The little boy died.
Sunday, 21 December 2003 06:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59"If You Want To Be There For Me, Just Make It From Further Away, OK?"*
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In this book I'm reading, the little boy died. (No, it's not Cujo.) I'm going to have to spell-check this carefully, because I'm crying too hard to see the monitor clearly. The little boy died.
And I'm back with Celia, inside her skin, and I'm getting hysterical.
My red pen is missing. I can't do Christmas cards without my red pen. I spent an hour, and missed IMing with Andie, because I was searching for the cell phone.
He died. Where does life go, where does it go? I can't understand it, I just feel this loss echoing in me like Quasimodo's bells going crazy in my head. Why do I feel this loss, it's not my loss, I never even met Him, He just moved into my head when I walked into His mother's house.
(I can't find a consistent way of writing about Him, and I value consistency highly because reality shifts and if you know that you always do a certain thing a certain way, you can recognize it again and you don't get lost. Only I can't do that, so I always get lost. I'm lost now.)
My father died this year.
When I was about nine years old, a woman hit a telephone pole at the corner of our street one evening, and the pole snapped. It didn't break where the car hit (yes, there was a car, it wasn't just a woman hitting a pole, she was driving a car), it broke a couple of yards above the point of impact.
Was the woman injured? Did she die? I can't remember. The power went out, so a lot of us were outside, sitting on our porches, watching whatever was happening—an ambulance arriving, the Power and Light truck. It was summer, the dark was late in coming.
I didn't understand about the pole, how it could break in a place it wasn't hit, why being hit in one place would make it snap elsewhere. I asked my parents, and I'm sure my father explained—he would have known that sort of thing. I don't remember what he told me, but I understand it now.
You take the hit, and you don't even feel it. Everyone is worried; something terrible happened, but you don't know what to do with their concern because you feel fine. Life goes back to normal, until suddenly something snaps. And the something isn't what got hit. A brick hits you in the leg and your arm snaps. How do you explain that? How do you explain that the reason the cable bill is late in December because your father died in February? The connection here is . . . ?
The connection is, I don't know. I don't feel right. I'm out of sync with everything, including paying bills. I think about it, worry about it, but I don't do it because—
I don't know.
The little boy died, and now I'm crying, not over him, it's never over the character in the book, it's about a real-life thing that hurts to much, or stands to close, for me to see it; I can only feel it in reflection, hear it in echo. It has to be oblique, because if I felt it in real-time, it would kill me. The little boy died, so I'm crying over Him, and my father, and myself.
It's always about myself. But we knew that, didn't we?
*Dr. Mahesh "Bug" Vijayaraghavensatanaryanamurthy
-:- -:- -:- -:-
In this book I'm reading, the little boy died. (No, it's not Cujo.) I'm going to have to spell-check this carefully, because I'm crying too hard to see the monitor clearly. The little boy died.
And I'm back with Celia, inside her skin, and I'm getting hysterical.
My red pen is missing. I can't do Christmas cards without my red pen. I spent an hour, and missed IMing with Andie, because I was searching for the cell phone.
He died. Where does life go, where does it go? I can't understand it, I just feel this loss echoing in me like Quasimodo's bells going crazy in my head. Why do I feel this loss, it's not my loss, I never even met Him, He just moved into my head when I walked into His mother's house.
(I can't find a consistent way of writing about Him, and I value consistency highly because reality shifts and if you know that you always do a certain thing a certain way, you can recognize it again and you don't get lost. Only I can't do that, so I always get lost. I'm lost now.)
My father died this year.
When I was about nine years old, a woman hit a telephone pole at the corner of our street one evening, and the pole snapped. It didn't break where the car hit (yes, there was a car, it wasn't just a woman hitting a pole, she was driving a car), it broke a couple of yards above the point of impact.
Was the woman injured? Did she die? I can't remember. The power went out, so a lot of us were outside, sitting on our porches, watching whatever was happening—an ambulance arriving, the Power and Light truck. It was summer, the dark was late in coming.
I didn't understand about the pole, how it could break in a place it wasn't hit, why being hit in one place would make it snap elsewhere. I asked my parents, and I'm sure my father explained—he would have known that sort of thing. I don't remember what he told me, but I understand it now.
You take the hit, and you don't even feel it. Everyone is worried; something terrible happened, but you don't know what to do with their concern because you feel fine. Life goes back to normal, until suddenly something snaps. And the something isn't what got hit. A brick hits you in the leg and your arm snaps. How do you explain that? How do you explain that the reason the cable bill is late in December because your father died in February? The connection here is . . . ?
The connection is, I don't know. I don't feel right. I'm out of sync with everything, including paying bills. I think about it, worry about it, but I don't do it because—
I don't know.
The little boy died, and now I'm crying, not over him, it's never over the character in the book, it's about a real-life thing that hurts to much, or stands to close, for me to see it; I can only feel it in reflection, hear it in echo. It has to be oblique, because if I felt it in real-time, it would kill me. The little boy died, so I'm crying over Him, and my father, and myself.
It's always about myself. But we knew that, didn't we?
*Dr. Mahesh "Bug" Vijayaraghavensatanaryanamurthy