Frozen - a fragment

I am caught in a time that only I can remember, because this time lives only in my memory, my memory and yours. But your memory is gone, dissolved away as you did not too long ago. And it wasn’t too long ago, was it, since the last time you reached out to swallow my hand in yours? Not too long ago, since we fell into a friendship that plunged into a romance, and sent me careening into a happiness I never knew could exist.

And then I was frozen. It happened in a millisecond, or 2.5 milliseconds as you would have put it. The air hangs still. You can almost see the frozen molecules clinging to one another, forming a quiet nothingness that preserves you lying there, and me standing here under two megatons of realization waiting to fall upon my head. I am afraid to exhale, to bring me into the next moment that follows this one: the moment in which you are pronounced dead.

I have been holding my breath for the past year and nine months. Sometimes I wonder if anyone notices. I like to pretend that they don’t, that they cannot have the intuition to know the difference between the me that walks around everyday, going about my business, and the popsicle me inside, dead amongst the living. No amount of warmth from the suns in all of the solar systems out there can melt it. The core of me lies dead with you, interred in a cement grave with a green plush pony, a high school varsity jacket, the biggest watch you’ve ever laid eyes on, a wallet with pictures of you and I (a double of which stands in my living room to this day), and an urn containing your ashes. What are ashes, anyway? Remnants of molecules, piles of atoms reconfigured, a desperate preservation of that which was you. But the dead are most finely preserved in memories. Memories from those who knew you that don’t necessarily correspond with others’ memories or with reality. Wayward, inconstant memories that deceive and give an approximation of truth, leaving the memory-addict wholly dissatisfied, frustrated in its evanescence, pissed off in its perversions, angry in its clarity, and ultimately, fiending for more.

I can live with your blue shadow forever, can’t I? There’s no compelling reason for me to join the rest of humankind, out there in the real world beyond the comforting chill of preservation. I used to abhor the cold, but now I look for love in its twilit corners. Swathed in indigo gauze, this world of you and I keeps me dead amongst the living.

It hurts to live this way. It hurts like when you are holding your breath underwater and your sinuses start to press in and the sockets of your eyes ache because your head is about to explode. It hurts like when someone dies on the news and you realize you can’t feel any sadness for it. It hurts like anticipating the dizzying but necessary pain you will get when you’re about to move an arm or a leg that’s fallen asleep. It hurts like all the pain you’ve ever felt in your whole life compacted into one heavy bullet lodged deep in your heart, all 2.5 megatons of which pull the whole of you down, down, downwards until you fall upon knees already bruised.

*07oct04*