Yr Dead

by Sam Sax

When we walk down the steps to his basement apartment, he turns to me with his key already slid in the door and says, My name’s Christian, don’t tell me yours.

Edwin-lookalike

He remembered me from the store because my eye shadow was always so bright and messy and he was struck how a person could look so ugly and lovely all at the same time.

Lol god this is how i feel i present myself 24/7

Then I look over to see that he was just offering me a cigarette.

Lol. (same)

I suppose in the end, every utopia is funded by this other lesser world, that to imagine a better world means at least you have to have the means to imagine it.

Fuck. That's heavy and true.

After the show, a group of us play the game the characters played, where you have to call the person you love most and tell them you love them. When it’s my turn, of course, I call Edwin. He’d died earlier that semester and I haven’t told anyone. I pretend to let it ring knowing full well the number’s been disconnected. Had to stop calling it weeks ago. I left so many messages breathing—heavy wordless grunting, imagining him next to me—

(during last year of colllege) ugh. Heartbreaking.

She lies down on the couch with me in her arms, even though I’m too big for it. We sleep peacefully for a time in this man-made lake until I grow hungry and want to eat. I want fruit roll-ups and gushers. I want the sweet stuff other kids get to have for snacks. I cry like a little kid, but she isn’t there. When no one comes to comfort me—when I realize there’s no one left to cry for—I go make myself a peanut butter sandwich. Dad comes home from work just before the night comes on and it’s only then we discover Mom’s emptied her closet and the damaged sedan has vanished from the driveway. Even before she left, she was already gone.

Wow.

They all grew distant after Mom disappeared (too much sadness to face—first her brother dying, then her taking off how she did)

Is she still missing/gone?

Art is so embarrassing, and if it isn’t at first blush, just give it a few years, it will be.

all it would take was a little bit of gasoline and a rag. You could find it just about anywhere. You huffed it in, and then it felt like you were flying through a chemical sponge.

Heartbreaking

First time, we were in the unfinished basement off the garage at Edwin’s mom’s house where she kept the gas canister for their generator.

Mom comes back to the apartment only a handful of times and each visit she’s less and less there. I assume it’s out of some inherited sense of obligation, this is what a mother does, pulls her body back here to sit at our metal kitchen table and fumble around gawking at the cage of her former life.

Man that's rough

The visits come further and farther apart until they stop all together, as do the calls, until we all finally give up the scripts we’ve inherited and accept instead the life we have in front of us.

In one version of my death, I’m lifted from the hospital bed and carried away by this vast and humming river of birds, rats, and insects. All of us never to be heard from again.

I meet Arnold at the tail end of college. We’ve followed each other on Tumblr for a few years, having similar interests in the occult and ’90s fashion, but never realized we live in the same town until he posted a picture of a patty melt from an iconic local dinner. Ten years my senior, Arnold stuck around after his own graduation to build his life.

I swallow a laugh: how is this my life?

Lol been there!

I meet his half-sister Constance, a few months in when she comes to visit from Hartford and the whole meal she refuses to look at me, like I’m some kind of boy-ghost that might go away if simply ignored.

Hmm... Why?!

The secret delight of my job is I’m basically being paid to read.

A dream!

In the ER, I make a city with my hands. I place angels in the city and people the buildings with televisions. I dream who lives on what blocks and imagine how the community thrums, all the sounds of the marketplaces, subways, and penny arcades. I give this city a name, I name this city after angels, this city I make with my hands.

Here in the hospital, for four days and four nights, I do what I can to not think about my circumstance. Dehydration, the doctors say. The nurses take care of me, treat me like a child again, which is the thing I love most about illness. Two days, I spent in Arnold’s closet until finally managing to pull myself through the tiny window out into the yard, where someone called the cops, following which I was brought here. I can’t imagine what I must have looked like, crawling all dybbuk-like across the neighbors’ immaculately manicured lawns, lol.

Holy shit. Wtf Arnold

My father’s biggest fear is being in a small room slowly filling with water.

It might sound like a cop out, but I really don’t fear anything so much as my own mind, and the not-so-subtle way it can distort and disassemble any room.

What I don’t realize at the time is that her brother has just died. Took his own life, no one says.

His body was found in his car just a few blocks from our apartment. Must have driven up from Queens to the suburbs. He’d been missing for a few weeks. Now Mom has to drive by the corner where they found him every day. Every day she has to drive past her brother.

:(

Empathy eats you alive. You can only survive by separating these two, by reading the news and not connecting the whole wet network of human suffering to the breath you are currently taking into your lungs. And if you cannot do this, well, what else is a person to do?

To be alone at a bar is an American rite of passage. To see everyone having their best life with friends and manage not to be lonely is to have achieved the highest state of consciousness.

When Mom left us, her parents rewrote their finances to cut her out of their future deaths, which meant eventually, I will be getting her inheritance.

But what I see instead is some whole-ass other messy bitch—me but oddly perfected and hideously bright. She’s so gorgeous, I could die; I could already be dead.

ARNOLD: Listen, I need to talk to you… ARNOLD: I want to apologize… ARNOLD: Don’t act like a fucking child… ARNOLD: All your shit’s still here. Do you want me to toss it?… ARNOLD: If you want to talk, I’m around. If not, I understand. I love you… ARNOLD: Coward.

Fuck you, Arnold!

I choose gasoline on purpose. It’s significant that it’ll be a fossil fuel which returns me to dirt: what will end us all and what all this will become in another fifty million years.

All I want to do is leave a little more room for what good people are left to do their feral blooming.

I end up taking a man because this is what is expected of me. Levi is fine. He’s the butcher’s son, which my sisters find very impressive, though, for me, he is just a man who always has to wash the blood off his hands.

but what is life to a man who sees the world this way—as a living thing waiting to be disassembled, one that can be separated by nothing but a blade?

Levi is sweet to me, and I do my best to be acceptable. I do my wifely duties; I make his bed and his children.

I'm glad he is kind

My eldest is a nogoodnik, and I love him for this. He lies all the time, for no good reason. Where were you, Herschel?

The story of Ezra's great grandmother ?

This way, at least, he might lie enough to be able to imagine a life outside of here.

In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim theorized four different types of suicides—the egoistic, the altruistic, the anomic, and the fatalistic— I love how sure and clear these words sound. I love anything that breaks suffering down into a clean taxonomy you might look to when lost and nod your head in the performance of understanding.

I’ve never been a joyful man, but still, how sad and perfectly ordinary to be another person to whom history simply happens.

My mother invented such wild stories for me as a child that, now that I’m a man, I can’t stand to stay in this cold and simple country.

Herschel

Of course, this was well before the men came to our home on horseback, before the real butchery began to spread across the country. She had premonitions, I guess, of what was to become of us. And so her stories were never of here, but always elsewhere, all of them whispering in their subtext, whispering just below the surface: run.

Flee is such an ugly word, really. Brims with cowardice. I prefer the word flight, which has a strength to it, an orientation, defies gravity.

All my ghosts are trapped in here with me, but I’m good at ignoring them. I think little of the family I’m leaving behind, only of the stench of this damned straw as it grows more putrid, partially digested, Old Testament wet.

My favorite customers are the ones who spend their years reading and reselling books here, using their store credit to purchase more books. To those people this is no different from a public library, and it’s what I like best about the shop—how, during the best of times, it can feel as if we exist outside of money and outside of time.

This is all you need to know about the end of our species I think, what supersedes the desire to survive is the desire to look, to document the world as it leaves us.

All species adapt to their circumstance. All circumstance requires adaptation. What can’t we learn from our natural world, from our nature? We turn away from the earth, forgetting we’ll be interred in it.