trillonious monk

Lately I have been avoiding topics like, How have you been doing, and Jesus Christ where are you these days? It seems to me a great ordeal, the whole talking thing. Probably because there is such a thing as sensory overload, and my senses, frankly, are on overload. The act of talking, of moving one’s vocal chords, of producing audible sounds that render words that render meaning that render speech that renders the communicative act of me talking to you in a vocal tract exchange that extends, too, to non-verbal signifiers, such as tone and inflection and gestures and pauses and nods—yes, talking seems, to me at least, rather strenuous.

I have been avoiding these topics because the answers to these questions are addressing the sole question I have been trying to answer since it occurred to me that it was the only question worth asking. It doesn’t take a keen observer to observe what is observably oblique. But, you know, that is the first rule of diversion: to divert.

The truth is, on a humid summer night, when fireworks exploded overhead the lake shore and children sat wide-eyed at a constellation of blues and reds and whites, I decided that Uncertainty had emphatically made its point. I had gotten used to dismissing the banal, the cliché. But there is something about sitting over two thousand miles away from what you know best, from a life that seems both distant and familiar all at once, and realizing that these decisions make us who we are. How to cope, how to work, how to live.

When I die this earth will continue spinning at a twenty-three degree tilt, and it will revolve around the sun, and all those three hundred and sixty five days our sun will have risen and set, and fanatics will shout apocalypses and doomsdays, and the young will look even older and the elders will shake their heads, and words will change and the oceans will change and policies technologies biology will change, and there will be more weddings and more funerals, and women will have babies who will have babies too, and taxes will be filed, debts will be made, and the poor will steal because they are hungry, because they are starved, and there will be conspiracies and theories, and couples will make love on squeaking beds—

When I die I will have remembered when my parents were living dirt poor in a Chicago suburb. They took us to a nearby icecream shop and told us to choose our favorite flavors. I chose cookies n cream, my brother and sister some candy-coated sorbet. The three of us sat outside, feet kicked against the curb, and happily ate, unbeknownst to us, the last of our parents’ dollar. My mother’s head against my father’s shoulder, my father and his protective gaze.

We were so happy for a time.

  1. moustachioed said: Rachel, I miss you.
  2. hidekihotblock said: Let’s get together for some tea and not say a word.
  3. rachblog posted this