An Image

According to my text message, I was drinking colors. The world was a pinwheel of images, and as I breathed harder things only blurred more. I felt like a child on a cold day. I couldn’t feel my legs; they were beneath me. I couldn’t find my friends; they were beside me. Things began to spin. I became the pinwheel, and watched the world blur. It was beautiful, canvas turned to palate. Somewhere in the funnel of memories, you appeared. You had your hands turned up, palms out. I’d never seen you like this before. I didn’t stop to ask you if you needed something. Your eyes were wet. I switched to the next scene, like a kaleidoscope. This time I only saw your hands, and the image blurred, then focused. It felt like dying, watching your hands sink and then reappear. I wanted to place the back of my hands in yours, to feel the weight you were carrying. It wasn’t much, I imagined. You looked like you wanted more, so I pretended to give you a part of me. You began to cry, as I watched my hands, dripping rubies, release a pumping heart into your hands, now folding. I didn’t feel any pain, but it looked like you did. I didn’t understand why you cried. Your tears turned to blood to match your dripping hands. When I looked down for my own footing, I saw nothing. Blankness. I looked up, and you were much closer. No more tears. You began to kiss my cheek, and your arms felt like stepping from the shadow into sunlight. When I closed my eyes, I felt like an infant, held in the arms of his mother, her soft voice cooing him to sleep. 

-Mr. Bones: There is.

“Jumped,” they said—though I doubt he jumped. “Jump” is what a kid does when he’s happy. “Jump” is what a child does on a trampoline, or when catching a ball, or when entering a swimming pool. The word itself is fun. “Ju,” like the release of a springboard, then the flat, startling revolution of heels to the ground: “mp.”

Maybe they used this word, instead of “fell”—I’m sure it was more of a falling—or perhaps “slipped,” because it invokes some sort of affirmation. You don’t just “jump” from a bridge and plummet 70 feet to your death on the cold bank of a river about as inviting as the concrete floor of a bar in the winter. You surely don’t do it for height or distance, as a child might do off a bench or swing set at a park, drawing lines in the sand each time to measure his success.

But now, a new term to accompany this already unsettling word: This time, “bounced.” Again an unusual, playful word. I hadn’t realized that he never made the splash, until I spoke with a professor, who had walked that very bridge cautiously and reverently, but with a feeling of hope—as if on a balancing beam—every day on his way to school, years ago.

“He could never get a damn thing right in his life, the poor guy. He didn’t even make the river. He bounced.”

Maybe he intended it this way. I have heard it rumored that he waved on his way down, before he took his final bow. Perhaps he saw the irony. There, on that bank, body like a wrung-out rag, eyes still and gazing, he niched himself a place in history where he might watch the river flow, but never drink again. 

I wrote a poem some time ago that resulted from me trying to stomach some form of revolutionary existentialism that I was dealing with at the time, which is now a mere picture—with caption—in my mind. I remember thinking, and being told, that it was one of my best pieces at the time, at just 4 incredibly short lines. It seemed appropriate to make it short, in accordance with my irrational fear of diminishing into nothing, as if the 19 years I had spent in this life had somehow met their limit and I was going to croak any second.

Well, that was a matter of perspective, as I curved backward, staring through the open mouth of a skull and down the spine of a Camarasaurus.

Here’s the poem I wrote:

Museum

Curious, our sudden

fascination with bones.

Statuesque, we were,

among other things, dying.

Yesterday, too, I encountered a new perspective. This time, as a result of reading a Billy Collins’ poem titled “Memento Mori,” which captures most of the original feelings that I had at the time, and twists them into lighthearted, easier-digestible form. I used to think that I wasn’t a fan of Collins, but I’ve recently come to realize that which draws so many readers to his words: connection. He is able to take many common thoughts and ideas that we encounter and make them magnificently profound, and he’s damn good at it.

Here’s a link to the poem: Memento Mori

Cody