sudden death sudden blindness

Eric experienced two and a half drastic life changes following the sudden death of his best friend Devin. Devin and Eric had been best friends since they were young boys, living together both throughout college and then in city apartments, the kind with fire escapes, through most of their twenties. In what was the 33rd year of life for both of them, Devin died in a freak boating accident. The results upon Eric's life were as follows:

ONE.
Eric developed an intense paranoia of becoming suddenly blind. He began having a reoccurring nightmare about sudden blindness every night, waking up in a cold sweat at the point in the dream when his nightmare persona entered complete and total darkness and the scene went black.

ONE AND A HALF.
Accompanying this paranoia was a phobia of blind people. After Devin's death, whenever he saw a blind person (and there were a lot of blind people in San Francisco), Eric became rigid with fear and could only imagine the person stepping off a curb and getting instantly flattened by oncoming traffic, a bus or a truck, something heavy and ruthless.

TWO AND A HALF.
Three weeks after the funeral, Eric left his wife of 4 years. It happened after he passed an alter of owl figures displayed in a random window across from Mission Dolores, which prompted Eric to remember a dream that he had just before himself and Devin moved out of their last apartment together to live with their respective fiances.

In the dream, Eric and Devin and a large owl sat at the kitchen table of their apartment. Devin opened his mouth to speak but instead of words his mouth hung open in silence and his tongue rolled out of his mouth and on to the floor. It must have hung six or seven feet long, stretching across the linoleum floor. Eric proceeded to roll up Devin's tongue and then, before returning the tongue to Devin's mouth, decided to place it in his own - just for a second, just to see. It was thick and juicy like a steak. In the dream Eric was vividly and positively certain that his friends' tongue was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. After taking the tongue out of his own mouth and placing it back in Devin's, the owl at the kitchen table spoke, telling Eric: "from this moment on, your taste buds will gradually deteriorate. nothing will ever taste as good as it just did. your vision, too, will deteriorate, and the colors will slowly but surely wash away, until there is nothing left but darkness."

Happens All The Time

His friend's called him Meat and he was a staunch vegetarian. He had a cat named Road Kill and a goldfish named Sushi. He was big on irony. Occasionally Meat got the urge to curl up in the fetal position, suck his thumb, and imagine he was in his mother's womb. Once he tried this in the bath, submerged in water, and almost died; it was half suicide attempt, half accident. No Big Deal. Happens All The Time. Despite depression, Meat knew he would be OK. He told me, Kyle, I know I will be OK, because at night I ride my bike around the neighborhood listening to music, and it feels good.

winter window

The window was open in the middle of winter, and i would not be closing it because given my luck, the night i shut it would be the night you tried to come in. After two years and six days, irony would not miss an opportunity like that. After two years and six days i lay wrapped up and in a cocoon of blankets and wished to be born again into something beautiful, a moth that could fly blindly and happily towards the light, or a butterfly that children would extend their hands out to.

January wind blew in through the window and i wrapped myself tighter. This was a window that would stay open forever.

people are tired and take a day off

it is almost summer and she wakes up at 6 AM and her roommate's bedroom door is open and his room is empty, so she sits on his bed and looks out his window because he has an ocean view and the early morning mist floats at the treetops and the tips of the roofs of houses and over the ocean like a blanket, and it is totally beautiful. she feels two conflicting urges of simultaneously wanting to curl up in bed all day and also ride her bike through town screaming, or some other confusing combination that indicates: what the fuck is happening and how are we supposed to feel?

on this day, no one wakes up. they are not dead, they are just resting, they will wake up tomorrow, and she isn't concerned for the state of the world but she is frustrated because she can't fall back asleep and there is absolutely no one to hang out with and no coffee shop open. she attempts walking around the neighborhood but the silence is uncanny so she returns home. instead, she spends the day reading the newspaper on her roommate's bed and watches the ocean, where you can just barely make out tiny ripples of movement, waves crashing and retreating.

it is a long and quiet day and she misses everyone. she can't wait for tomorrow when people wake up and are well rested and she can exchange smiles with friends and neighbors and strangers and there will be this unspoken understanding between everyone that yes, that day was needed, whew, what a treat to get a whole day off, things feel so much better now. she falls asleep thinking about being tall and holding her head high, and other metaphors for confidence. tomorrow will be better.

things are not going well

things are not going well, he admits to his online journal. it is his first online journal - lots of last resorts have come to fruition lately, precisely because of how terribly things are going. he admits he is severely depressed and then goes on to explain to this online community things that he would not normally express, like how he secretly looked at self-help books in the library but was too embarrassed to check them out, like how he wants to have really rough sex to get his aggressions out, like how he spent the morning punching the wall after his parents had gone to work and the house was empty. now there was a hole in his bedroom.

examining his hands, he is reminded of a girl that he used to know in college. actually, he did not really know her, but he saw her around in classes and remembers getting stomach aches when he would see her bloody knuckles while she was taking notes (he always made a point to sit by her), indicating that she had a habit of punching hard surfaces - maybe concrete. it was something he had not understood until now. he thinks about how girls wear rings but men never really do unless they are married or are the creepy type, and he thinks about perhaps defying norms and purchasing many rings so that tomorrow, things could get really messy and all cut up.

later that day someone leaves a comment on his online journal entry. it says: "you need to get out of town. maybe go back to africa." he is shocked and instantly uncomfortable. how does this person know he went to africa in college? clearly it is someone who knows him and he is humiliated and deletes the online journal. he thinks about this recommendation. perhaps it is a genuine piece of advice, but when written down the words look like either a joke or an insult. good advice is hard to come by.

he suddenly recalls this experience he had in high school once. he was in this hippie class at a hippie school that involved ideas of changing the world. on the first day of this class they were instructed to write a phrase repeatedly on a long and narrow strip of paper that would then be hung in the doorway for the students to walk through like those beaded curtains, only on these strips of paper would be extraordinary positive and encouraging phrases that would make everyone feel accomplished and proud when they entered the classroom. he wrote "we'll get there we'll get there we'll get there" and the teacher looked at him and said, no, that is not positive enough, you need to think of another phrase, something better that represents a more tangible accomplishment, something that is already great and beautiful and successful.

he thinks to himself now of the perfect comeback, because of course those always come minutes or days or in this case, years too late. he thinks, who are you to say what accomplishment means to me? accomplishment is movement.

thought experiment

in a thought experiment you closed your eyes. you imagined a life 15, 20 years from now. a normal life, adult, parental, a couple kids, house, front lawn, dog or maybe a cat, a job that you don’t totally love, a wife that you sometimes feel regret towards. you imagined being that future version of yourself reflecting back on where you are now. you imagined remembering the pink house and chairs on the front porch, the cracking plaster, the mice scurrying through the ceiling as you lay trying to fall asleep, the thrift store mugs, the stacks of dirty dishes, wine stains on the furniture and beer cans in the bedrooms, ice cream for breakfast and pancakes for dinner, dust on the floor, dust on the stairs, dust in our eyes. and the future version of yourself reflecting on it all in a thought experiment in your mind thought, just one day, i want to go back for and relive it for just one day, for just one day.

“some day this house will burn down and we’ll be long gone by then”

may day every day

it was a beautiful day, and the world was going crazy. smashed glass decorated the store fronts of main street, and periodically the rich would march through town with their guns and pitchforks, calling for the immigrants and anarchists to show their faces. the sun shone of spring and all the trees sprouted tangerines and cherry blossoms and a fire streaked the sky and and a scent of fear floated about with the spring pollens and the ocean waves rose and crashed, reverberating and resonating down through concrete roads. a bouquet of wildflowers sat on the counter. so its true - april showers bring may flowers. this month, the world seemed to be telling us, every day would be may day. every day would be may day. every day would be may day. every one on all sides felt afraid but at the same time every act of kindness had an irreplaceable beauty, every little bit of truth and love and realness was so profoundly human.