduced the whole fatal chain of events to the first drop of water that hit him on his way to work when ‘it was really coming down’. Phil loved the simplicity of confusion. He loved to pass over the grandest obstacles and lose himself in details. There is so much missing from his story. So much remains a mystery, to die with him. I didn’t even know whom to hate at the funeral; the only thing I knew about Angelica’s appearance was the color of her eyes. They were green. I looked around for the enchantress that bewitched my friend. I scanned in bitter frustration for the green-eyed monster that consumed this human sacrifice. She wasn’t there. I didn’t know many there, there weren’t many in the first place, but none of those who made an appearance was the siren Angelica.
When I thought about it I was astounded by how few people cared for the passing of a twenty-year-old out of this existence. The minister’s eulogy, taken from some manual for all occasions, book-marked and highlighted for service time-allotment, scripted between weddings and christenings, was an empty monotone oration. The songs, decided upon by Phil’s grandmother, were mumbled out of dusty hymnals, few knew the tunes. The people, faced with their own mortality and the ultimate illustration of the consequences of choice, were consumed with their loss and how this tragedy would affect their lives. Phil used to go on about how the system teaches us that the standard of worth in society is contribution. How our education equates worth with notoriety. That is such an inaccurate and unattainable standard for the majority of people who will live malcontented because they’ll torture themselves with overwhelming feelings of inadequacy for never being more. Still, I could almost picture Phil rising from the dead, by the hand of God, in answer to the prayer of some charismatic zealot, only to see his funeral and jump again.
“Popularity is no measure of worth, Phil.”
“Life is relationships.”
“Quality not quantity.”
“If someone couldn’t write a book about your life, it was wasted. I want people to know my story. I want there to be a story to tell.”
“There are only two people who will know my story: God, because I can’t help his reading it, and my wife, whoever she turns out to be, because she will be the only one to turn certain pages.”
“It’s funny… in this day and age you’re lucky if you get a moment of silence for your labors in life. I won’t be happy with less than a holiday… at the least nationwide news coverage.”
He said this with a cynical smile as if he knew he’d pass with less notice than the dying flame of a match. It’s only if you’re holding the match that you pay attention to the flame… and it’s usually the one holding the match that extinguishes it too… before they’re burnt. I’m sorry buddy, but it was a quiet event, open invitation, where few showed up. And you left your story in bad hands… I’m not worthy of articulating a life, let alone a life like yours… I can’t even live my own.
“If you’re not living you’re dying.”
Too many times we vowed to get busy living. Usually proceeding a bad movie or an evening spent witnessing an acquaintance’s binge at an excuse for alcohol consumption labeled a ‘party’. The problem was we couldn’t escape the parameters of living laid out for us… and we wanted to on several occasions; the parameters aren’t made with everyone in mind, regardless of how often we’re made to believe they are.
I think that the first step towards living is ridding ourselves of everyone else’s preconceptions of us, being those useless anxieties of expectation that lead us to examine our sorry selves in the mirror in search of our shortcomings; if we could free ourselves of those impositions then we might find our own worthwhile pursuits. I don’t know what dreams I’ll have tonight, or what they’ll birth tomorrow, but I won’t be defined in a day. I may never know who I am or all I’ll come to be; I think those questions may only be answered in how I’m remembered by the one who knows me, or in a compilation of all who knew me, but it is my sole ambition that one person will be able to answer that question by saying that I was her one and only truest love. That is the contribution I want to have on one solitary individual; I want to be the love of my love, the hope of Hope, the dream of my dream. That is the only thing that keeps the shell of faith and desire from cracking, under the pressures that the world brings, and spilling all I’ve held dear all over; the hope that my beloved is awaiting me with the same fervor I wait with.
It is my desire to know hope that I might discover love. It is a fear of mine that I’ll content myself with hope, and never pursue love, because of the inadequacies I see when I look at that image in the mirror. To be as honest as I’m capable of being, I don’t think I’m able to love myself until someone else sees something worth loving in me. I have yet to find it and I look. Every time I look in the mirror I scrutinize myself, inside and out, for the blemish or flaw that makes it impossible for me to accept admiration or encouragement or the intimacy of love that is my heart’s desire. I have difficulty accepting that someone else could love what I could not. Phil summed it up once while I was driving…
“Sometimes I think you’re naïve to believe in this reclusive Love, especially to the point of torturing, sorry, 'saving' yourself, for someone yet unknown…”
He was talking to me but I was pretending not to listen. He was looking at the speedometer while I lowered the window.
“Then I remember that you think speed limits are naïve, unjust, presuppositions enforced by pseudo authority figures and that that thought reassures you of some notion of a greater absolute and principles and truth and perfection and eternity, which in turn leads to the contemplation of the other virtues of peace and comfort and joy which all eventually leads back to God, and I know that you know that love must exist somewhere out there for those who believe in it and it’s that thought that sustains your will for another day without that which you so strongly desire.”
I just looked at him while he looked out of my window, to the officer, whom had just ambled into view and was now shining his flashlight throughout the interior of my car. I had been pulled over doing one hundred in a sixty. I put my head on the steering wheel. The cop looked at Phil and I in turn. Phil said afterward that his face looked like it was chiseled out of granite, I couldn’t say, I couldn’t look at him.
“Do you know how fast you were going?”
“Sir, the speed of thought cannot be measured.”
“I’m addressing the driver, son.”
“Sir, the one driving this car can only be reached through devoted prayer. My friend here was in communion with higher purposes.”
“Have you boys been drinking?”
“No, officer.”
I took the liberty of professing this much… I didn’t think Phil could keep my account balanced much longer.
“He’s lying, sir.”
I looked at Phil. In an instantaneous intoxicating fury, I yelled at him.
“What the hell are you doing!”
“You see, sir? He’s totally out of control, he’s gone, he’s wasted, he may as well have been drinking all night. He’s a wreck officer… he’s in love.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s in love, sir.”
“Let me get this straight, you were doing a hundred and three in a sixty zone because you’re in love?”
I looked at Phil. I swallowed, hard, and looked at the officer. Phil’s description was rather accurate; I was looking at the tombstone marking my open grave… and I jumped right in.
“If you knew her, officer… you’d know my hurry.”
He actually smiled. He checked himself and looked sternly again at both of us. Then he addressed me, all business.
“License and registration.”
The time for talk had passed, even Phil could sense as much. I handed the articles requested to the officer.
“Now don’t go anywhere…”
He said it almost playfully, like we were the toys. He turned around and started back to his cruiser. He was there for a good ten minutes before his flashlight bobbed back to my open window. Neither Phil nor myself had ventured anything but breathing for those ten minutes, only mine was considerably more irregular than Frosty’s. The cop handed back my license, intact, and registration, and a ticket, all in a neatly folded little package.
“Slow it down, boys, you’ll get where you want to go quicker if you get there alive.”
He drove away.
We stayed parked in the dark on the shoulder of the street in silence for another good fifteen minutes, expecting the cavalry.
“I think he bought it, Fost … you can go now.”
“I bought it, Phil… and I pray to God I can.”
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