Take for instance you
- Locked due to inactivity on Oct 1, '16 3:54am
Thread Topic: Take for instance you
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Take for instance that we were getting in trouble every other minute. Like the night you thought it would be cool to throw a chocolate bar into a hotel swimming pool then point at it and yell
"s---!"
You said it was something you saw in a movie.
No surprise everyone in that pool was out instantly. We accepted our lifetime ban from the hotel like men, then rolled across town and checked into another, where you proceeded to seduce a single mother who was away on a business trip.
The next morning over breakfast, you told me, and I quote "If you put that bed sheet under a black light you could use it to signal small aircraft during landing procedures on a zero visibility night."
Despite your best efforts, Later that day she snubbed you and you accepted it like forced retirement.
Take for instance the day we spent the night like millionaires needing to go bankrupt by sunrise. Take for instance the lies we told our parents.
"No... This isn't my sheet of LSD... I'm holding it for a friend."
Take for instance the time you told me a heart can't break. It can only bend.
Take for instance you. Take for instance me. Take for instance the word instantly and how it used to be used to define things like mashed potatoes or coffee.
And now, somehow they use it to sum up your life, telling me you died instantly.
They sad it as if there was a measure of comfort to be found in the fact that you were dead. That you said no long goodbyes or last words.
Just gone like a deadbeat dad who popped out for some cigarettes and didn't come back.
Fact is, you were a different kind of gone altogether. Gone like the promises of lovers who believe in things like unicorns and forever.
Gone as in never coming back. Gone, as in your parents can't bring themselves to go into your old room.
You were gone like that.
But they all said you died instantly. They said it as if in you the grace to not linger like a tragedy in slow motion,or a heartbreak set on pause. No slow cause of death for us all to deal with.
They said it as if it was a relief, as if that's what you would have wanted. And I've seen machines push life into the bodies of people who would rather just go and I know that's not something you would want, and I'm not saying I know you better than most, but I'm pretty f---ing sure you'd rather be alive.
Like the night we decided to drive to the observatory. We camped under the stars and go drunk. One beer in you sunk into nostalgia like a loveseat tailor made for your body. Listed from memory the top twenty girls you never kissed but always wanted to. Backwards non-stop from twenty through two.
You stopped at number one and said her name as if once upon a time, you almost did.
We were alive that night. We watched the dark bleed into twilight. We watched the sunrise write novels on the backs of shiny black beetles and blades of grass, and we read the day cover to cover in one sitting. The clouds splitting like lovers lost in shuffle of trust and jealousy.
We said our favorite lines out loud. Yours was "If my father is ever proud of me, it will mean that in some small measure, I have lived better than him."
Mine was "If my life is the whim of a dreamer, let them awake and remember the grand idea that I am."
The world's was "Let them stem from me. Let them be picked and pressed into diaries. Let them be the tangible memories of writers who could not scribe fictions greater than those based on the true stories of their histories."
Of course the world didn't actually say that. We were high, and for once there was no because to the why.
We spoke like liars finally speaking truth. Each word was a confession booth where we recounted our sins, realizing the failures of our youth are what make up the beauty of our age.That every page turned cannot be rewritten, only reread. That every chapter we sped through needs to remain unedited, exposing our f----ups like the slips of the nipple on the evening news.
We were never perfect.
We were only ever barely amazing. But I've been thinking of the word instantly, and how you lived.
Instant to instant. Take for instance the night we met. When you wiped the rain out of your face like sweat and said "It's not raining. It's just the weather trying to look busy."
We decided right then and there that the inventor of the umbrella was a p---- .
Three days later, you were sick in bed. Reconsidered your position, then called me and said "Maybe he was just wise."
My heart is bending. I keep re-reading the ending of your life expecting another chapter. I expect laughter as if it was always there. I expect the sign on your bedroom door that read "Beware of s---head."
I unexpect your death so hard that a part of me believes that I can make it not true.
You kept a rock on a satin pillow on your bookshelf and told me "It's a star." And you found it in a junkyard and it had been broken down for quote some time because too many people wished on it, and that's a lot of pressure for one little star.
You are the smile I have kept secret, the Atari four bit hero of my youth, and at the service your friends all looked at me as if to say "You're the writer."
And I don't want to be an a--hole, but... so what?
I knew him only as well as he knew me and when you told me that he died I missed him...
Instantly.
For Instance, by Shane Koyczan
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