Becoming the Story
Page 9
nothing to stop me from writing it early. I have made some creative “predictions” in this piece, some of which I hope do not occur. But it is all in fun.
Let me be absolutely clear: I love life and I have every intention of living until I am 120, and even longer if I can. But whether my death happens tomorrow or 1000 years from now, I want to make sure than I, and not it, have the final word. This is it.
From the Journal of L.E. Henderson; final page:
Damn. I knew this was going to happen. But not today. Not now. I had plans.
I have half a box of chocolates left over from Christmas, and I still want that other half. Two of them are maple creams. They are my favorites so I was saving them for last. Bad idea.
Besides I was working on a story that was sure to be my magnum opus, an opus to end all opuses, a scintillating story about a sentient banana who goes to the zoo and gets chased by escaped monkeys.
But this gets in the way of everything. Okay, I get it, everyone dies. Someone first told me that when I was around four or five. I did not believe them, not at first. How could there be no me?
But I should have had more warning. I like to sip coffee in the mornings with my cat in my lap and read before I write. I want my coffee and I want my cat. Everything I had planned, my entire routine is capsized by my inability to, well, move.
I still cannot get over it. This really happened. I had kind of thought the singularity might happen and would save me. Ray Kurzweil said as much. The singularity was going to be a point where humans united with computers and achieved immortality. Some even suggested that humans could download their minds into computers and live out beautiful cybernetic lives forever after, in a digital fairy tale happy ending.
Okay, maybe it was a long shot, but it gave me hope. And it was inspiring. Throughout history, there was a lot of talk about immortality. Religions promised it. Horror writers created fantasies of immortality experiments gone awry, featuring Frankenstein monstrosities and demonic pets.
In literature it seemed like immortality always came with a terrible price. It offended the gods or set off disorder in the spiritual world. It required unthinkable acts of evil or the sacrifice of souls.
How many millennia did it take for someone to have the guts to say, “Who cares what the gods think? Dying is a bad idea. Maybe we should stop doing it. Maybe we should figure out how to live forever.”
I admire Ray Kurzweil for saying that and trying so hard to figure it out, even though he died before the singularity ever happened, despite taking 150 vitamins a day in order to stay alive for long enough to experience it. Ray Kurzweil, sorry it did not work out. Maybe the singularity was just around the bend. Could you not have taken one more pill?
A lot of people think God grants immortality to those who believe in him, and maybe that is why none of the greatest minds such as Tesla or Sir Isaac Newton never turned their attention to living forever.
By the way I am currently searching for the bright lights I have been told to expect and, so far, nothing. God, if you exist, now would be the time to appear, you coy bastard. Where are you?
I cannot even see my grandmother. She was supposed to be waiting for me under a rainbow or something, with a beatific smile on her face and a retinue of winged seraphim. And unicorns. Okay, I never heard there would be unicorns, but if I am going to go to the trouble of dying, there should be unicorns.
Hell. This is boring. I want to finish my story about the banana, not not be.
Oh no! That did not just happen. I am going to try to pretend that someone did not just put me in a box. I am a person, not a pair of shoes. And why are they nailing it? Do I look like I am about to escape?
Granted, I would if I could. It might even be kind of fun to go lumbering around, arms outstretched, saying “Rroww” or “Arggh.” I have the best Halloween costume ever now, because it is authentic. Unfortunately, I do not feel scary, just kind of helpless. The living scare me to be honest.
Who puts someone into a box?
Well, I do have one consolation: all the writing I did. Maybe a part of me lives on inside the printed ramblings I produced over the course of my lifetime. Maybe some vestige of me remains inside them where they can still affect people.
Okay, so I never got rich for my writing, but I am confident that one day someone, maybe hundreds of years from now, is going to wonder: “Who was this fascinating person who wrote these awesome stories? How unfortunate that she never finished the one about the banana! Perhaps our renowned literary experts will piece together what she was trying to say by extrapolating her point of view from her copious journal entries.”
About the journal entries: I produced a ton of them during my lifetime. And I was conscientious. To make it easier for my biographers, I have labeled my journals by the year on the bindings. That way they will be easier to reference in academic literary journals. It was a trial to be so far ahead of my time, of course, but posthumous glory is nothing to sneeze at. A girl takes what she can get.
If I had known what was going to happen today, I would have typed them up for clarity and legibility. Otherwise, I might end up being egregiously misquoted.
I guess it is pointless to regret things. I made plenty of mistakes but, for the most part, I did the best I could.
There are some people who say you should live every day as if it were your last. Bullshit! If I had done that, I never would have finished college. Why study? I would never have finished writing a single novel. I probably would have annoyed the hell out of everyone saying things like, “Please, do not mourn for me when I am gone. I want my funeral to be a happy funeral, with clowns and mariachi bands and puppies with little party hats. And of course, it would all be lies. If I am going to go to the trouble of dying, somebody had better cry about it. In fact, wailing and the rending of sack-cloth clothing would not be excessive. And yes, you heard me right. Sack cloth.
I hate good-byes anyway. I even hated it when my college classes would end, because I would get attached to my professors and their weird sense of humor or their bad comb-overs or how they would start talking about their vacations to Europe instead of the DNA double helix or the Emancipation Proclamation.
All endings suck, except the ones that end pain, and even those are not ideal. Like with me now. No more toothaches. No more worrying about what anyone thinks. No more gum on the bottom of my shoes, no more waiting in longs lines or cleaning up hairballs left by my cat.
But here I am. And I still want to finish my banana story.
This may sound weird, but I used to mourn my own death sometimes, at night. I would think about how sad it would be for people to lose me or for me to lose myself, and tears would spring to my eyes.
So for to any of you who are mourning me, I am kind of mourning with you now. Like I said, I hate endings. But I am still glad I got to be alive, even for a little while. I am glad I got to eat ice cream and pet my cat and fall insanely in love and watch bad movies and swim in the Gulf of Mexico.
But to do all that, I had to be bound up with this rattly caged wagon called “time.” I spent too much of my life grappling with the uncomfortable knowledge that life was always in motion and looking for something that does not really exist called “stability.”
Finally, I am free of time. At least, my psyche is. And I think that was true before I was born, for the billions of years following the Big Bang when there was no me. In fact, the universe did not seem to be in any big hurry for me to be born; I am a little insulted, to tell the truth.
So maybe I am not so much leaving as going back, reuniting with the cosmos. Fortunately, I am a fan of the cosmos. I think the cosmos is kind of like this toy I had when I was a little kid called a “Lite Brite.”
It was a light box that had a flat black surface with holes in it and it came with these little colorful beads. Actually they were called pegs but I always thought of them as beads, and I am the dead one here, so I get to choose what to call them.
Anyway when you put the
beads on the surface and plugged in the screen, the beads would light up. You could make patterns or images with the beads, and there was no limit to the designs you could make.
I was never any good at making the impressive images on the box like bunnies and castles. But I think that maybe the cosmos is like that: kind of like a Lite Brite trying to discover itself.
The patterns it makes might be pretty, but if it wants to make new ones, it has to break the old ones down and start again. But the beads are the same beads; in that sense, nothing ever really goes away.
I admit, it is not much consolation. I was always so upset when in kindergarten another kid would knock down my “palace” of wooden blocks. If someone had told me “Stop crying! The blocks are still there,” I would still have cried.
But back to the Lite Brite: I like to imagine that one day, after an infinity of infinities have passed, maybe the universe or multi-verse will want to try my pattern again. It will say, “That was a weird experiment but kind of interesting. Maybe I should give it one more try.” And I will find myself alive again and eating chocolate and reading Ray Bradbury.
But maybe just having been here, this one time, was enough. Some people think you get a kind of immortality by having kids. Bullshit!
Sorry. I have noticed that Dead Me cusses a lot.
Okay, this is one of my pet peeves, so bear