If “dying is an art,” you do not do it well. I do not
have words, do not have thoughts; there is nothing inside
of me anymore. I am vacant, hollow, and if this is what
time travel feels like I do not want any part of it. Racing
past the stars, past the planets, past Andromeda's spiraling, galactic force,
I am light-years ahead and then light-years behind—I am
two years too late.
You cannot know, you will not know, how
Auriga is waiting in the sky to whisk you
away, away, away.
The bubbling of your oxygen sounds like the water fountains
you used to pass as a child, but there are no pennies at the bottom
of this. And I wonder, with your eyes closed, if you feel like you
are swimming. Barely treading water, fighting to keep your head above,
choking on salt and brine as you try to kick your feet, try to
swim to Lake Michigan’s shoreline. I want
Poseidon to spit you out of sea like a cork, want
Neptune to come alive through the mosaics of your bathroom and
lead you away from the great, black, wave of stars that is
breaking and crashing and barely brushing your bare feet.
Some fish were meant to drown. You are
not one of them. Pisces is meant to swim forever.
This time machine has dropped me back into my nightmare again,
but it is not only mine, it’s yours. I am trying to read
the constellations, trying to map the planets, trying to figure out
the moon cycles, but I fear that this is a language I had learned once
and tried to forget—we are now digging each others graves.
The nurse in blue, the doctor in white, the sun in gold, and you,
red as dead and clotted blood, have merged into a new dialect
that does not mirror what I know the way the
Gemini twins mimic one another in the cosmos. (I think
I have lost my ability to speak with angels
and this terrifies me.)
Is God whispering the secrets of the world into your ear yet? Is Jesus
showing you how to be holy? Are you tearing the bread for communion
and feeding it to the birds? Are you taking shots from His heavenly blood,
getting drunk off the possibility of closing your eyes, leaning back, and
watching Perseus fight your battles for you?
Do you want to be a constellation, too?
I am eighty miles away from you, but it feels more like
eighty light-years. I am watching you through someone else’s eyes and
choking myself with my own hands as I try to show you
what you mean to me. My hands are cracked and bleeding from
pounding them against the wall you constructed around yourself, but you
don’t have control over that wall anymore, do you?
You are too young to ride Pegasus in the night sky, too young to
build your own wings, too young to fall and drown like Icarus. You
know how to swim. You are learning how to fly. There is no
reason for you to shake God’s hand yet. Put the halo down—
you are not ready.
For my friend, who I fear terribly will lose his battle with brain cancer soon. I have never had more tangled and conflicting emotions over a person before.
