This is a sketch, not an edited writing; I wrote it after visiting my father’s gravesite, where awful thoughts haunted me; which, being personal and insecure as they are, are kept away from the writing.
While they drove up, he saw a small group of solemn faces departing from the rows of modestly crowned tombstones; he noticed that the constant countenance between each mourner was remarkably parallel to the cast of the stone edifices - sober, aged, and progressively eroding, yet somehow synthetic or blatantly manmade. The car slowly passed these downcast denizens, drawing his attention towards the place where he would eventually lie, motionless—next to his father, contained by six feet of awkwardly hostile dirt and topsoil: humanity’s last farewell. Even with the regularity of these family visits, he never had been quick to identify the exact location of his father’s grave, or at catching patterns in general; so he tailed closely behind his two siblings, enacting what he considered to be a morosely observant, yet reluctant visage. About ten feet ahead, encompassed by slightly trampled peale green grass, was a dying bouquet of pale flowers in a rusting bronze vase, under which the façade of a contemporary tombstone spoke of a stranger; a stranger even to the boy. He walked around the tomb to face the it directly, and suited his behavior to portray the proper image of a reminiscent spirit, and inevitably confronted thoughts of who this man was. His father did not walk out, was not reclusive, nor did he abuse his children—no, his body simply crippled under the weight of a savage cancer, caused by a foolish decision in his distant past. This man was a stranger because he had to leave at such an inopportune time, when the mind of a boy merely begins the process of understanding; so standing over this man’s grave drew no sorrow from the boy, just as the body’s descent drew no overflowing reaction, only pity. The principal emotion that he felt on this occasion was a misunderstood sympathy for his family, and a strange sense of vertigo by the sheer depth of random circumstance, which I’ll detail momentarily.
His mother kneeled beside the grave, and according to necessary ritual, she delicately ran a cloth over the face of her beloved’s new home, dropping a tear over the thief that stole her love and dreams—death. Standing upright to assuage their mother’s anguish, his two brother’s reacted to the scene according to the chords it usually struck; one turned away gasping for breath, and the other swallowed the sorrow, allowing it to boil into a deeper anguish, thus convulsing his gentle face into a defenseless cringe. As for the boy, he stood with thoughts frothing over his melancholic mind, such as: how could the removal of a single man spurn the suffering he now witnessed, and even further, how he was uniquely molded by that stranger’s disappearance so long ago. Attempting to retain his loose semblance of mourning, he again looked sadly at his mother, now noticing her intrinsic connection to this present circumstance, and that’s when a vision apprehended his psychic grasp on the situation. Here is where he lost balance by the sheer depth of a ghastly vision, as if he were standing weightless on a towering mountain, about to fall off into oblivion—his body helplessly succumbing to the gravity of that reverie: this is what nearly drowned him.
The stock of memories that sketched a mental composite of his history slowly began to materialize into a linear timeline, and each stage was isolated and deconstructed—a perpetual evasion from what he felt was his reality. The terrific scene threw him back in time, taking his hollow memories then instantaneously tracing their effects on his life and character, carrying him in a memoir of mental oscillation—when his father was there, and later when he was there no longer. Such as the countless instances of father-son bonding time, under a luminous sky of deep shades of blue, playing catch with a father and coach set even deeper in his devotion to his son; however, the nostalgia was mercurial and swift to turn bitter, recalling instances when the boy was left utterly alone at meet-the-parents at school, wishing he could smell the masculine scent of his father’s cologne, or the feeling of his brambly beard kissing him goodnight once more; but these images began to fade, each individually. But the submerged horrors of seeing his father prostrate and crippled with sickness began to surface from a vacuous hole in his heart; and the boy stood in this reverie, himself crippled by an innate longing to stop this insufferable turn of time to secure at least one concrete memory with his dying father, the stranger. However, he was soon alone in a field of white—did this mean purity, or absurd blankness? He looked about to realize that the deconstruction had ended, and in its place a new caricature was being drawn; but take that back, it was not new—it was the previous scene, the hospital room. He held his breath, ready to collapse at the stress, but the color progressively yielded a new sight; not of that long-removed stranger, but of his mother: both pale and weak from the chemo. His history was becoming fabricated, now with a new victim to die estranged, his mother; but no, she was his foundation, and he crawled to secure her, but time became (as Vonnegut said) unstuck—propelling him onward.
The roles were now simply reverse, but the effects were anything but simple; although he was a constant onlooker, the subject that he watched evolve slowly diverged from his constant character—with vague resemblance to what he had considered his necessary essence. Only an inverted reflection remained to tie our nameless boy, who I’ll call Jonathan, to the supposedly identical subject he looked over. The independence he had drawn from years of solitude and refuge from his mother began to dissipate into a stubborn reliance upon the new family fountainhead, his father; yet one constant remained as a factor of contention, his callousness; he still felt little empathy or love. All the frames of a previously assumed genealogy were relived through a new vessel, his counterpart, and the outcome was the further result from consistent identity which could have been imagined. This cascade of projected circumstance finally ended with an almost identical scene in an isolated graveyard under a tempered Fall sky, with three figures each assuming similar roles as Jonathan recollected from earlier that day. Yet with distinct and striking differences: his father was worn, and the signs of a turbulent soul rippled down his aging face, and standing above was a man, apparently a brother of his, with a countenance burrowed with anger and onset mischief. Only his father and a man slightly resembling his brother remained, notwithstanding the absence of his second sibling. Finally he turned to see the figure with a back turned towards him; wandering around this faceless individual as he had with his father’s grave before, and discovered a terror that shook him to the core of his self-identity; the body, which in actually was his “reflected” self, was indeed faceless, a blur. No features to be mentioned, only a mirage of loosely loyal attributes, but there was no clarity or transparency in his eyes—only an empty portrait of absurdity. Yet Jonathan could feel the pressure of encountering a wholly foreign object, this was not himself, it was a gimmick, something to mock his conception of personality and the elusive self. He fell before this statue of indifference, pierced by the consuming confusion and hysteria of feeling isolated and unnaturally produced; and for the first time, he mourned over the tenderness of his fluctuating being, seeking a collective hearth to give him refuge and solace when he began to fall apart. And no, this was not the frustration and anger which he had always felt; it was sorrow, estrangement, and longing erupting his volatile character into a cursed wail, and afterwards, when he could no longer scream—he collapsed.
But this illusion began to tear and burn away like pieces of paper, each rattling off multi-colored streams of ink, but he was not carried away – how could he? A cool breeze caressed the moist swath that his tears had left behind, and a piquant sunlight warmed the curve of his upturned back. Looking up he saw his love, his reality; and he felt the overwhelming sense of necessity that peacefully rested under six feet of dirt—that was his father, a dear figure. But his family looked down at him with confused and dazzled stared, at the boy which had always stood nameless, now paralyzed on all fours; they each gently pressed a hand to his trembling shoulders, he was in pieces, but not torn apart. Separated from his reverie and discomforting vertigo, he stood to his feet with intent - to love the life he was given, necessary to the man he was to become, and he finally embraced the disheveled reality as his home, his hearth - peace when he was in pieces.
(Source: somber-and-sonorous)
