Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Dead at 53

My grandmother died December 7, 2009.
My mother had a massive blood bleed in her brain, exactly 6 months later June 7, 2010.
My mother died on my 28th birthday June 25th, 2010.

Death comes knocking once... again....

Death is back. It's back along the edges of my eyes... It has found the familiar crevices in my eyelids and is ready to settle once again in the valleys that are bags. Does he know it makes me look like my mother?

Death doesn't haunt my dreams. No. I used to think that going to sleep was the fearful place to be, a chance to allow your imagination torture you with nightmares. But the subconscious working with death is a sick, twisted thing. I'm not surprised, since the beginning of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, there has been mortality to face. Death has been in business for quite some time. I can understand why he doesn't mess with child's play nightmares. He waits for that moment when your defenses are down. When you've actually had a good night's rest, and pleasant dreams. Just as you wake up and are about to survey the fairyland you once visited moments ago. Death strikes. Not always the same either. Sometimes it's a slow crawl over your entire body, the sinking in of reality. Other times, it's like a flashing neon-lit sign above your head. Those neon sign times is why the snooze button was invented.

Sometimes I wonder if people see it, the mask of death I am faced to wear for the time being. But then I remember just how cunning and professional Death really is. He is truly gifted in knowing how to expend just the right amount of energy to allow someone else to do all the work. Death is a skater, a slacker, letting you do all the worrying by formulating the mask to look familiar to the average person. You see, the mask looks like any other fatigue-related stress carried on faces of almost everyone. It looks just like gravity, old age, free-radicals, lack of exfoliation, maybe a touch of dehydration, loss or lack of sleep, excessive crying, eye strain, too much computer time. The trick is those things take years, or months to accumulate, compared to a sufficient mask that Death can formulate in a day. If you've got people that are used to seeing you or are very observant, they'll signal your mask by asking if you're tired. But they don't realize you're probably getting the best sleep in the world at this point.

This time around, I want to use it as an advantage, a signal to give my eyes rest. I AM tired. The thoughts rummaging around in my head are what my eyes are alluding to. I am looking at everything which seems to be a mess that has to be adapted to. But I am searching searching searching for somewhere to start to pick up the pieces. I don't have a manual that conveniently tells me to start at point A. Imagine someone sent you on a quest to go to a land fill and organize it. Don't worry about time, that's not an issue. Just do what you can, start where you feel comfortable, and make it look presentable, make some organization of it. So you go to the landfill and your eyes scan, scan, scan. Search search search... where do I possibly start? Just as you focus your gaze on a piece of something familiar, you move closer to realize that your gaze has betrayed you and the closer you get, the object is not what you thought it was. No, that old tire was in fact a plastic bag filled with trash. So, back to searching the horizon... It is a maddening cycle but until everything is cleared, your eyes will search and betray what your soul is going through.