In Retrospect

I didn't know I was in a conversation, I suppose that's the point of the translation part. Then again, I didn't know a lot of things for a long time.

This is where it started:

"I'm slipping!" Her voice was shrill and scared. I grabbed on tight to the rocks and watched as she fell past me. I was told after that we were two hundred feet up, a whole twenty-ish stories of wretched fall. I felt the wind blow into my ear as she screamed, shooting past me like some sort of dreadful comet. She was right at the top too.

I'd always likened Elaine and I's rogue rock-climbing trips to that of risky, life-loving bravado. A careless and youthful machismo if you'll excuse the immaturity. To be clear, Elaine died on impact.

That was it, that was our first words together. It's a twisted thing to not know that you're having a conversation. In a way it's like being robbed or blinded. A thing that is yours, and deservedly so, is not there.

Something in me tightened after Elain's death. Call it a deep psychological response to trauma or simply changing your ways after seeing the one you love die -- I don't care. Either way, I had cut out such reckless activities forever, and more importantly, Elaine was gone forever.

This plan of not ever being risky was fine. Things kept happening. I slowly yet yearly matured into an adult, became some sort of a worker bee, and continued to live like a cell. I had no idea nor expectation that I'd ever talk again with my mysterious counterpart. My trauma was more of a one-off in my mind. Move on and get to working, I said, life happens. I'm sure the age of thirty happened to me around this time as well.

The next occurrence was much more subtle. In fact I think it happened when I was asleep. To paint it with the same rough edges that I felt it with, I quite simply woke up and remembered that I was living -- And that horrified me.

I knew it to be the same feeling that had occurred when Elaine died. It sounded the same, though this time it was much louder. This ordeal eventually forced me to quit my job. It twisted me into doing a lot of things that I didn't plan on. If you want to be cute you can call it an early mid-life crisis.

Don't worry about what the job was -- that is entirely meaningless.

The episodes began to happen more frequently, and with less predictability. Some would continue to occur at night, and others not. Maybe I would be struck at a coffee shop, or when talking to my parents, or with my pants down atop the toilet, it didn't matter and matched the haphazard aim of a drunkard with an agenda. This suspenseful and random dance made me quite mad as time went on.

To cope, I wised up and read some books. This lead me into some sort of twisted Freudian approach and eventually resulted in me returning to the site of Elaine's death. I had hoped to face down the internal, shadowy visages of my ego. Instead I broke down like a hapless child. My heart moved on eggshells as my mind navigated the guarded path of my past. I found feelings inside of a hedge maze and got lost on the way out. Like most humans I didn't quite understand just how broken I was.

It is here that I thought I was conversing with Death.

It made sense. My episodes felt absolutely helpless and painfully inevitable, the biting, spitting, pissing image of Death as far as I could see it. In my mind, I witnessed my young darling die horribly and Death just decided to stick around afterwards, dancing in my ears and heart whenever it got bored.

So I was cursed, I said, how does one go on this way? Firstly I became tragically poetic, and never really saw things straight again. Pets were future funerals and friends yelping sacks of trauma. Rivers were not rivers but streams of God's tears, mountains were just piles of dead things and the sky wasn't a window but a taunting painting. It was all well and lonely.

Time went on, as it does. Then I yet again wised up and thought about furthering my correspondence with Death. Maybe this was the healthy way out. As much as I wished this could be as cool and literal as basement, backlit Ouija boards and eye shadow infused seances -- it was not. I took the practical approach and decided to live next to Death. I became a mortician.

Shockingly, this was horrifying. I found out rather quickly that I was in no such state to meet Death, and every approaching, pasty corpse reminded me of my own inner mortality. Somehow my feet and hands continued to move about their job, but internally I was messier than the car wreck victims I dressed.

Even worse, I began to get the feeling that death wasn't even the one torturing me. This happened when the first corpse of a child rolled into my hands. There is not, and will never be, a more brutally intense thing for a human to behold.

I then became convinced that I was talking to Nihilism instead of Death.

I kept moving, as quite tragically this would not be the last time such a horrid view rolled in front of me. Humans have the rather bleak ability to plaster their eyes with their own inner tar, and I became hardened.

This stage didn't feel nearly as romantic as the last. There was no deep poetry like there was when I felt that I was talking to Death. Color itself becomes mute and drained when you only see it as an adjective. A forest was no longer a forest but just a collection of trees, which themselves were a collection of cells, which really and truly were just fancily dressed up dirt. I was now not just lonely, but sad and lonely.

Sixty hit, though at that age it might be more apt to say that it simply landed. Dead leaves can fall just as gently and gracefully as the live ones, and my external life was by no means poor. Nihilism had its reckless way with the internal parts.

I didn't give up, though it is worth noting that by traditional definitions I never succeeded in translating my conversations. I only found out who was on the other line when I myself laid down to disappear. Nihilism did eventually slow itself into harmless existentialism, and I died about as well as a tree does.

I'm going to repeat myself a little. If there is one actual tragedy in my life, and you may think that there is many, it is only that I didn't know. To be spoken to by something so important, and to mistranslate every step... I still feel quite like a buffoon.

I died expecting to find Death's shinning sickle hanging above me like a Damocles, or Nihilism's suffocating pillow covering my voice, or maybe even some abject, distant Deity of hexes who laughed at my stumbles. I thought and in some ways wanted this to be my end. It would be like placing the final piece on a horribly dysfunctional and discolored puzzle.

It turned out to be more of a Pollock painting than a shitty puzzle.

At first, I saw my life. I saw a childhood that was indeed marred by something rather dark, but there was more. The event was blistered under the light of my love for Elaine, and the absolute inferno that we had kindled while together. A wonderous thing cut short is no less delightful. It is like the wonder of seeing a lightning strike decorate the sky like painted, fracturing glass. Over in a moment, but glorious in an instant.

I saw my years as a mortician, but through the eyes of those who attended the funerals, those who lovingly gazed at a familiarly face and remembered things like I did for my Elaine. I saw how I took a brutal, natural thing and made it ever-so-softer for people. I saw them smile in a time that was filled with tears.

All that time I was not being cursed by a demon. No angel of hell was trying to speak with me. In the flash of my own Death I understood that it was Humanity communicating with me. Showing me, even in the darkest and most brutal valleys of life, that we persist. There is nothing wrong or immoral about dying. There is only dying, and that is well and fine.

I died quite like the rest, naturally.