Musical accompaniment: Oliver Tree - Me, Myself & I
"You don't even have to write as or about yourself. What would you say if you were someone else?"
- Penpal
He found himself stuck in a pause, trapped in the gap between moments, the weightlessness experienced at the apex between the pounding of running feet, the period between stumble and impact we call "falling", the quantum instant which connects two otherwise unrelated sentences; the semi-colons describing the triumvirate of "me; myself; and I".
With the solid ground upon which he built his church turning to quicksand beneath his feet, he scrambled for purchase, reached out to connect himself with something real.
"Thematically cliched as it may be in this context, but I love you, man."
There was solace and camaraderie in that indescribable moment, and with a solid point-of-reference/star upon which to hitch his wagon he watched it all fall away.
He took a breath, exhaled, tried to reorient. Up and Down are a subjective concept; when gravity fails both are as arbitrary as a description of the colour "blue" to someone who only sees the world in monochrome. All he knew was that he was the only common factor in everything he'd experienced, that if anyone should have known better it was him.
He'd taken risks, he knew he took them; things had come out against him, and therefore he had no cause for complaint.
That objective truth made his pain no less real. It was, and he accepted it, but whether he was rushing towards the ground or the ground rushed towards him was going to make no subjective difference to the bones which where about to get broken, or how much this was going to hurt.
When you carry the weight of the heavens on your shoulders, you don't get to shrug. When he set out to prove a point, every motherfucker in the room wrong, and put them all to shame, he couldn't allow himself to. For that reason, if no other, when he took on that mantle of responsibility he girded his loins, gritted his teeth, locked his knees, and muttered:
"Victory or death."
The weight building on the yoke he carried across his broad shoulders, slings and arrows pelting trapezius and laterals, and strength beginning to fail, over the course of his titanic struggle he realised that he was still standing not because he wouldn't falter, but because he wasn't able to. Arms locked and shoulders braced, legs tensed in position over knees which wouldn't so much refuse to bend as couldn't, he was committed. He'd always avoided commitment; there was always an out. He'd never found a hill he was willing to die on, needle he couldn't thread, or dead-end without a night-soil lane he couldn't parkour over the fence into and échapper down, with less shit on than behind him.
But if he didn't stand for something, he stood for nothing, so with everything and nothing to prove, one more smouldering straw fell out of a brimstone-scented sky full of fire. Refusing to submit might be a parable of fortitude, but being unable to is an unspeakable hell. As the weight increased straw-by-smouldering-straw, each a feather tilting the scales against his heart, and as much as he wanted to beg to falter, his knees refused. So it was he began to splinter, stress-fractures cutting towards his core, parts of himself falling away, falling into dust.
As pieces of himself elided, evaporating into nothing before they could encounter the ground, he wished he could bend like a willow rather than shattering like an oak, but the weight of what he carried around shattered his spine and he crumbled. In the end, of all the things to fall to earth it was the burden he carried that impacted last, crushing the smouldering embers that used to be his self.
Looking up from the Pensieve Pool of blended selves and shared experience, I considered the convergent threads I could no longer separate one from the other, prismatic colours separated and converging, each distinct but irrevocably integrated; inseparable.
What would I say if I was someone else?
What would he say if he was me?
What would we say if we were everything, we were nothing, and we were one?
Sandra used to say "Remember who you are," again and again, and at the time it gave me strength.
I rather wish Ian could hear it the same way I did.
I feel like he could use that right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment