My Fingers Are Words

I have a little favor to ask anyone that reads this: give me criticism. I'm going to start posting things I have written, and I would love some critical feedback, whatever form that may take.

That being said...

This first piece I'm posting is creative non-fiction. I wrote it for a class, and since then I've gone back and made a lot of changes. Scratch that, I've scrapped most of it, and changed it into this:

Hug The Dark

“The dead are always looking down on us, they say…”—Billy Collins

Maybe I’m being too pensive too soon, but I can’t deny the small and consequential fact that death has been branded upon my brain. And no, I’m not walking around thinking of morbid ways people can bite the big one, but rather I am always subtly reminded by the fact that our collective time here on this revolving planet is slowly coming to an end.
People go to great lengths to avoid using the word death. Death has become some bad word, a naughty expression like fuck or shit. Why is that? We’ve just masked the reality of the situation by calling it something else, like bought the farm, checked out, or we’re six feet under. In the western world we think of our lives as endless. We find ways to make our lives last longer, our skin look younger, drugs to keep our minds intact and our bodies from expiring. We have drive-thru graveyards so we can throw dying flowers from our windows on the graves of loved ones as we pass by, trying to hurry to the next great adventure in our short little lives. There are more than 200 euphemisms for death and dying, and all this makes me think that we are a culture that refuses to embrace the fact that our time here only lasts so long.
Have we banished death from our thoughts as a society, or does our desensitization to the world we live in give us the ability to overlook all the gravestones and body counts piling up in the cities around us? Or maybe if we just quietly ignore death, like most things that we disregard, it will disappear. I’m suddenly reminded of a poem by Charles Bukowski:

“alone with everybody”

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

I am filled with the notion that deconstructing death might make me a little more than crazy, but I can’t ignore the fact that the American culture pays more attention to all the other important things like birth, love, marriage, birthdays, dog birthdays and made up holidays. Why not, but isn’t it important to recognize death as well? Why can’t we, America, or just personally and within our own lives, have our own Día de los Muertos? Maybe that’s not enough for some of us. It’s because the meaning of death has changed, like all things, evolved in our immortal-hollywoodized-American culture to mean something else entirely. Over the years death has transformed from a communal celebration of life where open grieving was acceptable, to a negative source of terror and denial. Or is it the other way around? I look around and all I see is how death has become ugly, growing older and wise is a thing of the past, and therefore must be banished from public view. Instead of embracing death, we have become frightened. If death is the end, then it would be easy to find life devoid of any meaning. All this frantic running around to complete something, and for what?
Maybe the reason I’m brooding over this gloomy topic has something to do with the fact that death and I have had too much to do with each other in my short life. This melancholy mode of thinking is abnormal, but I know I process the world this way because I’m still dealing with what death has done to me. In a way I guess we all are all still dealing with the after-affects of death, some of us more than others. We are shell-shocked, post-traumatically stressed out from death’s effects. Death is universal. All of us have been forced to confront death face to face, and it has somehow, collectively, changed us—some more than others. What is it that happens when we do confront death? Many images spring to mind. In The Seventh Seal, Antonius Block seeks answers about life and God, as he challenges the embodied form of Death to a game of chess. Here, death is personified and simplified, set during the Crusades and the Black Plague. Throughout Ingmar Bergman’s broody piece, Antonius finds his life devoid of meaning until he completes a significant act of valor for a young family—for some other human beings on the earth. It is here in this selfless moment that Antonius is finally able to accept death—and in return—his life.
In Billy Collins poem The Dead, he emphasizes the inability to forget the dead; they are omnipresent:

“…While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich They are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven As they row themselves through eternity They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
And when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
Drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
They think we are looking back at them,
Which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
And wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes”

Sometimes words and images, or combinations of both strike a nerve in our heart of hearts of darkness, and a discordant part of ourselves is awakened, shuffled around, moved just ever so slightly. Maybe we shrug this emotion off, only to find that later when alone and in the company of ourselves, we brood over these feelings with such intensity we never thought existed. We have found ourselves vulnerable, human, delicate and frail. We are fearful and paralyzed. Or maybe not, maybe nothing can touch our icy hearts of stone, until death makes us more vulnerable than we have ever felt. And in return, we panic, we flee, we act silly and stupid. We respond. All my reservations with death were brought to the surface when I was 20. In early March of 2007 my body began to expire like some perishable, unwanted thing. Biologically, my body shut down. My blood poisoned, my heart slowed, my lungs constricted, my vision blurred, my legs and arms became immovable, my hair fell out, I could not walk, my kidneys died. My eyes had difficulty defining the shapes of objects and people. Everyone became little restless blobs, drifting and circulating in my tiny scope of vision. My brain was wildly alive, vivid with thoughts and memories, my dreams surreal and beautiful. Fiery red and yellow hot-air balloons drifting through marshmallow clouds in the sky, green seas filled with forests, and then the blankness came. Landscapes of stark white to swift blackness for months on end. I lacked any ability to communicate, although I was not numb. I felt everything painfully and surreally. I heard other people around me die as I sat lifeless for two months while my body contemplated healing itself. By some luck of the draw I woke up dead, but half-alive. While my body is scarred, it is my mind that suffers the most: my brain is branded with biological death, but also an emotional death—a death of the self that can never live again. It is as simple as this: a bird in-flight falling from the sky, like the first dying thing I ever discovered: a hummingbird. It had become trapped in my parents garage, crashing into a window, only to lay fluttering like a winged insect, barely alive on the cold, grey concrete. It was out of season for hummingbirds, and in childlike innocence I stared at its frail green and pink body, carefully holding it in my tiny hands. The bird’s heart beat wildly shaking in my hands as I petted it’s smooth green feathers that felt like silk. And then it was still.
What can the onset of death within the body do to the mind? It kills it, and like some reprogrammed machine you learn how to live again, to feel again, to just be again. And you aren’t you anymore: the person that you have become while dying is someone you don’t know. You have to relearn how to live with that person’s thoughts, and constantly fight out the memories of your old self. Emerging from the underworld of the hospital, I was faced with even more dark news, a grandmother was dying. A few months later a grandfather would die. It goes on and on and on and it is never easy, it never changes, it never ends, and I am left questioning myself: can I mask what has happened to me so that even I can slowly start to forget, and start to actually live?
I look back to before, to my other ignorant self and all I see are grammatical errors and bad writing. So, alone at last, I hug the dark and hope.