Another Lame Attempt to Help Someone

I've been thinking lately of goodbyes. I can't claim that the thought occurred spontaneously. The weaving thoughts of goodbyes come and gone spilled over into my life because of another who requires in her life a goodbye.


I remember a time or two I had to write someone's epitaph in my life and their birth certificate into the pantheon of those gone before and gone forever simultaneously. The ghosts of that life and death struggle in your head to resurrect the dead or dying flit across your mind like demons of some pathologically flawed hell. You lay awake and dream dreams of a future you will never realize.


Then the inevitable confrontations. You offer them the questions that you have carved out of your dying flesh where they used to make a home. You offer them the sacrifice of your teary and unanswerable questions at the alter of all they used to be. You walk up to them on your knees with a little silver platter of all you have left of their person, the hows and whys. The unrealistic hope that this is just temporary. When all else has failed, you begin the whens: when did you stop loving me? When was the last time you still cared? When did the last straw hit your back?

The questions are placed onto the alter and burnt up to that dead spirit in the air, the spirit of their memory. Never again will that memory live on this Earth. Like God leaving the Earth forever because he could not abide the world once it had died in the sins of Eden. And like the original sinners, you wander the land of Nod, always east of Eden with your mark. The stigma you carry is to remind you and others that you have lived and died and sinned enough to be human.

Life is murder. Murder of all that came before today, and sometimes murder is fun. Occasionally, you murder an abusive spouse or an insane dictator and the Justice flows in your veins like a burned rock in a tin foil pipe. Sometimes, you have to murder a child who made the mistake of standing too near a tank with the wrong flag painted on it and the Justice burns your skin and the tendrils of your conscious thought. And in this way, the love and hate is balanced.

In this way, all life continues on, murdering the past. The blood will wash off, and the sacrifices of your own dyed flesh where another moved in and loved you will burn away. In the crucible of time, we're all just carbon. If you're lucky, maybe some day your bones will be subducted and you will emerge more beautiful. If not, the silica will be pulverized to sand in some future desert. Time will murder your bones.

This may not help, but at least it's here. All we can expect of thought, really.