This is Us: Dead

I feel them watching me. I am at the side of the basketball court. I hold my breath as I pass by. I know nothing of what they see, I can’t understand myself in that way. What I am to you, was always unknowable, so what I am to the world, is unknowable too. As much as I don’t want that to be true, it is. In my mind there is a ball of light, I don’t know how else to say it. It lives there and gives me all my ideas, but it is not really a part of me. instead it is larger than I am or larger than I pretend. When I think of you, you are in the absence, not in the light but outside of it. You live there and haunt me like a ghost. I have done many things to love you and just as many to hate you. I have tried to forget you, but you are all around me, like air.

When I had my first dog, which was my only dog, I understood that you can love a thing and fear it. Not fear it in the way you fear a monster, but fear it in the way, that the thing that loves you needs you and that you will never be enough for that thing. You are only you. A human. I am me. A girl. That is all I will ever be. I have tried to be more, but I was born this way. Fragile and trying to cover that up. I walk the planet knowing that things can love me, but that I cannot help those things. They will be outside of my reach to make safe or to save. This fact is like a tree. It is there and once you see it, it just is. Beautiful and green and vastly alive, but all alone in the way we all are when it comes down to it. A tree keeps its distance from the other trees, if they are too close, they fight for sunlight and their roots get tangled and they become each other. Or something.

I was thinking in that golden shiny ball earlier today and it moved. It traveled down into where my heart is supposed to be. It is there now, making that spot warm and getting it ready for something. I can’t sleep. I know what’s coming and I’m scared of it. I know I cannot meet the challenge of being anything at all except my quiet self, my real self that I hide because I don’t think you would like it or understand. I am usually on some sort of stage trying to entertain you so I can feel love.

Have you ever held a bird in your hand and felt its heartbeat? Birds are wonderful, I think my Father said that and he’s right. There have been many birds in my life. Broken ones. Dying ones. Healthy fat ones. I have always loved them. Except for seagulls or pigeons. Both of those birds make me sick. Like they are rodents with wings. Scavengers that aren’t actually birds at all, because they pick garbage and do a bird bath in gutters. I realize that doesn’t make sense, but nothing will after this. I am a different thing right now.

I am not of myself in the way that I can describe something as accurate or in the way I am actually feeling it. I have always wanted to say things with precision, but words have an inherent limitation being that we are all animals and communicating as if we are noble and fearless. That’s dumb isn’t it? To be something we aren’t.

When I went to school, I saw kids there. I didn’t know how to talk to them, because I was scared. I thought they all knew each other already and I didn’t know how to meet them. My mother would say, just go and play with them, but I didn’t know how. So, I would walk up to the place that the kids were playing and find something to do with my feet. I was ashamed that I didn’t know what they knew. It made me scared to be alive. Later, I became an athlete at least a playground athlete, on the monkey bars swinging the whole time so I looked busy and wouldn’t have to talk to anybody.

My mother used to say she was painfully shy and her sister looked like Elizabeth Taylor, but my mother looked like Audrey Hepburn and I thought she looked better. Not as fat. When I was little I always thought Elizabeth Taylor was fat, so to say someone looked better than her was stupid. Just be happy to look like Audrey, I would say, she’s thin. I was painfully shy to be myself, never comfortable to be myself. I thought I wasn’t enough. I remember sitting in my mother’s car while she had panic attacks and didn’t know how to drive across the street. I remember being so young and not knowing how to drive and thinking, this is a bad scene, me in this car and my mom freaking out. I didn’t know if telling her to stop acting crazy would make her more crazy. I remember thinking things I wanted to say and then not saying them afraid I would upset my mother. I was very quiet as a child.

When I told my mom I was too scared to go to school, she didn’t believe me. I was scared for real. I would go and no one would talk to me and I’d be scared. Later after I made friends the people I did meet told me I seemed stuck up. I just didn’t know how to meet them and it froze me. I found out if I got sick I could stay home. So, I was sick a lot. Earaches. Sore throats. Fevers. It kept me away from school and I could get codeine. Codeine didn’t help the pain, but it made me feel quiet and safe. In a warm bubble all by myself, but not caring anymore that that was the way it was and was always going to be. It made me happy to be alone. It made me understand I had the best brain and I was the coolest person.

I realized today that I tell people how to be around me, but they don’t pay attention. I am very particular and closed off while pretending to be open. They say they understand how to act, but eventually I see some glimmer in their eyes wherein they think I’ve changed my mind about the directions I’ve given them. I want to tell them, you can only be close if you play by the set of rules and parameters I have given you, but there is free-will and they think they’ll do things their way and that I will like it, it will be good for me—their way. Only their way shuts me out forever. They didn’t listen. I have rules—you can only get close by pretending not to and once you drop the pretense, you are out. There is no other way, it’s because I’m scared of dying.

I think about death more than most people. When I was little I knew that all the people I loved were going to die someday and the pain of knowing it was hard to take. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. I remember finding out. I was in my parent’s bedroom, I even remember the bedspread—it was mustard yellow and brown flowers or leaves or something. My father was on the bed and I was on the floor with my world piggy bank, I was counting my money and my father was telling me stories. I asked what would happen to me when everybody died and he told me I’d die too someday. Why be born at all if only to die? It seems unfair. It stayed—the knowledge of it. Most people know this and can forget it and that’s why they don’t do anything in their lives with a desperation—they think they have all the time in the world. Or feel content in relationships or find stability---But I know it and can’t forget it, so I am awake to it all the time, which is a burden in one way, wherein I’m in more pain and feel things all the time, because no one else seems to know what I know, that we are all going to be dead, so why not try things, at least just once? Why wait it out. I think that’s why I live the way I do, in a way, like I am perpetually on vacation, doing things children do or teenagers do. It’s because we are dying.