I
There was something about my world that I found unbearable. Maybe it was my own self-consciousness screaming out bitter cynicism over the narcissistic indifference of my co-peers in their drive towards a ‘self-emulated’ sanctuary from harm. Maybe it is a schizophrenic mania that cannot fathom the neurotic psychology harking at the devious fiends who are guiding the listener towards the plight of despair. Or maybe it was a frenzied Pink inside me who wanted to close myself deep within my glass house, forgetting about the world outside of me... to become a Stephen-wolf of sorts, to misquote Hermann Hesse.
But that doesn’t matter... Or should it? Perhaps fate has cried out for whiskey far too often, and has reared its head towards me and what I’m staring at. A grave stooped high and mighty over a cemented platform hardened by granite chips and a limestone finishing of sorts that presents it as a tomb open for worship, rather than slabs of stone arranged to remember the dead and their erasing from this world where I reside. I laugh to myself, thinking about the hypocrisy that I have just believed in. There’s a cigarette in my hand - and if you’re wondering, it’s a white tipper - half consumed while staring between the tombstone of my dearly beloved and the world around her.
The cemetery is a stark place, but only if you want to believe it as a stark and depressing place to reside in. It is not; It’s the most peaceful place you can ever walk in. There is more discipline here - considering the “passed” as a populace - than anywhere else, with the caretaker proves the role of a ‘divine arbitrator’ for the populace. It is highly regular and yet... yet, nature is at its most untouched and unscathed here. The trees, titanic beings encompassing with the outreaches of their branches a great extent of their residence, providing a respite from the Sun’s glare; there’s the flowers growing on the bodies of the dead, their almost ethereal presence leaving a majestic presence here in these stark regions of our society - untouched natural form of such purity it grants a certain queer attraction to the melancholic surrealism of this place; the tombstones that are themselves stories of the persons they refer to - it’s almost sadistic, the sense of wanting to know more about the dead person, and why they wound up here, alone, without anyone here except the few lovers and affectionate family members to ask about our state in the underworld (if they can talk back that is); there’s no mail or any form of reciprocal response we must return - that’s the responsibility of my family now, I’m off to the Styx sweeties, to put it more crudely.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not promoting death in any form. But nevertheless, I shouldn’t be so harsh about this anger that pours through me but it cannot be helped. And don’t lie - you’re feeling the same way as I am; that sense of guilt that pours through you as you look at the one person whom you could have saved.
II
That’s what I was going through when we reached the hospital.
There was all that medical jargon, which I wasn’t paying any attention to. Things like “IV” and “shock”; since every part of me was more concerned with please let her be alright, please let her be fine at the end.
Pathetic, isn’t it? That is how unbearable loss is when it smacks you face-first. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing!!! There is the harsh laugh deep within the back of your head that simply cannot be removed; there’s a cry of what you presume is a nightingale beating itself on a parched and jarred wall the spike scratching through the skin and chopping through the skin without mercy and remorse, only it isn’t a nightingale but rather the part of you that was screaming all your time with your loved one She’s gone! She’s gone! Despair! Oh bloody carves of Cupid as he’s strangled by Hades, if either had any spunk on them?! What am I to do? What am I to do?! Help! IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?! IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?! IS THERE ANYBODY?! ANYBODY.... ANYBODY...ANY...
But the sorrow doesn’t end there... Then there’s the desperation inside of you... the endless fraught sorrow of that poor broken self within you.... that kid who can’t speak for himself because he doesn’t know what’s happening around him.... the dog who’s going to be struck down without their knowledge... That unbearable plight felt through the lens of the unwary victim forced into the arms of Pain disguised as her jealous sister Pleasure, as Pleasure - what twist of fate - dresses as Pain to torment the despaired prey.
Her torment is unbearable. As I waited for something to happen, I closed my eyes and saw the memories of our times together. Yes, torment can make you have such gay thoughts - better that than a complete breakdown of the self, the world collapsing like the water of a fall pouring down its contents endlessly without fail - and the ones I was having weren’t very pretty....
III
It’s a park, an old but well kept autumn park with its falling leaves, its browning gardens; its creaked golden colored arteries marked by countless dark colored benches for the walkers in their endless walks towards... either en end or a means to an end. That’s what I was going through when I passed through it, needed to hurry for something which is too remote for me to remember. Perhaps it was a favor to a friend perhaps it was a completion of something to do with me.... Whatever, I was walking through the park. And passing through I sat down on a bench.
I guess I was tired, or I was disgruntled and was too tired to suppress it, or I was to angry to be tired, maybe I was disgruntled over my anger in being tired, perhaps I was talking out loud to myself while speaking out such curious streams of my consciousness, when she asked me, “You seem like the literary sort.” And presenting out her hand she said her name and asked mine.
I was laughing at that thought then. I was laughing at it, still, in the hospital in my state of mind. And I’m still laughing at it now. Am I a literary sort? Does this garble seem like the definite literary arts to you? Does this avant-garde seem to even resemble - remotely - the fabric of literary ventures that society comes to accept from its “creative geniuses”?! Granted one of my deepest influences was Hesse and even Heaney at times came out an interesting choice, but I barely resemble them. For that matter, Joyce and Henry Miller aren’t even in the same league as me - the former simply a titan amongst self-speak, to put it more rudely, the latter its crudest albeit notoriously brisk manipulator. Either way I don’t consider myself close to the spunk that my influences poured out and published in the process. But she was right about one thing - I was a struggling writer and my inability to tolerate praise of my own work from anyone else whatever the degree of genuineness of the persons whom speak - or spit - it out, often made me laugh to myself as back then.
It didn’t matter between her and me. We looked out for each other, always and all ways. Need help in that story, love? Sure thing, you’ll get it sooner than a’ crisp cut of the crust crack quack counting on his cart o’ corps o’ county Canadians counted on for candy’ is said ten times two times fast. And she would laugh at the end of it; Restaurant? Sure thing, we’ll go to the April, O’Donnell, Felicia Talbot’s, Toy’s Tacos, Schmidt’s, which by the way, weren’t the walk in the park - in essence they made the Burj look like a candy store. Of course that was my opinion I never told her about it. I now think I should have. Or at least I think I should have. Maybe I did, I didn’t remember back then or now, because I found myself transported through the numerous memories of good times on a plane parallel to but transparent from view - like the movie-goer unnoticed by the persons around them but either way looking forward to the ending of the movie so that they can watch the next one that will be on a few moments later. Only in my case, I was the lonely movie-goer watching the movies of my life without the persons in them - the actors for whom it was meant to be seen. And watching them pass by, day by day, by day, through the glistening twilight that marked the end of time - theirs - and then smiling back its fascist disdain for our kind. It didn’t matter to me. It never did. But it mattered to her.
IV
“Why don’t you accept your life? You can’t write happy thoughts, you’re depressing. Your strength is your melancholy - WHY DON’T YOU LISTEN TO ME ANYMORE?!”
“BECAUSE I CAN’T BEAR YOUR IDEAS - BECAUSE I AM INCAPABLE OF THINKING FOR OTHERS WHAT I CAN BETTER THINK FOR MYSELF, BECAUSE I WAS BORN A FREE SPIRIT YEARNING TO FLAP MY WINGS ONLY I’D DO IT MY WAY AND IN MY OWN TIME AND IN MY OWN MANNER?!”
There was silence for a brief moment, as the anger sunk in. Then there was the first thing spoken, from her...
“Life doesn’t work that way. You have to go on with the persons alongside you. They’re your partners throughout. We look out for each other -the pack that keeps to together the society that they belong to.”
“The pack can move on; the wolves have better ways to live life; there are greater grounds to be covered but it can only be done alone; society can never understand them so they prevent them from being tread. They shun the bright and pure among themselves and cast them away as filth - mongrels for the taking.... what would they know of us...?”
Bringing out her hand she said “There’s so much they can know if only you approach them. If only you are willing to open up yourself to them. Behind every wolf that bites there are wolves who are genuinely concerned about their loved ones.”
I view her hand with scorn - the very hand that I once, would view with acceptance, warmly; knowing that behind it was the very fabric of the sanity that held me together... I slapped it, knowing that sanity was never there... life was a madhouse made of glass, a killing zone flooded with mercenaries up for grabs where they can when it can be done... There’s nothing that could come their way.
“Society is an empty frail old woman past her age living beyond her means and far more nauseous for the society to bear.”
Even with such a slur, she laughed. Maybe it was the repeat, maybe it was a spat, and maybe it was laughter of a ghost in the shell that was deep inside laughing; laughing at the unbearable fragility that grasped its existence....
“You truly are the literary sort.” And hugged me.
V
Of course in the hospital I was weeping at why I was apprehensive over her response. I covered my head then with my hands and finally wept. Weeping at the bloody mindedness that prompted me into rejecting her genuineness; weeping at my own inconsistency; weeping at the unbearable shit I’ve meted out on people over the years; weeping out at the fact that I was the ‘great big what’s it’ that Joyce was referring out; that everything that I had ever lived was a lie. A Glass House made from the same material which ironically, it was meant against. The glass lighted up the fabric that, satirically, kept it together while keeping it apart. Was life a killing joke? One big laugh for an audience I don’t know but I sure know me? A light in the dark that curved in such a queer way, the light’s purpose did not matter more than the awkwardness one felt when it curved anyways? All this poured out knowing that the inevitable I had been feeling all the time I was there had happened. That I inevitably knew the sense of the obvious when I found myself hearing the very words which had repeated themselves a thousand times, bashing the walls of my house made fragile for the sole purpose to collapse, was painful but unsurprising. That I knew that she was going to die was a repetition of what I had been feeling earlier.
He led me inside, and amidst all that paraphernalia and concoctions there was the girl who had held onto me with so much conviction, its propensity could have made a priest weep. She smiled such genuineness that was in its sheer intent purer in form than I could fathom - even as a melancholic grasper of the saddening realities of life - how naïve I was in my beliefs about life’s cruelty.
I finally held her hand - a fast I had held ever since that argument, knowing that it would not make any difference but nevertheless was a grudge I could not bear to let pass - and tried smiling back. No crying needed, I got that out of my system before arriving. No point looking like a faggot in front of her that’d only make things worse.
“You don’t need to smile. I understand what you feel”
“I suppose so. But that isn’t what’s important right now.”
“I know I’m dying. And so do you”
I wasn’t prepared to hear her say that... so I closed my eyes and tried pretending it was a bad dream. But it wasn’t going to work out that easily... I opened them and looked at her, weakly...
“Why are you feeling depressed? I’m alright.”
I nodded, but deep within the back of my mind I knew it was a sadistic sense of pity that drove her into saying it. I doubted that when I felt her hand tighten around mine. She breathed heavily, the difficulty of death’s ugly head rearing its way through her made it even more intrusive in finding a silent way out of this horror.
But she braved it out. And bringing me closer, closer... closer... she whispered in my ear, “You always have been a literary sort. Someone I could never understand but admire deeply. Like those glass houses meant to house dolls of tremendous value which, because of their tremendous value, deserve to be shown to the world... To be cherished and...” she stuttered these words out, but her breath was caught. She inhaled heavily but couldn’t manage to take in anything... I looked at her face, staring at the sky upwards frightened... She exhaled, keeping her eyes open with difficulty. They eventually closed... There was no response after that... A single straight horizontal line on the monitor indicated the inevitable, that the worst was over, that the end had come, that for the first time in my life I acutely understood my own writing as a farce... a shallow depression that grasped my emptiness without once acknowledging my own hand in this disengaging satire of foolhardiness.
VI
I extinguish the cigarette, and return to reality... I find myself staring at the grave of the person I had lost so many years ago. I cannot control myself as I wonder why I wasn’t there for her to begin with... Whether I was that very person that night when she breathed her last... whether I was nothing more than an aberration that was inconsistent and empty... a lie presented in the face of life when in reality death was hosting a party for people like me and I had walked into the wrong place... maybe that was the case... maybe it wasn’t.... but either way, it didn’t matter. I laughed, and so did Fate... we both stare at each other, although he glared at me over what I was still doing here, the fact that I had a boat to catch and I was wasting time over something that had inevitably happened. Because the grave next to hers had the writing of someone who had known her very acutely... someone whose name was the same as mine, who was born on the same day as me and who had died around the same date as she did. On his tombstone was an arrow, pointing to the back where it was written:
“There was something about my world that I found unbearable. Maybe it was my own self-consciousness screaming out bitter cynicism over the narcissistic indifference of my co-peers in their drive towards a ‘self-emulated’ sanctuary from harm. Maybe it is a schizophrenic mania that cannot fathom the neurotic psychology harking at the devious fiends which are guiding the listener towards the plight of despair. Or maybe it was a frenzied Pink inside me whom wanted to close myself deep within my glass house, forgetting about the world outside of me... to become a Stephen-wolf of sorts, to misquote Hermann Hesse.”
VII
And with it I knew that my time had now come. I should be going now. I walked away from the grave towards the gate, and wondered what excuse I could give to the boat-keeper who was going to lead me to The Other Side. I felt a hand grasp mine. I looked at it, and then I looked at the person. I smiled. I had my reason coming along with me. Both of us smiling walked out of the cemetery, with our bodies dissolving into oblivion, backs to the world and the gloomy past.
Sta.sh
and I'm grateful to all of you.
Longing 
Donate
)
!!!
I am angry at you!
the price is too high (Shehrozeameen response): Not to worry, we'll work something out.
WHERE CAN I APPLY?
), and I must say- you seem like the kind of person worth the conversation. 
