Aug 2019
I wake under the covers of plastic wrapped around my body; the sealed bag suffocating my lungs, turning them in to a world of silent aching. The piercing light from the windows penetrates my shelled eyes and I remember I don’t really need to breathe anymore. “Cadaver” my children call me. I have no other word to explain them as I know they have no other phrase to explain me. I am no longer inside the spectrum of names for in them laid an intimacy one could never hand to one so cold. I am the decimated clay in their hands but instead of them putting me back together, I marginalize myself with in them, with in their brains, under their probing hands, I live and I thrive, their minds my new home.
They hover over me, their touch a mixture of curiosity and displeasure as if their subconscious hadn’t yet adapted to my rough, cracked skin. My memories engulf me while I bear witness to the way my body comes apart, almost like silk underneath the scalpel, dancing the edge of the blade as gracefully as a ballerina.
‘I am a man’ I think to myself, ‘a man made in God’s image.’
However, the carved pieces of myself falling to the floor make me doubt my own thoughts. My senses have expired yet I wish to feel again, even when I’m peeled down to my bone, I wish to sense these curious hands upon me. I wish to feel my lungs fill with the city air, all the smoke and the stench of the sewers, the odor of the ground after a light drizzle, the sweat and breath of the people out on a stroll, I dream for it all to overwhelm my senses as it used to. My veins are empty of life and of blood, while my heart sits idle beneath my broken ribs, waiting for a ****** that will never come.
“Limbs aren’t meant to stay idle.” My father used to say while he was young and vibrant. Now I know his limbs, they too lay idle six feet under while they slowly rot away. Mine seem to be too battered to want the excitement of movement; under their nakedness lay all the mystery of Gods genius in its purest form.
They have left me here as an exhibition as though I had not been enough entertainment in life, as though my every waking moment had not been one roller coaster ride after the other, an emblem of unadulterated neglect from both God and man. And still I am forced to be situated on this stale bed day after yearning day until I am not enough to fill anything. But I suppose this is the true meaning of being a father, giving oneself so completely that at the very end of it, you are that something that dissipates in to the night air, shattered in to a million pieces but still knowing you will live on.
They hover over me, their touch a mixture of curiosity and displeasure as if their subconscious hadn’t yet adapted to my rough, cracked skin. My memories engulf me while I bear witness to the way my body comes apart, almost like silk underneath the scalpel, dancing the edge of the blade as gracefully as a ballerina.
‘I am a man’ I think to myself, ‘a man made in God’s image.’
However, the carved pieces of myself falling to the floor make me doubt my own thoughts. My senses have expired yet I wish to feel again, even when I’m peeled down to my bone, I wish to sense these curious hands upon me. I wish to feel my lungs fill with the city air, all the smoke and the stench of the sewers, the odor of the ground after a light drizzle, the sweat and breath of the people out on a stroll, I dream for it all to overwhelm my senses as it used to. My veins are empty of life and of blood, while my heart sits idle beneath my broken ribs, waiting for a ****** that will never come.
“Limbs aren’t meant to stay idle.” My father used to say while he was young and vibrant. Now I know his limbs, they too lay idle six feet under while they slowly rot away. Mine seem to be too battered to want the excitement of movement; under their nakedness lay all the mystery of Gods genius in its purest form.
They have left me here as an exhibition as though I had not been enough entertainment in life, as though my every waking moment had not been one roller coaster ride after the other, an emblem of unadulterated neglect from both God and man. And still I am forced to be situated on this stale bed day after yearning day until I am not enough to fill anything. But I suppose this is the true meaning of being a father, giving oneself so completely that at the very end of it, you are that something that dissipates in to the night air, shattered in to a million pieces but still knowing you will live on.
