4. Deathday

Journal, keeping one of you is a new experience for me. Judy gave me a diary three Christmas’s ago and I wrote in it on and off for the first week, and less and less as the months went by. By the end of the year it was 95% blank. It’s like Dad says, I never seem to finish anything. I’ve never had a journal before, and I continue to find, pages in, that I don’t know what to say. What words I’m fishing for and the way they sound and the soothing music of the crickets wafting in the window.

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Quiet as a midnight cemetery in the dead blackhole of winter...

To write it all down – that’s your mission, if you choose to accept it.

You crack me up! I say. I crack myself up sometimes. Funny - the rationalizations that offer themselves when your back’s to the wall. I laugh.


And laughter is a funny thing!

I laugh some more.

Judy’s radio’s playing. A classical piece… Bach… or is it Mozart… what the hell do I know? Judy’s the music expert around here. Change channel keep counting. Where was I?


558. 557. 556…

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Wrapped in tarpaulin pitchblack, enveloped by a sum of sounds adding up to a sense of homelessness, given the elbow by Sleep, thinking about Dad, about what’s going on with him and all, and what it all adds up to.

Beats the hell out of me.

526. 525…

Can’t explain why I think Death is close, but I know… I feel it. Kind of like the feeling you get when you grow aware of someone watching you. I half expect to see Death every time I look behind a door or turn a corner. Like fog, or that sharp smell of burnt matches, Death lingers, loiters, skulks around the perimeter of the house like a thief casing the joint. Whether it shows up before or after my birthday, we are destined to meet, eyeball to eyeball, in the days or weeks ahead.

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It’s inevitable. Inventible. Invitable. Invertable. Words are intertwinable. And, if my eyesight’s not out of whack, they are getting more intermingleable.

Judy used to tease me about making up words, but I didn’t mind because I do. Can’t help it. They take on a life of their own in the section labelled Language in my brain, seemingly making themselves up. ‘You can’t make up words,’ Judy would say, a grin growing on her lips, ‘nobody will know what you’re talking about!’ I would remind her that all words are ‘made-up’ and that somebody has got to do it and we’d both laugh and go into a word-making frenzy, driving each other around the bend into Bananasville.
We love anagrams, too. Thinking about Death a lot recently, I discovered these two:

The Da

Hated

Death

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I’m 17 but people think I look a lot older. 25 is the most common age I’m pegged at. Perhaps as old as 30 some say, at a push. Why I look so much older than my years is anyone’s guess. It certainly isn’t because I’m going bald or greying around the temples or excessively lined around the eyes and forehead, because I’m not. My hair is straight, thick, almost shoulder-length, and just like Mom’s, black as a raven’s. My face is oval-shaped with open features that Mom says are handsome – but not immediately or obviously so (whatever that’s supposed to mean) - with a clear complexion, a shade or so darker where beard and moustache would sprout if untended by the razor every morning. The skin beneath my eyes is dark too, as though a shadow has fallen across them - but that aside, my face is no more wrinkled than any other seventeen year old boy. Except for Pete, of course, my best bud. He started smoking at 8. He’s starting to look like my old baseball mitt.

Gaze wanders from tonight’s slightly thicker moon, and strays back to this page vacantly looking up at me. Ideas about what to say have been sprouting in my head all day. Now that I try to write them down, nothing comes: got caught up in the grinding machinations of cognitive cogs in desperate need of an oil-can. A brick wall of a headache builds up behind eyes, causing me to wonder if staring into the whiteness of the paper is making me snow-blind. Stir crazy. Slightly schizo.

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But Oz never did give nothing to the Tinman that he didn’t already have…

Could be, I agreeably venture.

Considering fountain pen in write hand, thoughts drift to Judy, and a memory arrives like a lost letter, sending me back to a Saturday night well over ten years ago.

Judy and me in my bedroom, talking in the dark, wrapped in sleeping-blankets inside the sheet-tent I’d pitched on the floor at the end of the bed. She says she thinks she knows why I look so ‘grown up’, but doubts she can explain it. With a little cajoling from me she gives it her best shot. Something about your eyes… is all she manages, whispering so as not to wake Mom and Dad. When asked to elaborate, she remains still and silent for ages before making an awkward attempt. ‘This probably won’t make any sense, but your eyes, there’s this feel from them or something, like happy and sad at the same time. Intense but calm. Dark and light. You know?’ I shook my head. ‘Oh I don’t know. Something like that. Hard to put into words.’ Secretly bowled over at the thought that she would bother to notice my eyes enough to make such a wonderful remark, ‘No kidding,’ I say, smiling like the Cheshire cat in the dark.

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The moon’s slid a few inches to the left. I’m smiling thinking about that night. Shaking my head. Sitting up straight. Turning attention back to the desk and the task at hand. Marshalling thoughts. Gathering wool
straining to

form whole

sentences

thin blue lines

snowy plain

daunting page

turning

pen

this way and that

fingertips

rubbing

talisman

It’d be kind of funny if it showed up on my birthday - that would make my birthday also my deathday.