#lacunningham

[l-a-cunningham]

Language

Isn’t it maddening to imagine

That lying at your fingertips

Are all the right words

And all the right expressions

To make all your dreams

Or your nightmares true.

[l-a-cunningham]

Death and the Girl

It was the night after New Years’ – chilly outside – mostly quiet, save for the rhythmic tapping of wood against pavement. He seemed to glide with every purely theoretical step; all clad in black and leaning slightly on a gnarled and twisted scythe, did Death. Tap, tap, tap. It was a popular time of year for His business. Whatever bitter misfortune it was, the holidays supposed to be full of cheer would all too often venture down the road to ruin. We living souls might think that sad, but as Death was very aware, the dead had little care for the tears of the living. Tap, tap, tap. He had already collected a few. Drunk on high spirits, and their clear liquid cousins, a merry crew had taken a car to see their friends and instead encountered an elder tree. The late happy few had barely known fear before their end, and the tree just waved in the breeze, confused and entangled in a steel embrace. Tap, tap, tap. Death had helped them out of their pained bodies. Peaceful smiles and memories of home will now be all they ever know, and as Death swept away into the dark so too did all the fear and pain and hurt. All the bad memories gather dust while the fond ones wait patiently in anticipation, as they prepare to be taken off their shelves and bookcases to be distributed among loved ones – but all the bad had left with Death, or at least, as much as He could carry. Tap, tap… He paused. Tap. A young girl stood at the side of the road. Her hair caught the breeze and scented it with cinnamon notes – but shortly after that, the bitter taste of sadness. She had no tears upon her cheeks, rosy from the chill; it took a practiced eye to see that she was drenched in the barren dry of all the weeping never seen. The eye of Death was practiced well at seeing through the perfect painted masquerades of perfect painted little people. From His cloth He pulled a watch and checked the hands to see the time. Without ado He snapped it shut and began to walk towards the girl. Tap, tap, tap. She looked over at His approach, steady and deliberate. No fear crossed her face, nor did hatred fill her eyes. She simply watched as Death approached as though she were greeting an old acquaintance that, although they had never seen eye to eye, have found an understanding love that not all things are meant to be together. “Are you death?” she asked Him as He stood beside her, looming overhead. Death did not answer right away – He turned His face that was a skull to look at His scythe, and at His long and flowing cloth. As if to ask without words: What else could I be but Death? “I am Death” He replied. She turned her eyes to meet His, a gaze while not defiant was certainly severe. “Have you come to take me away from here?” “I understand that I have” She let out a long breath, made jagged by the cold, for Death doubted it was fear that put her teeth in chatters. She looked back at the road, casting a glance left and right as if to look for traffic – there was none. “So I do it this time, do I?” she asked, giving Death a thin smile. Death returned her stare. “This time, you might” “So you came all this way just in case?” “It was not out of my way” Silence descended. The girl nodded slowly and clutched her jacket around herself – a jacket that was not hers, it seemed, the arms were too big and the hem was baggy on her smaller frame. Although even He could not be sure, Death wondered if it was the hint of a tear He saw in the corner of her eye. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t inconvenience you, then” she said softly. Death sank to the curb beside the girl. He might have been sitting, but if he had legs they could not be seen nor heard nor felt, and so it appeared that he simply sank. The girl flashed Him a glance, one of equal parts confusion and caution. “What are you doing?” she asked, and He answered in truth. “I have arrived early. I am waiting” She did not appear to be very pleased with His demeanour. Perhaps she was displeased that he so nonchalantly ruled her life as a commodity that he merely waited to collect; or perhaps she was unhappy for making Him wait in the first place. Whatever the cause for her grim expression, aside from the obvious, she need not have worried. Death was patient, and it would not be the first time He had waited by the side of a dead person, waiting for technicality to allow Him to guide them away. “Why are you going to do it?” He asked. It was a question that could never be answered truly. The girl sighed. “I’ve run out of reasons not to” she said, not really wondering why she was answering Death’s question. “It’s not that I have a bad life. There are people with worse lives than me. I just don’t think this one fits me – it’s like there’s something wrong with me being here, living it. “It sounds really selfish when I say it out loud, really… privileged, I suppose. Like, what right do I have to be complaining about all this when everyone tries so hard to make it good? Like, how dare I give up when no one else does? I know that, I know how it sounds. “But that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change me looking out into the world, into my life, stretched out in front of me, and seeing nothing. No way forward. The therapist told me though, she said that ‘no one can see the future, dear’, as if I didn’t know. It’s not about seeing the future; it’s about caring if it’s even there. “And I don’t. If there is a future out there for me, I don’t want it. Give it to someone else if you have to, but I don’t want it” By the end, a single, solitary tear had rolled down her cheek. She rubbed it away immediately and sniffed, as if to suggest that it wasn’t a tear, it was just the cold making her eyes water. Death knew the difference between a watering eye and a tear. Tears are so very different, they are formed with purpose and they travel with intent. They are a mark upon the face, a display to the world that all is not right. They are memory and premonition – and those cannot be caused by a stiff breeze. “That is a good reason” Death mused, mostly to Himself, but loud enough that the girl could hear Him. She looked surprised at His answer. “No one has ever said that before” she said. “They had more to lose than I do” He replied. There was silence once again. Silence as both beings felt the presence of the other. There was no love between them, there was no knowledge, there was only an experience of one another. Experience requires no words, no sound – it is remarkably like death in that way – it was peaceful and it was pure. “That’s just it, isn’t it?” she said, after a minute or so had passed. “That’s all I am to them: something to lose. They want me to be around, they want me to be present, but they don’t actually care what I am. I’m just another thing in their lives, part of a collection. “I can’t even blame them, really. None of them. Not my friends, not my family. I probably do the same thing; you might even meet another girl tonight who will say the same thing about me. I suppose if I was perfect, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?” Death shook His skull. “I think we would” he said. “Why?” “Because a perfect person could never know that they were perfect. A perfect person would never think of themselves as perfect. Moreover, none of the things you’ve mentioned would be different, if you had been a perfect person.” The girl gave a short, dry chuckle. “So what you’re saying is: I was going to die tonight either way?” Death shook his skull. “I am saying that we were always going to have this conversation” The girl gave Death a long stare. It was the kind of stare that you give a pet when they do something unusually clever, or human-like, and you suddenly find yourself unsure of how you had perceived them to be. It was the kind of stare that a jeweler might give a man in rags who presents a flawless diamond – as though that person might not be aware of the value of their actions, or diamonds, as it were. “Have you ever thought about doing it?” she asked. “I once wondered if it would be possible” He replied. “But you’ve never… tried?” Death looked up at the night sky. “No, not I. I have no desire for an end” “But you must see a lot of sad things, a lot of terrible things. How do you not want that to end?” “I see these things in a different way. It is not an end for me; it is an end for them. I am not taking, I am giving. You see the sadness that leads to Death, I see the Death that leads from sadness. It is all about perspective” The girl frowned slightly, concentrating. “But death is sad, usually.” Death tilted his skull. “Am I?” “Not you, but like… like, if a grandparent dies. That’s sad for the people left behind” Death nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, I suppose it is. Not for the grandparent, quite often. They take a great many happy thoughts with them, frozen in time forever. Very few people bother to cling to the bad ones at the end” The girl dropped her gaze and her voice grew soft. “What about people like me?” “People like you? It may surprise you, but when you think about it, it makes sense for a person who desires Death to be happy when I arrive. For some, it is a feeling of finally taking control – of throwing off their chains and being free. For others, it is release of a different sort; release from pain or suffering and finally feeling it all slip away as you rise up out of it. And still others feel accomplished, triumphant even. They feel victorious over the world, and that makes them glad. Very few people hold on to their reasons for dying after they have crossed the threshold” Two tears, large globes of anxiety and despair, rolled down the girl’s cheeks in unison. She wiped them away as well, but this time she could not help but laugh through the tears, into the sleeve of the jacket. “You make it sound so wonderful” she said, her voice not quite breaking, but petering on the verge. Death turned to face her. “It is a beautiful thing” Without warning, the girl turned to Death and wrapped her arms around him. Death felt the scythe fall by his side and hesitantly, he patted her back and let her small body rest on his cloth. She looked comfortable there, nestled into the darkness, enjoying the unexpected warmth of Death’s ghostly form. “Thank you” she whispered to him, and there they stayed for a moment. A moment in time, as a young girl embraced Death and Death held her close to him. A moment suddenly pierced as a truck rushed past them on the road, all lights and wheels and rushing wind. The sudden gust as the vehicle passed kicked up the girl’s hair into Death’s bony face – it smelled of cinnamon. After a while, the girl got up again, and went back to looking at the road. This time however, she had the faintest smile playing on her lips. Death rose up again as well, picked up his scythe, and pulled out his watch once again. The girl watched him this time, and took in a deep breath. “How much longer?” she asked. Death raised his hand. “Before that, one more question. What reasons did you have to live?” The girl looked surprised, but Death continued. “You said before that you had run out of reasons, I’m curious to know what reasons you ran out of” “I suppose all the usual ones” she said, somewhat hesitantly. “I didn’t want my family to be sad, or my friends. I was scared to do it, mostly. I didn’t want it to hurt, or worse, I didn’t want to fail. I couldn’t take it if I’d really tried and it didn’t work, if I woke up later in a hospital or something with a bunch of doctors telling me what an idiot I was” Death murmured his agreement. “Yes. Yes, I thought as much. These are not good reasons” The girl looked a little hurt. “Well, I guess not. They weren’t enough, were they?” “Indeed not. But I think you have forgotten one” The girl frowned. “What? That I should love myself? I’ve heard it before” “No, not quite. I don’t think you are finished here yet” The girl gave another bitter chuckle. “Oh? What gives you that impression?” Death loomed over the girl once again. “You thanked me for listening” The girl’s face went from one of cynical derision to one of disarmed wonderment. Death stared back through skeletal orbs, peering deep past all the walls and defenses. Peering deep inside and gazing finally upon the truth of the girl, the unknowable self. There he saw what no one else had, what she had never even seen herself. There he saw a person screaming at the world, telling the entire planet what she wanted, what she needed to survive – and he saw all the world turn away, dismissive. He saw them call her overly dramatic; he saw them call her attention-seeker. He saw doctors and therapists tell her that she was broken, but that she was normal. He saw a world strip her of everything that she was until all that was left was the sadness and the upset, the roiling discontentment that felt so wrong to live inside. Death saw a girl who just wanted someone to listen, to hear her screams. Not to fix them or try to make her better; just to hear that she was not okay and understand what that meant. Death saw everything that she was, and everything that she could be. He patted her on the head. “You don’t want to die; you want to be heard” said Death, and began to walk away. The girl watched in silence for a moment before calling after him. “Wait! How much longer!?” she called. Death turned as he put his watch away in his cloth. “Oh, a very long time indeed.”

[l-a-cunningham]

Enough of This

Maybe he has lived enough of this To merit a modicum of respect. Perhaps you owe a moment to his Shattered mind made derelict To listen and in circumspect Evaluate your stance, lest It be lost to bitter retrospect.

[l-a-cunningham]

You will chase your love and often fall behind And in defeat erase what you must know: You are a thousand, thousand loves combined Thus you are not unloved, and never alone.

[l-a-cunningham]

What is Fire?

It is the final gasp of emptiness, Invisible ignition Of the fleeting shade of excellence, That dies in our cognition. It is the dream of simpler times, When Gods could walk and dragons Fly across the vast forever-sky, And men believed in legends. It is the breath of life itself. That from the spark a flame arise, And issue forth from mother’s mouth. It flickers, once, and then it dies.

[l-a-cunningham]

Imagined Sadness

I want for nothing, Golden mountains rest in ash I am not dead yet.

[l-a-cunningham]

A Painted Rose

You were perfect, the way you were before But others disagreed and said you should be better You should be thin You should be clean You should be happy You should be as we say. Why did they want us to change? Were they jealous or just closed-minded? Perhaps they were neither. Perhaps they were buried too, deep beneath our feet. You washed yourself in other peoples’ dreams, Became the product of their scorn. Are you still the same person you were? Or are you different, Are you changed? Do you mourn for her, the one you left behind? [Do you mourn as I do?] You have forgotten her, and all her merits You have replaced her with plastic sheets and polystyrene Now you look in shop windows and see in the glass A painted rose that looks so sweet, but has no scent You called yourself a broken thing, a cripple? The bastard child of hateful love, a veteran of many hard fought battles You thought your scars hideous [I thought them beautiful] You tried to scrub and cut them out [While I remembered them.] So many dreams, you had, and not enough life it seemed So you forgot your dreams and stole the dreams of others Called them yours and painted smiles on your face So anyone who looked could see: you were happy with your dreams. And then finally I grew heavy on you A great anchor to yourself, a self you’d rather forget You are thin now You are clean now You are happy now You are exactly as they told you to be. What will happen when they are all gone away? When the only one to love you is you, and you Cannot quite remember who you are to start with. How will you breathe when everything around you is empty space? You will suffocate, and the world will tread softly across your grave And there you will remain, buried beneath other peoples’ dreams.