after A Death in the Family ---And This Is Why I Have Trust Issues: A Post-story Metastory
This new series of short works focuses on my interactions with things I read. It may or may not be autobiographical; I haven’t decided whether me writing about my life is autobiographical or not.
My Struggle: after Knausgaard
Word is that one of these days the sky will turn to dust and we will all be on the ground kneeling, oh father, have mercy on us, forgive us for we have sinned. And we are the best of sinners. Faith rocks us in its lap in our infancy and as we become adults we gain this Lacanian awareness that the world is not us. The world is not what we look like in the mirror and so we create stories.
There are some days in life in which I feel thrown into the world. Like Heidegger would suggest. I open my eyes and am greeted by a story of my own which is not my own. I read and select a response. I do not acknowledge the verisimilitude of this fiction which is not fiction because it is real. Yet it is fiction. Yet it is a story. Yet a story is not necessarily always a fiction.
And so we play a round of word search with no endgame. The rule is: Find a string of words and make it good. Make it real good. Make is unassailable. Inexorable. Like a chess master about to say Check mate. Like a cry in the wild from a mythical lone squirrel with no possibility of ever finding wings. Like a biological disaster that is impossible to prevent because you cannot stop breathing and, therefore, you cannot stop breathing the airborne viruses in.
Like a word search we cannot complete.
Find a string of words and make it good, said the Lord to Adam. Ribs later the words became Eve. Eve was a companion. Eve was a kind companion who cohabited with snakes and consumed an apple.
Whatever Evita said. Don’t cry for me, God. Don’t cry for me. The prodigal son does not deserve the rain.
The angel cries, “Hello, is it me you’re looking for?” Lionel Richie and a bucket of freshly peeled potatoes sitting in the rain trying to give me a good morning hello. I pause my TV show and give him a middle finger. I have a lunch. I sit and smile like a dead pig at the ceremony of my grandfather’s dying breath.
I look into the mirror and make a great smile out of my face today.
The world is beautiful again.
I will write the story I’ve been meaning to write, and the first sentence will be, “And this is why I have trust issues.” Because clowns fall asleep like everybody else and leave their white face paint on God’s fucking pillow case.