Work Text:
02/13/2024 8:22 PM
I have noticed recently that I seek out the most extreme versions of my life's tragedies.
I am twenty two years old. In under two months' time I will be twenty three and half way to my final degree.
In about three months I will have one more year left to be a student. The final year of my life before I shed my final excuse to not claim full adulthood.
There is a tendency to roll eyes at people my age shirking the title of adult.
My only defense is I never expected to get within striking distance of my twenty-seventh birthday.
I was supposed to be in a car crash. My nightmares through middle and high school would loop sounds of sirens and blue-red ambulance light delirium.
My mind is a gifted liar. I get my tongue from the same nerves.
I read Salinger and Plath and Woolf and every other tragic creature I could find at age thirteen
I was a lonely kid in the state of Missouri and all I wanted was to die. To be removed. Cleanly. Without a trace.
I closed my eyes and dreamt of my missing person report until the day I turned seventeen.
I read Salinger and Plath and Woolf and didn't even get the satisfaction of recognizing my corpse in the ink.
I felt nothing and raged.
I had been haunting my childhood bedroom for much longer than I had been reading those books that didn't even find me.
In high school I learned how to shoot film photos and cluttered my development sheets with self-portraits
I was a vain little thing, all teenagers are.
My self portraits were layered and hazy, never containing my full body in the image and developed the same way that the old con artists of America used to create images of ghosts in spirit photographs taken at kitschy little seances.
My statement at the art show included a reference to contacting the artist via ouija board. The line was a half joke.
My final year of high school my father spent the entirety of the fall semester in and out of the hospital.
We didn't know what was really wrong with him until almost Thanksgiving.
Our apartment was too quiet, I was at school until midnight working on lights for my school's theatre department,
And still I was expected to await my college acceptances and do my homework and function like nothing was wrong.
The first hospital visit was in August. No one knew until mid-October when I finally broke down in the hallway.
When I had the free time, I remember obsessively reading essays about Edgar Allan Poe that year, and his wasting characters.
The rot and sickness of the Usher House, the rot that pervaded his own life, the distinct wrongness in his work.
I also fell in love with Susan Sontag that year. Reading her essays about photography, suffering, and sickness.
In a haze I remember nearly nothing from, I binge watched shows like Leverage and the first season of Umbrella Academy alongside a constant barrage of stand-up comedy specials.
I read a book about a girl searching for her dead crank cooking father and cried as the girls in my class couldn't find sympathy for the girl who spoke like me and looked for a father she didn't like but depended on, knowing he was already gone.
I read obsessively about the 1918 Influenza pandemic that brought a world already ground down by the most brutal war it had ever seen to its knees.
I dreamt of myself and my little sister searching for our father in the hospitals of Paris.
My father survived that year, even when they diagnosed him with cancer at Thanksgiving.
My friend's mom hadn't. I have a photo with her at her art show before graduation. I don't call my parents nearly enough to feel so sad about that photo.
My first year of college marked a global pandemic.
My mom caught the virus not long after the global emergency was declared.
There weren't enough resources to test people her age, and she didn't need to be put on a ventilator.
She was never counted among the sick.
My father slept on the couch. My sister and I in our own rooms, our own beds.
We struggled to complete our school work from our apartment while caring for ourselves and our family.
I heard my mother's wretching coughs at all hours of the day. I came to fear the quiet of not hearing them.
I had been following the disease before they had named it. I was the best informed and the third most scared.
I listened to an album about the end of the world on repeat from my favorite band when it came out that month.
I watched every single zombie movie. 28 Days, Train To Busan, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn and Sean of the Dead, I read World War Z
While my mother coughed up a lung in the next room and I watched the death counts climb, knowing just how great the margins of error must be.
I read and reread the Yellow Wallpaper that year, for the month and a half my mother was sick and my father slept fitfully on the couch
I read and reread The Yellow Wallpaper, as I never left the house and tried to care for my mother who was nearly too weak to leave her bed.
Not even a year after this, my grandfather was diagnosed with an awful and violent form of dementia.
He hallucinated, he became paranoid and violent towards my grandmother, the last time I ever spoke to him had been early that November.
They told us the bad news on Thanksgiving. My father claimed he wasn't dying.
I later told my mother I wished my father had said he was. I felt cruel for that. My mother claims it was natural.
I still haven't forgiven myself.
I then committed the cardinal sin of being told about a medical diagnosis, and I looked up my father's exact words mere minutes after he said them.
I decided my father was wrong, my grandfather was dying.
My father became a shell of himself as he went with his brother to visit his father, barely himself either, never lucid enough to recognize him.
He said that as an adult, it was my right to decide if I wanted to visit him. However, as my father, he said he really did not want me to do that.
For all of the cruel and unforgivable things that I know I have put my parents through hearing their first daughter say as she grew up, I have rarely felt worse then when I looked into my father's tired eyes and told him that I agreed with him, and that I would not be visiting him at all.
We both knew it was the right call, and I know it relieved my father to hear the conviction in my voice.
All the same, it stands out in my mind as one of my betrayals of the man who raised me.
The last time I saw my grandfather alive was a mere days before he died. I had thrown up in the bathroom and not told my parents before my mom and I left the house.
I had downloaded an entire season of an investigative podcast to my phone and prepared myself for the absolute worst of seeing an unconscious man in his living room.
My mother and grandmother told me to talk to him. Tell him about my semester and my classes starting in a week.
I did. My voice didn't break, shaking only twice. The nurse claimed he could hear me.
I hoped he couldn't.
He died the day I was supposed to go back to my dorm at college. My parents told me to text my friend and decide what I wanted to do.
I told her I still wanted to go back to school. She picked me up an hour later, giving me time to have extra goodbyes with my family.
She let me sob on her shoulder in a McDonalds parking lot. We aren't friends anymore.
I still don't miss him. Not like I feel like I should.
I rewatched The Taking Of Deborah Logan when I got back to my dorm room that night. I had watched it nearly weekly during the time my grandfather's diagnosis was told to me up until his death.
It was one of many possession movies focusing on the changing of a loved one I watched obsessively that winter.
It was insensitive, unrealistic, ghoulish, and frankly bizarre. But every time I encountered a tragedy, it had seemed more reasonable to seek out exaggerations of my problems and revel in their gory catharsis then to add to my family's growing weight of grief.
Our apartment is in an old building. Only so much more despair can fit on the walls. The movie ended and was a worst case scenario I knew I would never face.
I watched a great deal of horror movies that year, adding to my already impressive repertoire.
I try to avoid mentioning my comfort in the most ghoulish and depraved of genres to my parents.
I don't want to know what it would make them think of me.
My final year of college, my friend Josh died during finals.
I wasn't especially close with him, but I had known him for three years as a member of my school's Jewish Student Union.
Josh was from a town not far from my mother's hometown, and a member of ROTC and every sport on our campus. He was at every party in town, and every student knew him or knew who he was.
Josh liked to make fun of me for knowing I wanted to convert to Judaism for as long as I had and never doing it.
He called me a Jew anyway. He claimed I was too fun to still be Catholic.
Every time we ran into each other he would wave and chat, walking with me to grab a few words, since I was perpetually running late that year.
On Yom Kippur, we had all gone out to a Mexican restaurant in town to break our fast together, and afterwards he convinced me and my friend Emma to buy him a bottle of Barefoot Pink Moscato. I still have the receipt in my room somewhere.
I was heading to the library the morning I heard the news, to work on two of my three very late final papers on reading day, having blissfully escaped a hangover from the prior night's "party" at a friend's house.
My friend A texted me to tell me her condolences.
I knew what was about to happen before I even checked my email as instructed.
I felt numb reading the message. The entire morning that followed is a complete blur. My memory doesn't kick back in until that afternoon.
I made a few posts about the event on a private social media blog, not naming anything or even being recognizable.
I went to the memorial that night, and I kept the paper flyer with the blessings and the candle.
They were the first things I packed to bring with me when I moved to North Carolina. I still haven't figured out how to ask my rabbi about honoring his memory, even though I am not kin or even close, now that I have finally begun conversion.
I try to buy a sweeter wine I think he would like every once in a while for him now. I now associate Mike's Harder Lemonades and the smell of myrrh with mourning.
Months later, as we expected the death of my great-grandmother, an incredible woman who was deeply important to my life, some horrible thing possessed me to search his name online. I found the report of his death.
Car crash on the way back to school.
I missed the memorial service his family held in Columbia that summer. I was in North Carolina trying to find a place to live.
It haunts me.
I was meant to get my driver's license that summer. I never managed to get confident enough behind the wheel for it.
Half my friends decided to all get really fascinated and obsessed with motorsports the next fall.
At current, I have decided to join them. I'm having them explain things like Nascar and Formula1 to me. I like to think Josh would find this funny.
I've always been enchanted with the nature of movement and speed. I find movement breath-taking, and I have a love for niche and extreme sports.
Sports that demand the entire body and soul, the most primitive part of the brain to be sharpened like a good hunting knife, sports that require its athletes to retrain themselves to feel fear differently.
When I was little, and had first learned how to swim and had seen the ocean a few times, I had decided what I wanted to be was a free-diver.
Not a scuba diver, a person who has a team and equipment and oxygen as they go tens to hundreds of feet beneath the surface.
A free-diver, a person who inhales on the surface, wearing their bathing or wet suit, clears their mind, and swims down.
I loved the feeling of holding my breath and seeing how far I could persuade the sea to allow me visit.
To this day, one of my favorite feelings in the world is a dull and buzzing burn of my lungs as I simply let the water hold me down
Burning brighter and hotter as I calmly and leisurely climb my way (not far, I have since lost some of my drive to descend) back to breathable air.
The urgent draw of breath into my protesting lungs, relief flooding my system to be able to breathe
The slow soothing feeling of the air working its way fully back through my system, where if I float still and quietly enough, I can pretend I feel the oxygen moving with my blood throughout my body.
It should surprise no one, that I am enchanted by athleticism that requires a rewriting of the way fear is processed.
I am a novelty seeker, and what is worse, I am a novelty seeker with relatively poor survival instincts.
Of course I can't look away from a sport where the drivers are hurtling around at several hundred miles an hour.
Every horror I have found in my life, short as it is, I am unable to keep the most egregious form of it, gory and extreme to the point of parody, the most distilled and potent version of that concept, from taking over my mind.
In fact, I seek it out. I find these horrifying little things, and I look upon them like fine artworks.
Time and time again, I seek these little indirect terrors out and incorporate them into my life.
I am turning my soul into either a morbid little cabinet of curiosities or a mausoleum, and I am still haunting my own house even after years of trying to stop my time as a spirit photographer.
I used to conceive of myself as a graveyard when I was younger. There are bones and ghosts clinging to me, there always have been, and I could always tell.
Now I can't help but wonder if it might be more accurate to label myself as a morgue. Full of cleaned and mostly recognized bodies and souls, all just waiting to hopefully be claimed by their right mourners.
There is no one to ask this question to. The next of kin are all gone.
9:59 PM