I feel like Pluto. That is to say I feel for it. Amidst days that have been like a sore, numb limb, I have only experienced a sensation of sympathy for an outcast planet. Only because I happened to read a poem about it. Although I am afraid my relatability to it may just be an exercise in self-pity.
I have been wishing for an asteroid to strike this dinner table at this very moment and wipe all of us lunatics out in an instant. They’re not bad people, it’s only because I am tired and I need a permanent occasion of rest. Plus, dear god, this is getting boring.
Here’s how I am. Body discomfort incarnate, but the hair looks neat. Nails are chipped. My hands are fidgeting, acting on the constant need to scratch my neck. My stomach’s a little upset but that’s because I didn’t shit well in the morning. I look at the guy sitting across from me to confirm if I look nice. It makes me sick. I think I need more ice in my drink.
Nobody has asked me a question about the particulars of my life yet, I hope they don’t. Meanwhile I am thinking about writing a note for the instance of my sudden death, just in celebration of its unpredictability. Something nice to leave behind because there can be no possible relics to my life.
Last night, I dreamt of a graveyard underwater. I was breathlessly submerged by engraved proofs of endings. I wasn’t afraid when I woke up. I had been reading the suicide letters of famous people before going to bed. In an effort to make myself feel things, I tried to imagine how broken her letter must have left Leonard Woolf, as he held the final remnant of her departure.
I don’t imagine the tenants of this table would like to hear how I didn’t cry at the thought of the rocks that she put in her pockets. Or my dream, in which I too was drowning. They didn’t appreciate the joke I made about my best friend’s funeral either. It’s been three months now, unclench a little. Jesus.
The chair beside me has just gotten empty. And there it is. Another reminder of absence. Listen, listen, listen… but all echoes are left in vacuum. The table, like my life with one chair now vacant, emptied after contacting a life and a burial.
It’s fine, I am telling myself again. It’s just like we’ve had one big fight and we won’t be talking for weeks. Which is why I remember her contact but have removed it from my phone. I have put all her things in my bedside drawer, except my sadness which refused to fit in.
I beg it, please let me forget. But memory’s persistence is frustrating. When she had lost her pet, bawling she had said, “the evidence of love has to always turn into grief, at least once and sometimes twice and many times over. The universe demands it.”
There is no other explanation of death except the universe's sadism. It feeds off the love we have nowhere left to give.
I’m thinking of adopting a cat and calling it Fish. She would have found it amusing.
The asteroid has kept me waiting, but that betrayal isn’t new. I am feeling a little fuzzy, so the night doesn’t feel half bad now. Maybe I’ll ask that guy to drive me home.
Listen, listen, listen…
Tonight, like so many others, again became about you. But all these thoughts are just to say that I am looking at the empty space you’ve left behind, trying to fill it up, only to find it staring right back at me. It makes me miss your kindness.