I do not visit my fathers ashes. I have yet to visit the wall they are placed behind.  I hate the bleakness of that place. I hate the dark nostalgia that encompasses it. That place has an repugnant power. The power to condense the entirety of a father an son into a single metaphor:  a wall. 

I went to the cemetery today with the the intention to visit the wall and confront my cognitive dissonance. As if this morning my own obsessive fear and discomfort of mortality invited the memories of my childhood to a romantic dinner for two. My future was flirting with my past.

I walked out into the green field and kneeled down by an old bench with a small eulogy engraved to a small child. The humor wasnt lost on me since I felt as if I came here to lay my inner child to rest. I stared off for a moment at the tombstones resembling stalagmites rising up from the earth and the dark storm clouds resembled a giant, abrasive paw.  A paw eternally raking ethereal dirt over these graves.

I look at the old, delapitated houses around the border of the cemetary and found it comfortably symbolic; The body is a suitable home temporarily and when its occupant moves on,  the house still stands ground and slowly crumbles. Giving it a sort of charming character in the most morbid, decrepid sense. The brick foundation of the skin and the old rotten wood cabinets of the torso and lonely, abandoned furniture of the internal organs.  I soon felt that this is not a graveyard, this is an abandoned neighborhood.  With strict deed restrictions against the still occupied houses such as my own. My fathers house stood up around a small concrete walkway down a small set of stairs by the water and it had burnt down a few years back.  My father died with no money and although cremation was highly against his beliefs, the state imposed arson as a way to get him into this neighborhood in accordance to the eternal lease. They let him move in, under the condition that his house shall be burnt down and its embers should be placed in a wall. Just as physical as it is metaphorical, this wall is an obtrusive eyesore in an otherwise decent, low key neighborhood.  This wall represents the lower class. This wall represents the low income housing of the graveyard. The less fortunate. Ill forever hate that wall and I couldnt bear to stand infront of and accept the role of an lowly worm trying to scale a monolith.

The poet Khalil Gibran wrote: “A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, “I will have a camel for lunch today.” And all morning he went about looking for camels. But at noon he saw his shadow again-and he said, “A mouse will do.”

Today I am the fox and at sunrise this morning, my fathers ashes were a camel I realized as I turned to head home. At noon I settled for the mouse of merely stolling through that old abandoned neighborhood..  I still have not visted my fathers ashes.

“I dont want you here. Get the fuck away from me!”

Obedience is such a despicable thing.

I had already endured as much as I though I could. Balled up fists smashing against my face and chest, nails tearing at my skin, spit, vomit, blood. I was drained. Just as emotionally as I was physically and I am not a hero, I am a bad man and here she was reminding me at the top of lungs.

“Go!” She yelled.
There was a brief moment of silence. Deep down, I realized that it was a demand that should respectably be followed, but somehow my mind processed it as if it was a question. I felt a desperate need to respond. I felt like the entire intensity of an impending storm depended upon my next words.
Her finger was still in the air. She was much too drunk to realize that it wasnt pointed at me, but I recognized that gesture. I’ve seen it before I thought, as I picked up the bottom half of my t-shirt and used it to whipe the blood away from my nose and bottom lip. Those kind of gestures do not ever require a proper reference point because it doesnt matter where those types of fingers point, they are just meant to state “anywhere else…..anywhere but here…..anyone but you.”

Twice…….
Two fucking times I had been been given that guesture that seemed like a question. From two different women years apart and I choked both times. Twice I let them down and did not respond because I gave into that sickening obedience. All of us did.

Even now I find it difficult to distinguish a difference between the first womans breathless plea, “please just go away. I want to die here.”
And the latters unearthly screams “You make me sick! Go away!”

Because the following moments in both scenarios are the same. Moments soaked in the most repulsive subordination.
They had already made the decision to obey. One was already determined to follow the impending orders of the fist-full of pills she had just consumed. And the others blood had already begun to follow the chain of commands that began from some dilluted logic up in her mind and issued down to her shakey hands that opened up her veins as if to give her blood the very same gesture I was given. “Go!…Leave!” And just like me, it bowed its head and did as it was told with no response.

Inferiority lies at the heart of all forms of enablment. It doesnt matter whether you march to the grave or you hold somone else’s hand while they march towards thiers. The obedience states that you have compromised all control of yourself to suit the “needs” of another. It doesnt matter what it is, I know my own inferiorty as a young man robbbed my of my heroic ability.
There is no room for obedience in the mind of a hero. Heros run into danger when they are told to get out. This is what seperated me from them. This was the answer that I choked on when given those gestures that seemed like questions. Heros do not wait until morning. If I was the man I am now, I could have stopped them. Instead of thinking I was giving them what they so desperatly wanted by leaving them there to perish. Thankfully these women did know real heros that ran in after I left.

I do know one thing though….obedience is no longer a part of my life. There will be no third time. I promise you that.

I dislike looking people in the eyes.
Eyes are the organ directly responsible for receiving and producting honesty. Like when someone finnally “sees” the truth. Or when people are ignorant or naive, we say that they are “asleep” because their eyes are seemingly shut. Or when you desperately want someone to realize (real eyes) something, you shout out frantically, “open your eyes! Cant you “see” what’s really going on here?!”
The most important thing is that eyes are entirely incapable of keeping secrets. They say much more than lips do and sometimes when you catch someones eye, even on the first encounter, you can already see that they are hurting you. Or that they are hurting someone. Even if that someone is themselves.
Anyways, today is the first day of winter and I know this no matter what. I know today is the first day of winter because I woke up with that feeling on my skin and in my head and I never want to let it go. There are far less eyes in winter and I feel like no one is watching. Its the most soothing comfortable feeling I can imagine and it makes me feel like I am in love.
I can wear ill-fitting jackets and my spirit jumps from roof to roof and I don’t have those eyes on me like a million anchors. Most of the year, each gaze feels like a sad story and my body is a bookshelf. Each stare, every look, and every glance fills my limbs with stories like shelves and makes me heavy as a boulder and drags me down towards the center of the earth. But not today. Not in winter. In winter I am in love, and love is blind, and I am light as air.

How would you compile a life without things that are no longer there? Thats the terrible circumstance, isnt it? You cant seem to have much appreciation of anything without the weight of things that you will never have again. I guess thats the measure of a “life”.
What about the minds painstaking inability to move from certain moments. If there is nothing else that can be done with a memory, wouldnt the proper thing be to get rid of it? Wouldnt that be evolution or neuroplaticisity? It seems like I’ve done every single thing there is to do with the past at least a thousand times. I’ve re-lived every circumstance until its hardly even possible to distinguish the reality of certain ones anymore. Ah, an entire life lived in hindsight. What a travesty. The lack of a clear line between the past and the future.
Nostalgia: Is that supposed to us make feel alive, or feel that we’ve already lived?

Is a life just a harrowing collection of all the things that we once had, Or is it the few things that still somehow remain? The things that get stuck to our clothes and shoes as we walk through this world. All the things we cant shake. The pollen of lost loves. The dirt and soot of sickness, defeat and embarrassment. The dead leaves of wild nights where we laughed til we puked.

At times I wish I could bury the entire world like a mangy mutt buries bones in the back yard and return to it when I am good and ready.