Because the Dead so Soon Grow Cold

The problem with life stories is that they always overstay their welcome. Stories that go on too long have no recourse but to end in tragedy.

The facts cannot be disputed. This late in the game, the hypothesis has been tested too many times and will not be disproved by will or by whim. The body dies, decays; nothing remains but an afterimage, an atomic shadow of memory burned onto the wall.

It'll be two years this winter. At the end of every month I visit his grave and leave red roses. Though sometimes I think it won't do any more good than a single drop of water in a parched riverbed, I offer a prayer as well.

I know if he were here, he would only mock me. I won't need either where I'm going, he would say. And then he would smile; it would be the same sad, sweet, humorless smile as always. But in spite of all his sleight of hand and all he had kept from me, I knew him well enough to know that he would appreciate the gesture.

That's why I always pray the same words, over and over, until they come to me so easily I wonder if they mean anything anymore: Wherever you are, I hope it's peaceful. Wherever you are, I hope you've forgotten everything.

I've always imagined death as just another synonym for amnesia. I think he would like that too.

If that's true, then life is really nothing more than a long trek toward forgetfulness. I can't remember anymore what it felt like to kiss him. His mouth, or the fall of his hair against my face.

It's the little things that sometimes seem the most profound. The details no one else wants to care about are the most important to preserve. Every time I realize I can't recall the color of his eyes so clearly, it's like watching something precious he entrusted to me go up in a column of flame.

I used to think that what was wrong was what he was. Now I think it was what he wasn't. What he could never be.

Somewhere along the line he lost track of all the masks he wore as faces, and all the faces he wore as masks. And it felt like every word he ever spoke only carried us further from salvation. Further from each other.

There are hollow places between the events of every life, soft and insignificant moments like the space after one wave breaks and before the next crests. When ours happened to align was the time we spent together. Like a stray cat, I'd lose track of him for days and weeks and months at a time. When I saw him again, it was always with flowers and jewelry, and never with explanations.

I learned to live with that, too.

In the evenings, he used to read to me from Kafka and Milton and Mishima. We were younger then, and I was thrilled by the way his glasses slipped a little down his nose when he was deep in thought. He always turned the last blank page, as though he expected more words to shimmer, like a mirage, and appear. Endings were never final enough for him, never as certain as he wanted them to be.

He was never able to accept that sometimes people walk out of your destiny and into their own.

For what it's worth, I did try. There were times I wanted to hold him so close he'd never think to slip away again. And there were times I wanted to forget I had ever loved him at all. And there were times when all I wanted was to tear him to pieces to see if there were any scraps of truth left in him.

But I can see now that it wouldn't have changed anything. In the end, he's still killed as many people as he's killed.

In the end, that was never the reason I was too afraid to hate him.

In the end, dreams and lusts and madness and love really weren't so different. One didn't burn any more brightly than the others. One wasn't more slowly reduced to ash.

In the end.., there was only one way things could have turned out, and so what I feel isn't regret. It's something too new, too unfamiliar to be regret.

I used to be afraid that I'd never stop missing him. Now, I'm certain I won't and I'm relieved. Maybe it's too much to ask that he be forgiven, but I don't want him to have gone without just once knowing what mercy is.