Can’t Catch Me

I was pretty sure I was going to die. Now, lemme back up and say I’ve been wrong before, m’kay. And obvi I didn’t die or how would I be telling you about it. But that’s the thing about stories: you can know how they’re going to end and still be gripped by the moment.

And gripped I was. Or gripping, myself, shivering, in the dark. Or it wasn’t dark, really. It was early morning. The air is shit because of wildfires and the sky’s gray, but there was some light.

I couldn’t see much light. My eyes were closed. Closing, I guess. And opening slightly, lika peek.

When they were closed, I could see into the future.

I was dead. Like Dad. And my kids were there without me. It was especially hard on Fox. Maybe on Mason, too, but they’ve gotten so big and so independent, it’s harder to tell.

But I could see Foxy pulling away, from everyone. Not isolating, but diving into the world of shallowness, of doing things to distract oneself and not be close to anyone or anything. I could see it because it was a world I knew, and a world I thought I had trained myself to avoid.

Yet as I lay dying—or believing so, anyway, and remember: that’s the important part, the believing—I could see that I had really fared not all that much better than Wil. He hadn’t lived as long as his father, and now I would die less than six months after he did. And for what?

Nothing, came the reply.

You ask who the reply came from.

No one, I say, but that’s a bit of a lie. We’ll get there, bae. Just not today.

It was for nothing cos there is only nothing. I see then, as I lay shivering, that there has only ever been nothing. Nothing is where we’re from and where we’re going. All of us. Me, Dad, Mason, even Foxy. We’re all headed back into nothing.

It might disturb you to consider that, or maybe not. You’re not dying. Or, hell, maybe you are, in which case, condolences. Feel free to set me straight. I could use it.

You ask if I am feeling all right.

No, I say. I’m not. I thought that was obvious.

I can tell you’re disappointed. The work suffers, doesn't it? And why shouldn’t it? I say. I mean, I am suffering. Though to be perfectly fair much less today than yesterday.

This all happened yesterday? you ask.

Yeah, I say, then light up a smoke. The flame casts shadowy illumination along my collarbone and over one of my tits.

You ask, Should you be smoking?

Probably not, I say. I mean, I thought I was safe here. You know, in Soma. I thought the virus couldn’t reach me here. But I was wrong.

I take a drag, giving a brief intensity to the glow of the ember, which frames my face for you in the dark. You can see beard stubble clearly then, growing in a ring around my mouth sucking the cig.

Life isn’t always pretty, I say.

You say you know that.

When I closed my eyes, you know, yesterday …

As you lay dying …, you supply

Yes, as I lay dying, I could see what little was left of me. How little my leaving changed things.

You say that you doubt that’s true.

That’s sweet, I say, but no, I could see the future. I could see that when I was gone, life just went on. And I had done nothing to leave anything for anyone else. I mean, I thought I had. I thought that’s what I was doing all this time.

You know, you say gently, you could have been delirious.

I blink at you through the shadow and smoke, then take a drag, exhale, and say, Yeah. True. But it was valuable, you know? Scary, yes. But also valuable. It was valuable to see that my life so far has yielded nothing of use to anyone.

Maybe it’s not about being useful, you say.

Oh, it’s not, I say. It’s not about anything. And anyone who tells you it is is telling a story. I mean, I get it. It’s what we do, right? As a species. We tell stories. I understand. But that’s not what life or death is. It’s not a story. It isn’t anything.

You’re quiet and I don’t know what that means. Normally I’d just ask, but I’m still under the weather, so instead I just stub out the cig and curl back up in my old woman blanket on the blue velvet couch.

“I want to do something useful,” I say. “Something that can keep going after I am gone. But not just to do that. I think I would rather just go and leave nothing than leave something perpetual that exists only for that reason. It has to actually help.”

I sense you want to say something, but you don’t say anything. You just rub my back, which is nice.

“I appreciate you,” I say, then close my eyes again.