Waiting for It (Part I)

Waiting for It

A jog that went too far. He is without anything but his being, and here on the dark, empty sand near the hidden but heard lake, he waits for it. Lured into sleep by the ravage his body feels and the calm, kind nearby rapture of lake waves breaking on beach, he waits patiently. Like child stands at door on Halloween night, knowing not if door will open but pretty sure it will. In this state, with consciousness coming and going like the gusts of this late September wind, which sounds are real or fabricated are unknown to him. It feels like he is inside a sea shell. Everything whooshes and has the tunnel effect. He just lays there, resigned to his position. His awkward sprawl, alone, and not knowing if he’ll be found before light shows him to first morning passer. So he waits. On each breath, not knowing if it may be the last breath into the perfectly cool, million stars blazing in cahoots with a low, almost full autumn orange moon, night.

Waiting for death to come is not the scary, shake-filled nightmare you think it is. It is like a slow sunset dripping on top of peaceful land. It is a slow strangle, a squeeze of organs, like closing a window in delicate speed. It is not pain. It is only frightening for the first moments you realize what you’re feeling. Death. You’re whole life is no more doing than avoiding it. But when it’s here and it’s inside of you, taking over the breaths of life that you’ve taken for granted forever, you wonder why we, as a people, fear it. It is better than life. It is not the last snowstorm, but that first hypnotic, snow fall that makes you disbelieve how your heart will ever not want to see the flakes of white trickle from black air to waiting ground. You are, in dying, like the sidewalk. Tired of people running over, stomping, spitting on you. The snow comes, and everyone goes away. Even if they run on you, the snow coats. It protects. You are the waiting ground. Death is the snow. It is beautiful.

He breathed in and was sure he would not breath out. Something gripped his throat or his lungs. Maybe his heart was stopping or his brain, like a computer operating program, was shutting down. He laughed inside his fading thoughts at that idea. That we, as humans, are no different than computers. We come out of our mother’s womb and for the first few years, we have these glitches that people try to fix.

He remembered being nine years old and his father asking him, "Do you think she’s pretty, son?" He was staring at his mother’s fashion magazine and was without thought to what he was about to say would be thought of as wrong.

"Not really. I think he’s really pretty." And he pointed at the shirtless, tight jeans twenty-something male, with perfect wet, dirty blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and a hard chest that, even at nine, Elliott knew he wanted. He didn’t know thinking other boys were pretty was wrong. He had been thinking that way for a little while now. His older sister, two years his senior, would play a game where they would compare, "Who’s cuter." He thought every little boy all over the world must play this game. It was only now, looking up at his father, that he knew something he had done was wrong.

In a long second, his father’s face fell from playful smile into long frown. He dropped his head, looked at the picture, shook his head, looked his son in the eyes, and never would again.

Part II to follow soon.