Ego

"Ego"

By

AP Hadley

A line formed by friends and family stretches the depths of the hollow hills
And I am swallowed by the immensity of the event and the unbelievable enormity of the field in which we had all chosen to gather to cherish the last breath taken by a fellow human and send her off only for me to see her again in fifty years when the tar in my lungs would take hold and form a clump of cells that would slowly suck the life from my eyes and make my movements slower

In those final days they would say I grew sweeter and easier to be around after years of being angry and hardened by the rain and soot that poured from every orifice of every non-living thing I encountered, and after months of mild contemplation of the idea that I too would be a non-living thing that would exist only to pour rain and soot on the people who loved me and make them hard and make them angry, I would decide to treat them better

Only then would I grow sweet and easy to be around, only after my sole child was a full grown adult with a family of their own and the words “I hate you” had fallen from their lips would I realize the precious gift that I had received, not from some god or some intangible being but from the person I loved and spurned and yelled at when they accidentally burned me with a tea kettle during a long forgotten holiday party

My final breath would be strained and I would drown in my bed with my spurned lover and child who hates me at my side crying because these past few weeks they were able to tolerate me for the first time in a decade and honestly I wouldn’t want to go any other kind of way because the idea of dying alone is even scarier than dying next to people who you have hurt because in the end they too realized that dying alone would be a cruel way to go and they would be able to reconcile my past aggressions for the sake of my own comfort

My eyes would become milky sea glass after I finished convulsing and the nurse would give my family a few minutes to mourn me and say goodbye and although I would not hear them the idea is a nice one that would give them comfort as my skin ran cold and my heart stopped beating and the electrical impulses in my brain would slowly come to a halt and everything that is me would cease
But this wouldn’t be for another fifty years

Right now I am the fifth person in line to see the husk that her spirit called home and I’m getting nervous because I don’t want anybody to see me cry, crying would make me look weak and I need to be strong and I am strong but not strong like steel beams supporting a modern framework but strong like the hard wood foundation of a colonial house that has been rebuilt and burned to the ground more times than anybody cares to remember strong like an ancient fossil that has only become harder but more fragile with time

My voice would tremble as a single goodbye hung in the air, a poison cloud rotting away at the false sense of hope generated by this meeting and I would half expect the corpse in her new bed to look up at me and say something like It’s okay or I Love you but instead she lies there, still, unbreathing, like I would be in 50 years, and an uneasiness is washing over me


A hand on my back makes me realize the million year long vortex I’ve been trapped in was just my own head having trouble coping with the sobering reality that the person I loved would never utter another word and her heart would never beat the hand on my shoulder belongs to another person who loved her, another person caught in that awful spiral that your head generates and I hug him, saying it’ll be okay, even though we both know that is a lie, the words provide a sad sense of comfort to the moment

I still have to fall in love again and raise a child and become hardened from my inability to share my feelings so that I can pour my life into my work and slowly rot away all that I ever was in an attempt to achieve something and I still have to hold parties and drink beer and act normal even though nothing will ever be the same and I still have to be burned by that tea kettle and raise my voice and I still have to be hated and hard to deal with but those days are ahead of me

And honestly? Fifty years isn’t that long