Essay 60

Each death is an anticlimax; there’s nothing to say, and no one to say it to. The protagonist: speechless! The parents pass on laurels you never wanted. You win but you win what? Living is winning. The young always win, prized is being next in line and the rest indeed is silence. 

It’s not going to stop, says my friend, oh no, as I enter the vortex of informed adulthood where everybody’s simultaneously strong and bold and sore; where I want to hear each story, your every bare defeat, and for the love of God please shut up, see how I can’t take on any more? 

Not how I wanted to win, Daddy, not through the accidents of dates, of age and cell and rot, the war not won just cut, the long chokehold of coming back, feet stuck at the bottoms of stairs; the cotton hair, my scrubs, the care, my wait. Out there science.

Not how I wanted to win, no, not this losing, not by an end, not by being damned to wondering and re-wondering what you meant to say when you called the day before and no one went. But I could be disremembering: all dates are accidents.