Matty: stones on a desert floor

I have died a dozen times, maybe more. I lose count; or perhaps more accurately, I have lost interest in the enumeration. Instead, I float in the ether, above the varied tableaus of my past, peering down upon the remnants of lives long lost.

I died in Phoenix, and afterward, I marched, by night, for the next bastion of relief against my demons. There are no newspaper clippings of my disappearance. No police reports were taken. No outcry of sorrow.

I died in Jackson. When I stopped showing up for work, inquiries were made. There were no friends or acquaintances to provide enlightenment. My landlord knew nothing except his renter skipped town. Once the temp agency who hired me sent a new worker to fill my spot at the warehouse, that was it, my existence written off, unadorned.

This story repeated over and over…

Reno, Raleigh, Rapid City.

San Diego, Sacramento, Salem.

Boise, Bismarck, Biloxi.

My act of disappearance is hard wired. Deeply rooted neuroses keep me from relationships. I’ve learned the cadence of a solitary life. In the arena of mental warfare, I am my own worst enemy. I stand alone, girded by invisible walls, fortified with paranoia. I am the mundane phenomenon of depression, anxiety, and trauma left unchecked.

Baltimore, Poughkeepsie, Wilkes-Barre.

Twenty years awash on shores where waters cling to land only to recede, drawn back into the body from which they came. Over and over again, like cycles amid the waves. Waters so deep and vast that to be caught in their pull is to forever be reaching for air, gasping for something to buoy myself, like a barnacle attached to a ship’s bow.

St. Louis, Salt Lake City and Oakland.

The seed of anxiety deposited in my thinking, nourished by the frenetic energy of my troubled cognition. The only thing that has ever stopped the mental infestation was my absence. I must walk away from whatever life I have. Each time I did, my psychical mind descended into bleak malaise. It was an affliction from which I cannot escape. So, I died, inside, from the exquisite pain of madness run rampant. It is a pain that suffocates one’s life until fleeing is the only remedy.

That’s why now, as the vulture’s beak, strong with practice, pulls the remaining sinews from my skull. I am surprised at my sadness. It’s an emotion I thought I’d forgotten. Looking down upon my deteriorating body I find myself, unexpectedly, sad. I find myself wanting to live. I have died so many times in the minds of others, I thought naught what it would feel like when I did depart from this plane.

I don’t like it. 

I find myself pining to try again in life, to find a reason not to die away. I am struck with the irony of my seeking death as an escape, only to suddenly want to escape from a death I have so long sought.

I don’t remember anything from when the semi hit me. I had walked along the side of US Route 95. I was headed North, away from the heat and insular culture of Yuma. I had enjoyed the sound of passing traffic, the white noise present during my northward trek. The truck had drifted a few feet to the right onto the shoulder without the driver’s knowledge. The moment of impact registered as a bright, white light.

Then nothing.

Nothing until I realized the yawn of morning and the presence of sunlight sufficient to see myself lying on the hardpan dirt of the Sonoran Desert. There I lay. My legs contorted unnaturally. My face immersed in the Earth. My backpack resting a good distance away, seemingly unmolested. My body, just far enough away from traffic to lie unseen among the sage and stones, crumpled and still.

Time takes on a different role after death. It is no longer linear. The view I see of myself from wherever it is I am, is constant. I can see today, yesterday and tomorrow.

Today I see the vulture, harvesting the final nutrients beneath my tattered clothing. The protuberance of a humerus bone clutching onto its radius counterpart with a weathered ligament poked through my clothing. My sun-soaked skull revealed my occipital bone through scattered, matted blond hair. Blond hair tinged with dried blood.

I find myself in a perpetual orbit above the body I knew. A body that had been given the chance to live a life, but whose mind never allowed it to thrive. I have truly died. I am now departed from myself, watching my body slowly become part of the lonely desert. My broken phalanges are but small stones on the desert floor, scattered without intention or purpose akin to the lives I used to live.  

Looking down now, I recognize my future is extinguished. Yet here I am, still awash in the memories of lives I lived. To what end have I come? I have become what I sought in life, and that is to die and be released from life. And now, in a place absent of pain and anxiety, I mourn myself, my fettered existence. Death, I realize, was not an answer; it is a premature conclusion, without remedy. In life, I understood death like the Tarot card placed in front of me, time and time again. The Tarot, depicting a skeleton with an arm raised toward the seeker, is not about death; it is about change. My life repeatedly sought change, not death but a hungered change, a change I was unable to affect with my aberrant mental faculty. I see that now, as plainly as I see my bones on the desert floor, discharged among the sage and boulders.

Because, at long last, I died…