Boring texts. Chapped lips. Dirty clothes. Sex on sandpaper. Shitty pick up lines. Unfiltered thoughts. Overdressed thots. The Titanic without a story. A really sad melon.
I take Dry January very seriously. Take my booze; I’ll take every bit of moisture Mother Earth has to offer. Foreplay? Gone. Girl? Gone. Sour and sweet? Gone. December? Still here. It’s the honorary 33rd.
It’s not the end of the year—or my sobriety. Why restart my problems? I’ve mastered them. I can tolerate a glass half empty; it hides the end. Sleep only reminds me, I have to wake up again. I’d rather tirelessly travel through the next day and the next, as they flow into each other like a pair of ice melting into paradise—a place I’d happily drown.
I half-assed a minor in philosophy. My parents strongly advised me against it. They said it was a waste of time. They were speaking from experience. In the first and only class they ever took, their professor pointed to an empty chair and asked, ‘Can someone tell me if this chair’—taps chair—’is actually there?’
Some twenty-or-so years later, I enrolled in a class called Philosophy of Death in the months leading up to my dog’s passing. I figured it would help me rationalize my mourning. I figured the professor would ask if he would ‘really be there?’ He was weak, limping on whatever he had left, and in his eighties, so I knew it was coming. I just wanted to prepare myself better than I did the time before that.
I had another dog, his brother, who passed away two years prior. Having one dog left made it way easier to process the pain. I could hold him and get the same feeling. It was a vague sense of comfort. He didn’t know what was happening and that he would never see his brother again, I did. But still, we shared the pain.
Every day, I’d leave class enlightened. I’d think, ‘death gives meaning to life. We need the finality to give justification to do anything. Because that’s what life is. It’s not thinking, it’s doing. You find reason in life via the action of living it.’But these were all thoughts. They weren’t action. The day was drawing closer and all I had were seven essays to show for it. He kept limping, I kept drinking (not nearly as much as I should’ve). He didn’t know his time was ending, I did.
The day came.
It was at the height of the pandemic. I watched my parents carry him out of the door, masks on, tears in their eyes. The vet would’ve put a mask on my dog if they could’ve. Regardless, I was down another brother. He left the living room. He never came back.
I broke. My on-and-off-and-on-and-off girlfriend was with me, trying to comfort me. Emphasis on “trying.” I ignored her. I ran to the piano, hoping it would help. This was when I was still playing regularly. I lifted the lid. But I didn’t play. I just watched everything around me with excruciating detail. His beds, his toys, his stinky ass pee-pads. I normally hated seeing all his toys tossed around the house, but now all I wanted was to throw one with him. I closed my eyes, the tears pouring down my face. I let it all out. I started playing. My fingers were slipping off the keys. I struck the shit out of every octave. I had no dynamics. It was all distorted. Loud. Angry. Confused. I was begging for answers that I would never receive.
It didn’t matter how much I prepared for his passing; there’s no survival kit for someone else’s death. There are only so many words I can tell myself, only so many keys in a piano, so many classes I can enroll in, and so many essays I can write to understand the finality of a goodbye. Of him transitioning from a moment to a memory.
I see another goodbye coming and I’m running as fast I can from it. But I’m limping, just like Toby. I don’t want it to come. I don’t want it to come. I don’t want it to come. I don’t want another memory. I want to enjoy right fucking now. I’m torturing myself for what the future holds—because soon I won’t be able to hold anything.
I wonder how I would’ve felt if I full-assed philosophy. The class may have been a waste of time, but his life never was. Here is the final project I made in his honor.
I pull out a chair. She walks to the opposite one. She doesn’t recognize a gentleman. Maybe I’m not one. I call her over, “This one is for you.” She blushes. As do I. I’m facing the entrance. I can see if anyone hotter walks by.
Tradition to me is treated untraditionally. I hold the door to catch a glimpse of her ass. I buy her flowers because I had to stop for gas. As gentle as I am, I am also a man, confusing romance with getting in her pants.
But leave the pants to me. And wear a tight dress. Drink to our similarities while I drink to our differences. Chivalry is dead. And buried by every split check. I’d like to buy love. But I may not get to pay.
A storm named Mariah Carey is visiting me in mid-February to fuck me like a Christmas song. The waves are inescapable. I can’t even tell how big they are until they hit me. A light peers through. Am I saved? No. It’s fucking lightning.
The lighthouse is gone. Now I’m just a beat-to-shit ship in the storm (hopefully the ship has devil horns). I’m no captain because I have no one to lead and no where to go. I’m in a whirlpool—no life jacket, just booze.
My compass is flaccid. I was two knots away from home, practically getting a sunburn. Now I’m sinking. I’d much rather get burned and know I’m on the right path than drown alone.
But who cares? None of these words change how I’m feeling.
The world keeps telling me that that time heals all wounds. I can’t see the wounds without light. I can only feel them. ‘Walk into the light,’ is the moribund advice. That would be nice. But there’s no light for me.
