Epitaph on Effigy

So far away I’ve gone,
Please don’t follow me tonight
And while I’m gone
Everything will be all right…

Epitaph on effigy, eulogy of essence, everyone, everywhere ending what should have been endless. Is the atmosphere really so drab, so melancholy, or does my memory fill in the grayness of the overhanging clouds? All the beauty, all the color, all the sunlight of the world is drained in my eyes. Funerals, the unnatural things, however, are better in black and white. Black wardrobes, white lilies; black coffin, white linings; a constant distortion of reality; reality swirling in and out clashing together in that space where only black and white exists. This is what demons do to saints.
I stare down at my feet. Maybe that mysterious feeling of vertigo is overtaking my senses now. I can no longer tell up from down and I am swimming in that ocean of confusion, and drowning in it. Am I moving for the surface or delving six feet at a time deeper into its dark depths?
I will never know which way I went that day: if I dove deeper and deeper until there was no way out, or if I clawed myself upwards. It no longer matters if I drowned then or if I lived on. Either way I was reborn as the phoenix from the ashes into something that was entirely different.
Then I was one of those people who allowed etiquette to dictate my behavior. Why the silence and solemnity of men at funerals? The women are allowed their stifled sobs, but men must look on suppressing all the emotions that boil deep inside.
I wanted to scream, to rage and vent and flip the casket on its side; to rip the flowers up and tear the wreath to pieces. It might not have brought him back but at least I would have dispelled the dreamy illusion that I was in: the nightmarish hell that I lived in that day. It was as if some powerful narcotic subdued me. I was forced to sit idly by as they buried him, the person I had known and loved for so long, when rage ripped relentlessly at my innards. I looked to the person next to me, and he sat quietly too. I looked to the other side, he sat quietly too. Couldn’t they rage? Could they too be suppressing and harboring those dark seeds of hatred and anger? How did they sit so still? I looked to the casket, and he lay quietly too.
The precession starts and what an odd ritual it is; burying a human into the earth, enclosing him with a wooden lid and this will somehow heal our hearts. We fear these sarcophagi chambers in our lives and yet we all aspire to such fates as if they offered some lucrative treasure in their darkness. And the people that come to speak on behalf of the departed, trying too hard to speak from their hearts and only achieving the same monotonous eulogies that have been said throughout the millennia…As I said, funerals are unnatural things.
Let me tell you now then that there is no single solitary moment in which the heart cracks, splinters, and caves in on itself; no defined spot in the timeline of your life where the heart finally breaks into two symmetrical pieces. No, nothing that simple or that beautiful; just a sickness, a plague, that drains your body and fatigues your soul. Everything doesn’t crash down, and the sky remains forever suspended above your head, but for some reason the weight you carry on your back increases with each step. You do fall down sometimes but you always rise with more weight, a paradox in the laws of physics how we continue with the whole world on your back.
I sat there, solemnly quiet, for the whole thing, and, after it was all over, I walked to my car and drove off into that small horizon beyond which no one can see. I drove into unyielding nothingness; I drove towards the line that breaks the boundaries of space from what is real and what isn’t and when you get there you’re as small as you want to be. I never reached it.


COME BACK TO ME THIS IS UNCONCIEVABLE
BREAKING APART THE ONES YOU LOVE
HATE RUNS DEEP FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO US…
he’s gone, but nothing will take back time
I need him back but nothing will take back time…

That would have been almost nine months ago. March 20th they found him with the three bottles of cough syrup completely drained, sitting idly by his side as if Satan has conjured lap dogs. There must have been something great in that amber liquid to tempt him into something so drastic. Maybe he was looking for his horizon line: I hope he found it.
Since then I have been left in a state of constant confusion, battling inner and external turmoil.
It seems as if when his soul and body were so unkindly cleaved from this earth the natural order of my world was cleaved as well. I found myself in an ever-red tinted world, as if I was staring out from inside those Nyquil bottles. I could almost feel the syrupy molasses drenching my entire world producing a thickness in the air that was palpable to all the senses. All my actions were in that thick slow pace of drowsiness as if I had swallowed those bottles instead of him. Maybe it was I who was lying in that coffin, my soul drifting aimlessly through the halls of my remaining years while he lived on somewhere on the horizon.
It must have been a week later. Time didn’t seem to matter much to me anymore all I knew was that it was always moving forward and never moving backwards. If only it could reverse its ill-destined path and somehow find solace in taking a different course. If only I could find some solace in the course, it had taken. A thousand if only and not a single answer held true on those insipid days.
Anyways, it must have been about a week later. The air was just as bitter and the grave calm of the world still hung in the air. The solid earth even seemed stoic in its hardened state. The ground did not quiver… maybe it should have.
The shovel moved like lightning from my hands. I struck the ground and suddenly a fountain of anger and anguish that had built for so long awakened in me and I struck again. I could feel my hands but it was like touching them in a handshake, they were not my own anymore. The shovel was more me than my hands were; the tool of destruction was like an extension of flesh and bone and it was more my soul than my beating heart.
I dug that day; dug a grave for a friend. I saw the grave they buried him in, its perfectly cornered edges, its straight lines, but it was not deep enough: it could never be deep enough. And I dug until my hands were blistered and bleeding. I thought I wouldn’t be able to climb out of my memorial… and so I lied down in it.
I took the Hennessey that I had stolen from the liquor cabinet out of the pack I brought. I drank it as if it were water. I think I swallowed half of the bottle before sputtering droplets of amber liquid in my inverted monument. And, if I said that the liquor tasted sweet, you might laugh at me; but to me it was exactly like the cherry flavoring of Nyquil.

Building up inside of me
A place so dark, so cold, I had to set me free
Don't mourn for me, you're not the one to place the blame
As bottles called my name, I won't see you tonight


It was a month after his death when fate twisted again; bucking and braying as if it were some mad horse that I could not grab the reigns of. I struggled to hold on to them as everything slipped away. Chris Connelly died. I did not care.
Everyone else was in tears, as if his loss was really so tragic. However, I do not remember crying when Zach died and now that Chris died, I let a smile grace my lips. Grief only holds power over us as long as we are alone in it and so the smile illuminated my face for the fleeting moments it was there.
Then I saw the stickers: some obscure and glorious monument to someone who had died. Where was his monument? Where was the glory in his death? Some kid gets in an accident out on old 23 and suddenly he becomes the epitome of all that should be remembered. Where was the drained Nyquil bottle now? They made his tragedy seem greater than Caesar’s, when my friend's was far greater than even Cassius knew. The rage fell upon me like a rabid dog… and so, I fell upon them as a rabid dog.
The first blow on the unsuspecting victim landed in his chest and the second square in the jaw and suddenly it was as if I was holding the shovel again. The strength of the world was on my shoulders and I swung in its entirety. The cracking and breaking of his nose is what finally brought me back to reality. And with the deed accomplished, I sat up, and walked to the principal’s office to tell them what I had done.


Never let it show
The pain I've grown to know
’Cause with all these things we do
It don't matter when I'm coming home to you

I reach towards the sky I've said my goodbyes
My heart's always with you now
I won't question why so many have died
My prayers have made it through yeah
’Cause with all these things we do
It don't matter when I'm coming home to you
The stars in the night, they lend me their light
To bring me closer to heaven and you.
I laughed when they told me that I needed grief counseling. Laughed deeply, because they for some unknown reason connected me to that little incident. I wasn’t human, just some anger that manifest itself after the death of Chris Connelly (how I hate that name to this day).
I never did see the counselor as they suggested. I melded back into the shadows, sinking slowly back into the murky depths of darkness. And I’ve been getting it back on, slowly, carefully, on my own. The way we did things back in Tecumseh. The way I will always do things.
One day… I’ll reach that horizon line… I’ll drive with so much passion and so little remembrance that I’ll forget everything in an attempt to gain enlightenment. I’ll shrink and shrink as all the memories of the world slowly slip away into what was, and when I emerge on the other side of the horizon line, I’ll be completely new. I’ll be reborn. I’ll be me.