Crud Meridian

(This was written a few years ago in what felt almost like a fugue state after my eyes played tricks on me one evening. I’ve always liked it. Now it’s here)

Your brain knows two things about death. The first thing is that you will die one day, probably alone in some meaningful sense, but maybe surrounded by those you love, and that that will also have a fleeting weight to it. This death is inevitable, and could have a myriad of causes, the number of possibilities so vast as to blur into a pointillistic mess. There is no point in conceiving of the speeding car, the embolism, the untied shoelace. Each is entirely too possible. Each is as unlikely as all of the others. One of them is going to get you. And then a deep nothingness. A blankness that cannot even be thought about.

The second thing is that one day, you will walk downstairs at 11:30 pm. The light will be the cold dark of winter, suffused with light pollution’s poisoned pink and you will not hear your roommates footsteps above you. You will not hear your roommate’s piano practice behind you and the living room light will be off. Through the dark living room there is the kitchen and the kitchen light will be off and the back plate-glass door into the yard is a mass of pink and black and you will walk too fast through the living room into the kitchen. There is a figure at the back plate-glass door that you didn’t notice when you arrived at the foot of the stairs and turned towards the kitchen because you were walking too fast and listening to what clearly will not be there but there is a figure at the back plate-glass door and the figure is tall and dark and the figure is too tall and too dark. The second thing your brain knows about death is that there will be a figure at the back plate-glass door and the figure will be too tall and too dark and that you will see the figure too late to close your eyes or turn away from the back plate-glass door. You are sure of this that there will be a figure at the back plate-glass door and you will look at the figure and there will be a broken plate’s worth of time to think about the figure at the back plate-glass door. You know that you cannot turn the light on to look more clearly at the figure at the back plate-glass door. You know there isn’t time. This is what you know. You know you will turn your head to take your body with it and there will be a sound the moment you stop looking at the back plate-glass window and there will be a sound and accompanying the sound, preceding the sound, beating the sound to you will be the completion of the room’s darkness. There will be a sound like a speeding car, like an embolism, like an untied shoelace, and before it is over your eyes will swim in the dark. You know that when you turn away from the figure there will be a sound and a darkness and then there will be a feeling of weightlessness all in the time it takes to turn your head a little to the left away from the figure at the back plate-glass door. You know that the sound and the darkness and the weightlessness will precede a pain that will be unlike any other. When you turn away from the figure at the back plate-glass door there will be only a weightless darkness and a noise and then a pain that will last for the longest half-second in the world and you will spend the rest of your life in that half-second screaming out for the blankness that cannot even be thought about, for the deep nothingness. You know this about the base of the stairs and the dark kitchen and the light in winter. You know this about the back plate-glass door.