constructed/deconstructed

Stories for Gravestones

Lines of grey-black stone slabs, just crooked enough to not be straight, straggling over the hills of grass, once green, now brown, like soldiers broken by war.  Glory gone.  Eyes forced open.  This is how it really is.  This is real.

The leaves that have been falling steadily for the last week—drifting down slow, slow, resisting, denying the fact that they are disconnected.  Broken, dead and dead.  The tree branches too light without the familiar foliage, stretching their limbs and twigs and every fiber, every molecule of their beings stretching, stretching, trying to hold onto…but they’re gone now.  Gone and gone and dead.  Dead as the corpses—collections of bone and old blood, patched with papery skin—who lie under those slabs of stone.  Stones carved with many names, many words of comfort and hope.  Empty stone words to help those left.  The dead have no need for those words now.  In a few ages, the words will be worn down by the elements, or gone, under some strip mall or gas station.  The bodies rotting, their sinews stretching, weaving through the cracks of their concrete confines, cold grey vaults, stretching and spreading out and out.  Roots, webs, stretching, stretching.  Turning back into dust, rotting gently into cool inky soil.

            I go there often.  (Who am I?  Man or woman?  Young?  Old?  It does not matter.  All these characteristics that we define ourselves by do not matter.  I am me.  Me, and no one else.  Yet, who am I without everyone else?  Who am I without you?)  Tracing calloused hands over the names, so many many names.  I collect them, save the interesting ones in my memory—spin stories about them. 

            What were their lives like?  Whom did they leave behind?  Would we have gotten along?  Would I have shared my secrets with these Elizabeth Marleys, these Malcolm Lancers, these Lacey Turners, these Anthony Cutrones?  Would we have been lovers?  Spouses?  Had children, pets, vacations, cars, mortgages, season opera tickets?  Grown old together?  Matching walkers and that watery smell of dust and time mixed in with our wrinkles? 

I write the stories down on scraps of paper—old bar napkins, ticket stubs, expired coupons—whatever I have.  Sometimes in cigarette ash on those fallen, molding leaves.  Stories of picnics ruined by rain, of crowded dance floors in hole-in-the-wall bars, of fishing trips when we’d forget the bait, of promises etched into desert sands, of nights on the little hill—the lights of the city unfurling below, the stars above.  Scatter them around.  Back to the dust.  I like the idea of my stories mingling with the decayed bodies of the people they’re about.  A joining, a fusing, a mixing.  A rotting collage—a kaleidoscope of old life, new life, death, birth.

Routine

During the day I wander the streets of towns, cities.  Where?  Anywhere.  Everywhere.  Kicking up the carcasses of old soda pop cans, cigarette butts, decomposing fliers—the everywhere debris that ornaments cracked concrete pavement.  Where?  Anywhere.  Anywhere at all.

At night I stargaze through a warped dusty pane, nursing a bottle of brandy, scribbling down these thoughts: hotel pen on crumpled paper.  I save nothing.  The pages go like crippled pigeons fluttering out of the window, disappearing into the dark.  Where do they go?  Probably straight down to join the crowded rubbish of the street.  But I like to think of the winds cradling them, trailing them like banners until they are plucked out of the air by a fellow seeker of…what?  A fellow seeker of…something—some meaning, some verification.  Not sure what yet, but searching all the same.

Missed Encounters

I saw you that one time.  That time at the bar/club/ice rink/PTA meeting/concert/etc.  That time when you were…you looked so happy, so content.  And were you with someone new?  Some new lover/spouse/parent/child/lawyer?  Or was that just the waitstaff/concierge/principal?  Hard to tell.  I thought about approaching you but I was never one for confrontations.  Wasn’t that what you hated about me?  Maybe I should have approached you.  But no, better to just let it go and move on.  Don’t make trouble.  You’re probably better off without me anyways.  But who am I without you? 

I left the bar/club/ice rink/PTA meeting/concert, stepped out into the night and took the midnight train going anywhere.  Or maybe that was a song/dream/movie/story.  Did I really see you?  Can’t remember.  Not much difference between fiction and reality anyways.  That’s the brandy taking over.  The line is blurring.  Is there even a line? 

Overheard

            Tuesday morning at the train station.  A melting pot of different people, different cultures clashing in a glorious symphony.  Am I part of this too?  Maybe the second trombone player or that spritely piccolo in the back.  Or am I the conductor, arms outstretched, motioning wildly, orchestrating this huge, screeching, beautiful mess?  Clash! Boom!  Do you feel it?  Do you feel the music keeping time with your heartbeat?  Coursing through your veins, it is your very life blood pouring out, flooding your heart, your mind, until everything is just the music, that teaming sound that is all of us, that is bigger than all of us, it is loud, it is wonderful, oh so wonderful, it is life, it is love, it is our very existence, coming from us and sustaining us, lifting us up.  And we are there carrying out our individual motions, everyone moving in a choreographed ballet that is the essence of our humanity, that is this sweeping swirling tide of people, that is the train station.

            If you listen closely, you can hear the bits and pieces that make up the whole.  I sit there, in a place where I can hear and observe, pen to paper, recording, preserving these precious artifacts.  Saving them to post on doors, telephone poles, bus stops, store windows, dentist office magazines, park benches, street signs, theater buildings, front stoops.  To post on graffiti-stained walls and besides carved initials, on peeling wallpaper and shattered windows.  Doing my part to keep the music, the poetry, flowing.  Words mingling with life mingling with more words, more life.  Living art, breathing creativity. 

Accidents, Opportunities

            What led me here?  To this point in my life, this time, this place—just past midnight outside of the local donut shop, open late.  As I watch tides of grease-stained napkins lap about my feet I wonder—wonder and write.  Why am I here and now instead of there, then or somewhere, to come?  What makes me me and you you?  You, yes you, balding donut salesman half asleep behind the counter; you too, police woman camped out behind your tinted glass, and you, all you whores and drunkards who rule this time of day when the sun’s shut off; you, small school children tucked neatly in your beds while you, parents, talk softly about financial woes.  All you people out there, all you people whom I have met and all you people whom I have never met and all you people whom I will never ever meet.  You people whom I have talked with, laughed with, spent time with, and you people whom I brushed past sometime in all this time I have been here, going about my business, hardly noticing you at all.  You, even you, whomever you are who finds this, if you find it, and decides to read another person’s ramblings.  Couldn’t I be you just as well as you yourself?  Couldn’t you be me? 

What’s the difference, really?  We’re all just skin, bones, muscle, hair, sinews, veins, we’re all just blood, bowels, entrails—elements put together just so.  We’re all hearts, minds, spirits.  We all love, laugh, cry.  We search, we agonize, we want to belong.  We want a purpose.  We want to know: why are we even here?  Why these bones?  Why this skin?  Why these eyes, these ears, this mouth?  Why these quirks?  This lisp, this doublejointedness, this tendency to speak our minds?  Why this body?  What makes us who we are?  Who am I if I am me and not him, not her, not you?  Why am I not my mother, my brother, my neighbor, my second-grade teacher?  Who am I if I am not you and you are not me?

            Have I become me or did I happen to fall into myself by accident?  Some unforeseen twist of fate, fortune?  Did my circumstances force me into becoming myself?  Did the opportunities I had and the opportunities I missed mold me, shape me into this person I am now, this person who is inside this body who is somehow, almost inexplicably, me?  Was there a choice in the matter?  Whose choice?  Mine?  Yours?

            Are we different beings loosely connected by some common bonds, similarities?  Or are we the same being loosely disconnected by individual traits, aspirations?  If you looked past the outward things, past the bones, the skin, the sinews, the muscles, would you see me?  And would that image of me be a cloudy reflection of you? 

            For you have influenced me and I you.  Maybe against our wills, maybe imperceptibly.  But even if I have never met you, even if you lived long before my time or will be born long after I die, still we share this planet.  We share these elements that make up these bodies.  We have something in common despite our best efforts to be different, to be individuals.  Who am I without you?  And, who are you without me? 

Flying/Freefall

            Questions surround me.  They sit in the groove of my ears, they dance behind my eyelids and roll around on my tongue like warm marbles, threatening to choke.  My questions stalk me throughout the day and sit, smirking, watching me wrestle with meaning, with purpose, all through the night in the confines of that room behind the warped windowpane.  They will not leave. 

            I have dreams of flying, dreams of falling.  Are they dreams?  I don’t know anymore.  Diving—the wind and the clouds and time itself rushing past while the ground looms ever larger.  And am I in control or am I at the mercy of the universe?  Can I pull myself up at the last minute?  Am I flying?  Or will I continue to hurtle down, down, until the world comes up to meet me and I land, spilled?  Are these visions of achievement, of glory even?  Or are these nightmares of incompetence, my fears realized? 

            Where’s the bottle?  Is the world tilting or am I?  I can’t think.  All my life that is all I’ve done, writing these thoughts down like I was oh so important, like I was gifting humanity with my precious wisdom.  But I have no wisdom, no knowledge, only questions.  And what use are questions without answers?  They are the fool’s trick to appear intelligent while distracting from the fact that that he has done nothing useful.  No, I am not a philosopher and I do not have magazine articles and historians to paint me as such.  I am only me, no one special, and quite expendable after all.

            Where are you?  Why not me?  Why do we let ourselves become so attached to people, people who can hurt us.  Wouldn’t we be better without? 

            More questions.  No answers.  Back to the brandy.  It’ll dull reality for a while.     

Biology          

For much of my life I have been occupied with the desire, the need, to figure out my purpose in life.  Why am I here, on this earth, breathing air, taking up space?  What good can I do?  How can I verify my intrusion on this planet, on my fellow beings in this planet? 

The other day I found myself pondering these questions in a grassy area, populated by some species of the flora and fauna categories.  I noticed the patches of grass on which I had trod, how my invasion had left some blades crippled, and was wondering what right I had to damage, even kill, these fellow organisms?  Couldn’t something come along and snuff me out at that very moment with just as much reason and much less lament? 

It was then that I noticed or, more accurately, became aware of a humming.  Bees, all around the field, flitting about, focused on their task, oblivious to me and my problems, my insatiable questioning.  All my why’s and wherefore’s and what’s, all these you’s and me’s and us’—are we connected, what does this, what do we, mean?

But, back to the bees.  Consider this being more carefully:  they are born and, from that moment, know exactly what their place is, exactly what chore they must carry out and how to do it.  The worker bees who are built to provide, to sustain, to protect—who are willing to deliver their sting, and with it pour out their life’s flow, at a moment’s notice.  The queen, whose main goal is to reproduce, to keep her colony alive and running.  The drones who are quite expendable, really, they perform their one important duty, enable the furthering of their race, and then they die—no over thinking, they accept their fate and move on, let go.  These duties aren’t something that much be learned or sought after, they are hard-wired into them, they are their very essence.  They don’t question these functions which nature has mandated for them, they merely follow what their internal chemicals dictate. 

Bees don’t pollinate flowers because they aspire to do some greater good—they see only their objective and the best means of fulfilling that.  Yet, in their careful schedule of actions, they manage to sustain plant life almost effortlessly.  In some glorious happenstance contrived in the grand scheme of nature, they both benefit from the products of the flowers, and allow the flowers to keep producing.  All without agonizing over obligation, purpose, morals.  They are born, they do their job, perform their actions, until they die.  That is all—a simple biology lesson.

And then I wonder if it is not a burden rather than a gift that we humans think so much.  Wouldn’t our lives be so much more productive and (dare I say it?) enjoyable if we forgot thought and lived merely by instinct? 

A Turning Point?  Or Just a Bend in the Road?

            Tonight (today?), tucked into a dark corner of some hole-in-the-wall joint, empty glasses decorating the table in some abstract formation, my eyes came to rest on the small television set, glowing an eerie blue above the bar.  The image was crinkled, lines of static wove leisurely across the screen, yet my ears strained to catch the sound warbling out of the speakers. 

            It was a program on Alzheimer’s, showing the slow degradation, the deterioration, of the mind and its effect on the body.  It illustrated the loss of memory, thoughts obliterated, forever lost.  The conscious mind goes and then you’re running off of nature, hoping the body will continue to do what it’s always done.  But no more thought.  No more pondering or debating or will I or won’t I.  No more questioning.  Nothing, nothing at all.

            What would a life without thought be like?  A void of consciousness—how could you even begin to picture that?  Well, you can’t, really.  Because it isn’t there to picture.  It is the opposite of being there—it is not there, it is not anywhere, there is nothing.  Nothing, no substance.  And the worst part—you wouldn’t even know.  You wouldn’t even know that you were missing something, that there was something else out there to be had because you wouldn’t know anything.  You would be oblivious and, yes, that might keep you happy, but is a life of ignorance really preferable?

Then my mind went to the bees.  To my musings on whether a life lived on instinct alone would be better.  I had thought it ironic that long hours pondering this question might lead me to the conclusion that those hours need not have been spent at all had I trusted to biology, to intuition, in the first place.  But, realizing what I do now, perhaps I will conclude that, despite the oftentimes miserable existence which deep thought has bestowed upon me, I prefer it that way nonetheless.       

More Stories for Gravestones

            And so we have come full circle.  Or perhaps not, since this isn’t really the end—I will go on living for however long my lungs deem it necessary to draw breath and my heart to beat.  Maybe this is the first of many circles.  Perhaps when my heart slows and my eyes close for the last time I too will be buried here among these countless souls, another stone added to the ranks that stretch on and on.  Or maybe my path branches out from here, maybe I will never again visit this site and trace my hands over these carved stone names that I have come to know so well.  Whatever the case, I am thankful for the time I have spent here, for the lives we have shared, if only in my stories, now gone, back into the ground.    

            I can’t say that I have happened upon many new revelations since I first began coming here.  I am still searching, still stumbling around half-blind in the hopes that one day I will find the answers to my questions.  Even if I don’t, I can’t say that I am sorry I made the journey. 

            I am, perhaps, a bit more content than I was those many many months ago.  I have reconciled with the fact that the answers may not be out there, and that is alright since the search has taught me much.  I know now that, despite the sorrows such an existence brings, I am very much relieved and thankful that I was born a creature of thought.  If these months, these years, of pondering cannot produce a clear-cut purpose, they can at least give some vague shape and meaning to my existence.  And perhaps that is enough.

             Though knowing you, whoever you are, might have hurt me, might have steered me in the wrong direction or merely nudged me further along the path I was already taking, I do not regret our first encounter, our time spent together.  Was it a lot of time?  For some of you, yes, for others, no, for still others, only in these stories that now wreathe your gravestones.  For who am I without you?  All you people, whoever you might be?  The answer: I would not be me.  At least not the me I am today.  Might I have been happier?  More content?  Perhaps, but I am willing to throw away those “maybes” and “perchances” since I have emerged from our long/brief/imagined connection more wholly myself.  I am me because of you.  And I can hope that perhaps, just maybe, you are you because of me. 

That is all I could ever ask for.