18 June 2010

From Behind the Epidermal Road Map


Don't look at me that way. I see the disgust you try so hard to shove under the proverbial rug in your eyes. But that rug is as gossamer as netting. I can see right through it. I can see right through you.

You think I was always this way. You think that my bones have always creaked and my life was always lonely. I had friends once, you know. Dorothy, Mildred, Gertrude, Penelope, all of them. We grew up together, living in the same brownstone back before Brooklyn was the home of tattooed kids who graffiti walls and break into homes. Before the age of so called "communication" that you read from an eye-strangling screen, we would meet at the corner and walk to get penny candies from the general store (if you were lucky, your mother gave you a nickel). I had friends once.

Dorothy, well, she just about lost her mind after Fred was killed in the war. She didn't know what to do with herself; he was her life. I always told her that she had to find her own purpose for living, that living entirely for someone else was suicide. She never listened to me, though. She was always the defiant one. We eventually lost touch. The last I heard, she was living out her days in some insane asylum upstate. I randomly caught wind that she had died a few years back, but never had any sort of confirmation from her family. They never liked me much.

Mildred killed herself after her second child died. She had miscarried the first one, seven months into it. She was going to name it Henry if it was a boy and Rebecca if it was a girl (this was before the age of taking the obligation out of loving your child, no matter what the gender). When she finally carried a child to term, she found him (his name was James) floating face-down in a pool when he was four. It was too much for her. Her husband found her hanging three feet from the ceiling.

Gertrude died the way we all want to die: peacefully, in her sleep. She wasn't sick or in pain or suffering. She had lived a good life. Escaped most heartache and trouble - though no one can escape it all. But she was happy. She brightened everyone's life with her stories and with her presence. Everyone was almost grateful when she passed - not because she was gone, but because we knew it seemed only right for her to go as calmly as she lived.

And Penelope .. No one's heard from her in years. I don't think she's died, but I've no real way of looking it up. I don't know how these electronic things work these days, and I don't talk to the grandkids who could help me figure it out. My assumption is that I would've heard something about a service or a wake if she had finally kicked the bucket. Since I haven't, I figure she hasn't, either.

No, I wasn't always this way. I loved the way you do - how I adored my Jimmy, but that's a story for another time. I laughed at the same jokes you laugh at. I cry at the same things that break your heart. I raised two children, both of whom have moved away and onto bigger, better things than I. The world had a place for me once.

Once.

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