nathanael.ink

It’s not unusual to have had a year sneak by without our saying a word.
I’m sure it happened a time or two. But neither of us were dead.
Neither of us were even ill. Like jamming keys on muted strings
all the musical gestures stay the same but…

“how long will you hold on to his death like this?” they say in my mind
“how long will he be dead?” I reply. How long until the bullet undoes what he did? How long until the love/hate of his children swells
into some new instantiation?

You’ve got no chance to prove yourself now. Your painting is all framed in. Your ink all dried out. Not another word for you to poke and prod at a single thing.
Though when I write I wonder if I can let you write it. Like Paul letting God subvert his subconscious. I wonder if there’s some demonic way you could have snuck into my pen. like the way the witch conjured Samuel, is there some spell I half-wittingly wrought?

I don’t know what will come of the things you left up to us. No one has sent me your computer. I don’t know any logins to find your finished or unfinished works. But I could just let go. Or I could hope no one has thrown any of it away. or how long will I hold out?… I guess I‘m afraid you’d just end here if I let go. Like whatever is left of you would finally dissolve. What was of any worth would be lost to the mist of our slight discomfort in remembering the dead – in particular – your kind of dead.

Friends commit suicide. It’s a plot device. But the reality of how people talk about it differs. Some with embarrassment. Like they’re ashamed their son or daughter would ever suffer it. Yet others.. a sort of badge. like proof of their suffering. I’ve heard it before – rattled off in a list of names they know. As if to mean the speaker is familiar with the suffering.. but of course that’s not what it means – if it’s anything – it’s a kind of proof that they’ve seen a suffering that they failed to tend to – or maybe failed even to know about. Or, at least failed to be able to do anything about.

Keep wondering if I can do you justice. If I can make the reader suffer in some sufficient way. To feel a thing they can’t escape. I wonder if I can make the reader wonder it.

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If you’re right about eternity then this really is all that’s left of you.
It takes a weekend to make it through a good adventure novel, a few hours in a movie, but yours took 30 years. We watched an 80s movie with a murder montage. all draped in neon blue. just a series of dead bodies. A blast from just outside the view. The spill of blood on the window. You see it. Maybe feel it a little. but it’s fiction. and then it’s fact. and it’s almost a small difference. Just a difference in genre. Just the whims of a reader in a library. But you’re fact…
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I’m officially older than you, you know like, in living years. You won’t be a famous author. Unless I can really work some magic, or some asshole data miner finds all your stuff and can’t keep it to himself.

Funny how much grief feels like the “holy spirit” we felt as kids. The way it fills up your stomach. It used to be for me a sign I should pray. You did it too though. Looking back it’s clear we were both really good at working ourselves up to things. It’s a kind of internal witchcraft I think. I suspect it’s what actors do – believable ones at least. Really feeling things. I wonder how isolated you lived from your needs. Yourself all divided up. I wonder how much you used me to connect with those disparate parts. Much the way I used you. And still use you. so in this way you have real affect.
I can’t imagine you had the most respect for actors though. Fakers. You’d even get onto me for having too many other friends. Which was pretty amazing for me to hear. Even though it always came out as an insult.
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Dear Judah,
This will be the 5th time I’ve written to you without a response.
I know you can’t be terribly busy given how you put an end to.. well everything. An end to most of the stuff you were known for. I mean your ability to be absent has remained. You’re still fucking with my head too, so there’s that, but I can’t say how much of that you’re actually responsible for – probably less responsible for it than you’d like to be.

[its been important I feel it. what I feel from the memory is quite literally all I have left]