How ironic that my last post on here was New Year’s Resolutions and then I didn’t post again until now. Or maybe that’s not irony. I’m a bit irony-impaired at times as I am American.
I want this blog to be more writing focused and less about what books I’ve read and what films I hated. More of a place for my thoughts and ideas or even a snippet of writing that I’ve done. With that idea in mind, here’s a little something I wrote a year ago and tweaked recently.
“Whitaker had been slumped in his calfskin office chair for the better half of the morning without moving, without making a sound. He lived in the stillness of the moment, breathing in the emptiness of each second. After the ordeal of the funeral, he needed to not think, had to not think in order to go on living. The sour irony of an illustrious career as a grief counselor in the force trickled through his mind, quickly allowed to drain away.
The fleet flightpath of a fly buzzed through the corner of his sight, took up a perch on the jar of pencils on the edge of his desk. A mockery of his own stillness, breaking the morbid enchantment over him. He lowered the white shaggy-maned weight of his head until his eyes lighted on the silver locket, his to give and now his again. The inscription burned with her name, called the tears, streaming down and around the wrinkles to the darkly stubbled cleft in his wide chin.
They always said that Christmas was a time for joy, but it was also a time when a lot of people died. Of loneliness, of heartbreak, or something more mundane like lung cancer. She’d smoked like a chimney over the years, had recently stopped, but too late. So many things had been too late. The shiny laptop gathered dust in the corner of his office, the giant red bow still attached to it. His retirement gift, extra appreciation for pushing his retirement back time and again. His career and the trappings that went with it, all ashes. Like she was now. She’d never wanted to be buried. Worm food was what she’d called corpses. She wanted to be something ephemeral, a wind-born spirit spread across the Pacific or the Rockies. She was dust now. Scattered carelessly over a local meadow.
The desktop surface was cluttered with items from her life, each a token of some moment in their lives. He’d always been the one to nag her about tidying, but she’d never paid him any mind. A pile of yellowed business cards had been tucked beneath the withered remains of a poinsettia. Madam Julia, Grand Mystic and Revealer of Mysteries was what it read. He could almost smell the auburn hair dye on it. That was the scent he always associated with her. That and Doctor Feng’s, the herbal cancer remedy she’d gulped down near the end, desperate and scared. They both were.
No one trusted their future to an old crone, she’d always said. He’d never understood that. Who better knew about futures than someone who’d lived through one? They knew what to expect from futures; how all futures ended. How hers had ended.
The phone chirruped from its place near the corner of the desk, not the first time it had done so this morning, the sixth. No, the first time, the time he’d answered, had been their daughter, Emily. A reminder, the offer of Christmas at theirs was still on the table. He’d said nothing, could say nothing, the words stuck breathless and unformed in his throat. Emily’s voice, the way she phrased things, they were so like Julia’s. He had, hands trembling, put the insistently murmuring phone gently in its cradle. Little Emily Ann, her Grandfather’s auburn hair and her mother’s temperament. Oh how they’d fought, those two.
Family of her own now, expecting a third. Another something Julia wouldn’t see, but she’d spoiled Isaac and Olivia as much as she’d been able. In and around the hospital stays, the chemo and the radiation. Emily hadn’t wanted them to see their Nana like that, hadn’t brought them to visit. Hadn’t been there to say a final goodbye; Seattle was too far, Jim had lost his job again. She’d come for the funeral, Jim at home looking after the kids. More than a year since he’d seen her last.
There’d been a kind of a gravity to their despair that drew them together. Embracing, tears flowing from the hot nothing inside them, but tears and wails eventually gave way to the quiet numbness of exhaustion. So, they stood he and Emily, listening to the humanist, but not hearing, not really. Sharing in that grey moment of grief, they’d drawn strength from the painful proximity of their twin miseries. They both missed Julia, both had regrets about missing time for one reason or another.”
Tangled Scribblings 