"Why are your eyes closed?"
I sighed, before saying "My dad…he always closed his eyes. On the couch, at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, at every baseball game right before it started…hell, once he even did it during church service and fell asleep right in the middle of the sermon."
We both laughed, but she did harder than me. It was, unlike her, a memory to me. Happy injected, chuckle filled, but wistful and sad only now. Due to the fact he was…well…gone. There were no more church service nap sessions for him. His eyes had closed for the last time a long time ago.
But, of course, to her it was just another comical moment of the infamous T***** S**** **** Senior, my father, whom she had never meet and will not meet for some time. So she laughed harder than I.
Since, unlike me, she didn't feel a pang of grief stab at her heart, nor the dull ache of the death that had never really gone away. It didn't weigh her stomach down as though she had just consumed a truck full of cement.
After she recovered, I decided to continue my story after a polite pause. "I asked my dad that same question once," I said, a smile cutting its slow but sure path across my face. "And, he said 'Son…some moments are like kisses. They're more…satisfying, when you feel them. When you hear them. Smell them. Or, even taste them, depending on what you're doing Sometimes, it's just nice to sit back and hear. And feel. And smell. And taste. Just like a kiss. Special. Special in a way, that…it almost feels rude to open your eyes.'"
"Oh."
I laughed. "That was my response exactly."
And when the bullet cut its way into my chest, I felt no pain. On the contrary, I felt like I was flying, like maybe, possibly, I could escape the hell around me.
But I wanted something. I wanted something beautiful to see in my dying moments, but the fact of the matter was that my girlfriend ran when the shots were fired, in some lame attempt to keep living. She called my name over her shoulder when she took off, but kept running when I did not follow.
I simply stood my place, opening my arms as if I were about to embrace a close friend.
But I wanted something wonderful, something divine, something breath-taking, anything to see. I scanned my morbid surroundings, but there were only corpses and those attempting to crawl to help, various results of the shooting spree, and dust from all those who decided to run in a feeble attempt to live their horrific lives.
Then I looked down, about to close my eyes and give in to my peaceful fate, when I saw something beautiful. Dark as night on a new moon, but as beautiful as a sunset on a clear day:
I saw a red, liquid flower blooming, growing, on my white shirt covered chest. Oddly enough, it was right where the bullet had pierced me. How could something so beautiful come from something so evil?
And when the rose had come into full bloom, my back arched, my lungs taking in a gasping, large breath, my body making one last attempt to live.
I was too far gone, thankfully. And when my eyes slammed shut, before everything disappeared for the last time, I noticed the rose had leaked upwards, and was seeking my chin in one liquidy tendril.
Her skin was a brown, a bronze brown, a comforting brown, nearly a perfect brown in his opinion.
Her eyes reflected her skin, like the ocean reflects the sky, in perfect harmony and beauty, and he was constantly looking into them for emotion and thoughts but moreover simply to behold them for the beauty they held, the beauty in the chaos.
Her hair was short, and held hints of its once long length. What was once dazzling, sunlight blonde curls that nearly reached her midback was more of a brown that once again seemed to capture the beauty of her skin, and reached just beyond her shoulders and he found it breathtaking in every sense of his own air being sucked out of his lungs and into her own, and for seconds there was no air to breath, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.
And inside this beautiful canvas existed an ethereal chaos, and her chaos was a magnet to his chaos, yet their chaoses hardly blended, they slammed into each other, as did their lips, their lips and chaos both meeting in secret, with extreme intensity, rolling and colliding like waves and made a beautiful and chaotic dance in that metal contraption, cold and empty compared to their warm and passionate embrace and the elevator seemed to hardly even exist as they lost themselves in each other and their lips and their chaoses and then stopped abruptly, in perfect synchronization with the elevator doors. Those few seconds stretched into a blissful eternity, and he relished in them, and in her lips, before they were stolen away once again by reality.
And she was herself. And her is exactly the way he wanted her, no matter what their relationship may be. She was ethereal.
He was the sky. Not beautiful, nor large, nor majestic, nor photogenic.
He was the sky in the sense that when it was full of light in the day, in the view of majority of the people, and frivolous and full of light and he shined, smiling and laughing and dancing all the day time long. He was something that simply shone through something much bigger, a trick of a shell and light that wasn’t his own light, but His own light.
He was the sky in the sense that when the light disappeared, so did the beauty, and the smiles, and the dancing, and the laughter so many attributed to his name. He was something dark, something anciently evil and that gave no light, none of his own or His own. And only the stars remained, the stars of which he was little pieces of what the light had provided, delayed due to distance and the space between himself and the stars in the darkness.
He was loud for fear of being ignored.
He had spent so much time being ignored, he even started ignoring himself. He pushed his own thoughts and emotions away, they never mattered anywhere, so why should they even exist?
And he was loud out of fear, fear of being ignored, fear of being alone in being ignored.
And everyone was annoyed, and hated his loudness. But secretly, in a place deep inside himself, he’d rather be annoying than ignored.
And in an even deeper place, he wished he didn’t exist. Why do ignored things need to exist anyway? They don’t. It would make life easier to not exist than waste time and energy for people to ignore him.
He didn’t need to exist, and he wished he didn’t. And the only, true reason he existed was because the only other option was not existing.
And in an even deeper place, he simply wished to not be ignored.
Little Rock, Arkansas, where no one would know my name
Little Rock, Arkansas, where I would know no one’s name
Little Rock, Arkansas, where a beginning awaited me
Little Rock, Arkansas, a whole new life, a whole new me, a whole new everything
Little Rock, Arkansas, perhaps my only hope for escape and all stress
Little Rock, Arkansas, the land that called out to me
Little Rock, Arkansas
I am from cell phones, from Motorola and Verizon.
I am from the red two story on the left, can’t miss it, the brown one story, with the white minivan next to the two story
I am from the pepper plant in the back porch, the daisies we could never run near
I am from tamales every other week and big, rigid noses, and T** and J**** and J***
I am from the naturally loud conversations and sassiness thrown left and right and up and down
From the calm down J****’s and the you ate everything and now you’re so picky’s
I am from John 3:16 and he died for you and your sins, from Jeremiah 29:11 and, see, there’s no need to stress, He’s got it!
I'm from Chicago, Germany, and the Inca, tamales and burgers
I am from the big bookshelves with no books, the little table next to the kitchen table, the night tables with a different lamp and matching clock
From play with me to leave me alone, from 5 to 2 cause wow everyone’s so old, from the two story with the van in front, to the one story with the van in front