“The mist goes on and on. As you walk things come up out of your thoughts, frazzles of memories swirling around you and binding together, gathering like ghosts out of the dark.” – from Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
The mist goes on and on. As you walk things come up out of your thoughts, frazzles of memories swirling around you and binding together, gathering like ghosts out of the dark. High school prom, your first promotion, losing your job, losing your wife of sixty years to the peaceful clutches of old age, your first date, your first flirtation, the moment you realized that you had something you would keep, if only forever existed.
Images flit by as you take each step, and as you come to a bend in the path, your thirty-third birthday party looms out, brighter than the others. The party when everyone was sober but you, and you made a complete ass of yourself but still there she was to pick you up and clean you up and tell you it doesn’t matter, it didn’t matter, everything is/was/will be fine. Everything is fine.
Everything is gone.
Shapes come out of the fog that curls around your shuffling feet, great spindly moss oaks that soar above, dripping moisture that adds to the coolness of the dark. You keep walking, confident if not completely steady as your life makes its way to you in disjointed, out of order vignettes, each one more precious than the last, each one featuring her or at least fueling your eagerness for the ones that do. Riding your first tricycle in the cul de sac in the house you loved for the first eleven-and-a-half years of your life, the house you cried over when your parents moved you away, the house you went two hours out of your way to drive by after you were old enough to do so without feeling uneasy, when the feeling of complete freedom no longer came with the guilt of breaking the rules of childhood.
Every memory, every feeling, every thought you ever had that led you to her, and every one after roll to you and through you out of the fog as you make your way through what is now clearly a forest path, lined with misty thistles and soft sighs of leaves in a breeze.
And then the memory of waking up without the familiar puff of breath on your neck, feeling colder than ever before even under the piles of winter blankets, and knowing…
Knowing…
And now the path is entering a clearing, the mist pooling around, and you drift, no longer shuffling, no longer weak, no longer gasping with age, gasping with the weight of a life lived and loved, weight you never knew you were carrying, weight that is lifted as you float down, through the ground that was never there, through everything that was and wasn’t and finally you can rest easy as you take yourself away.
I loved this post. Most definitely the best one you wrote on blog day.
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