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.

_____________________________________

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…
_____________________________________

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.
_____________________________________

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]

[tbd]

I love music. I really do. I also love good writing. Let me take a moment just to appreciate a place where both of those things coexist: Levi Weaver’s song “We Married Strangers.”

He opens up describing a scene in a piece-meal kind of way (which makes the audience feel most smart when they notice it) from a first person perspective. Pulls us in with:

The blood that trickles towards my elbow 

Um, intrigue much? So there is blood trickling. On your arm. Do tell.

Looks like a map of Anaheim

Ok well that is super visual. Damn. Such a concise way to describe the way blood drips and intersects with itself. The detail of referring to a specific place makes this more personal too.

What used to be the bathroom mirror
Is speckled red with highway five

…hold the freaking phone. You just punched the mirror didn’t you? Oh yeah, the blood dripping down your forearm. Also, let me just point out that the metaphor of blood being like streets was never explicitly established. That happened in the head of the listener, and it sooo did happen in my head. “Blood trickling, looks like a map” oh that must be like the streets? “Okay, hold on to that. Now… Highway five is on the mirror.”  ..Well f*k me! That is so strong. Just. He let our brains do so much of the work to construct the narrative and then just trusts it worked the way he wanted it to and then drives it home.
Here is a map of Anaheim btw. Freaking hwy 5…

You look for eyes to reassure you

Okay, so now we have another character “you” to consider. This is the first clue we get regarding who this work is intended for (written to).

I’m staring holes into the ground

Damn. So they’re looking at you and you’re looking at the ground. They are looking at you and this damn broken mirror and the blood on your arm and they want reassurance. This is a letter to that person then isn’t it? And we, the audience, are just eavesdropping. #extrapersonal
Such a strong scene all established from a first person, super intimate, perspective that lets the audience sort out for themselves exactly what is going on. 

You’ve fifty faces there to choose from
But none of us can make a sound

…ouch. Now you’re just going to attack the person who is staring at you after you broke the mirror? Saying they have “fifty faces”. Ah well I guess you guys probably just had some blow out fight and that’s why you broke the mirror and you’re still pissed. Got it. But yeah, now no version of yourselves knows what to say in a moment like this. Yep.. that sounds like real life for sure. #preach

[Okay I’m just going to let you read the rest. You got this. It’s pretty straightforward.]

So let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again
To fall in love, to fall in love again
Let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again

…Actual tears on my actual face at this point…

We married young, we married strangers
In front of family and our friends
No warning signs about the changes
No one told us we’d forget
The love I see there on our faces
In all those photos in the hall
That smile I couldn’t seem to straighten
A hope that swore we’d never fall

So let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again
To fall in love, to fall in love again
Let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again

So help me out, I’m quickly losing myself
Help me out, I think I’m losing you

[sobbing uncontrollably]

it isn’t much to remember that we are here

what that entails is what we forget.

if you don’t want to say that only you exist, then you’ve got to take a position on what everyone else is. Are you among them or excluded from their collection? How could it possibly be the case that everyone is living in the same way that I am. Locked in their bodies, never knowing how they came to find themselves here, or what the future holds for them. If time is just an axis why is it that we cannot move about it? If there be more dimensions why is it that we cannot occupy them? If there be more colors why only this many is it that we can see? And if I cannot ask these sorts of things, what ought I be asking? If you think you know, you should be ashamed of yourself.
A limitless universe will hear not of your demands. If I cannot take myself to be capable then it is only an increase of folly to suppose I have found someone else who is. To doubt oneself is to destroy the only mechanism available to us. I cannot say I trust someone else more than myself in offering me answers, since I am the one doing the trusting, and therefore all sense of reliability bottlenecks at the reliability I take myself to have in discovering truth. The trust I have for scientists is necessarily a fraction of the trust I have for myself. There is a way to die while others go on interacting with a body they call by your name: to deny ones conscience. So be honest about your ego and be honest about your err. There isn’t anything this world has which you have special access to.

One does not believe a thing they do not take to be the case.

I came home from work earlier than usual today. Finished walking a hyper-needy boxer, showered, and turned on my pc just in time to realize my muscles had been struggling to keep my bones upright; like my brain finally gave my body the ‘okay’ to feel super miserable (I guess it was as good a time as any). With my final breaths I set Spotify to shuffle through some John Mark McMillan and tanked my rag-doll carcass onto the couch. I then spent about 5 minutes enduring the recompense of Wrigley’s (the boxer) grossly unfounded misconception that she, in fact, would fit reasonably well in the narrow groove between myself and the back of the couch. In time peace did find me, but per the norm, I found a way to muff it up. I got all eclectic. Traversed some memories, looked up old girlfriends new boyfriends, and began a conversation with an ex-girlfriend the same way I always do: in my head.

“What I would do… what I would do to be with you” I said with an uncomfortable sense of longing.

Imagined her here. Imagined five or six possible responses she might offer if I found some way to actually communicate those words to her (through the magic of the internet). I could tell her all the stuff I’m sorry for, the stuff I will be better at, and acknowledge the stuff I did to her that she just absolutely never deserved. I would know that my words mean almost nothing, know that my actions would have to prove it, and know that my asking for another opportunity is a misconception as grossly unfounded as Wrigley’s. Since, per the norm, I muffed previous opportunities. These sorts of conversations tend to develop a gravity (given their density) that generates a vacuum into which every proceeding thought for the next hour or so would be consumed… but instead, after only a few exchanges of dialogue, I felt something climb into my consciousness like a young man climbing into his lovers window.

“What would you do to be with Me?”

Now, when a moment like this arrives you’re faced with a few options: you can try to respond, or you can weep uncontrollably. I landed somewhere between those two as I was reassembling myself… I could go on to describe the implications of His words and the moment of intimacy that followed from this level of being so terribly humiliated (in a caught-red-handed kind of way) but… I won’t. Go get it for yourself.