Posted 8:28 AM by melanie

Memorial Day


I think about them sometimes, the people whom I’d like to talk to, but can’t, and I can count them on my fingers, my sweethearts gone forever. I feel like I’m on the edge of precipice and looking down into a pit and I know that none of us left living are very deep anyway and then I think about death like deep water and I wonder if I’m right about that, that once it’s over you head, once you die and plunge into the pool then it doesn’t matter how deep it is, or how long you’ve been dead, just like deep water, but then maybe you swim, and you don’t sink. I think I’d like to go all the way to the bottom when it happens to me and see how deep it all is and then touch and push my way back up, coming up for air or will I? Will it feel like drowning and will I grasp desperately for life in some ghostly way, trying to grab the living, or will it be like the time that I fell in the Amite River at Magnolia Beach once when I was five, and I sunk down and I heard music, and I saw colors and it was all so pretty and pleasant until someone, a very nice someone, pulled me out, and patted my back and carried me back to camp wrapped in a blanket not really comprehending or grasping what had happened and I still think about it and I still can hear the music and see the swirling colors in my dreams, and when I close my eyes, and I hope it was like that for them, like diving in, and it’s all over your head anyway, so it doesn’t really matter, none of this does, does it?


I have this really calm quiet little place to live right now and it isn’t unpleasant to be here at all. The coffee pot purrs, my dog wags her tail, and licks my feet, and I can hear a babbling creek close by and I have no complaints, I’m not hungry, and I have a place to live, and I absolutely don’t fit in, in this place of Shotguns and Pick-up trucks (a Marketing term), having always been more of a Bohemian mix (another Marketing term), but I I’ve crafted an art out of being alone and am good at finding things to fill my days, as long as my life has some purpose, and doesn’t hurt anyone, and I achieve something, then I think that it’s OK.

Someone came by my house the other day with metal detectors and hiking stuff (I live on the edge of a camp ground and national forest) and told me our homes and street were built on top of an old Civil War era Gold Mine and I know that there’s some kind of big cavern beneath my street because it keeps caving in (that's a bitch); and all I could think of was a great big sink hole waiting to swallow me, my coffee pot, my dog, my son, and all of my possessions and everyone saying “Oh well” when it happens, because I know that people like me don’t get gold mines, we get sink holes and the insurance company refuses to cover it and then you are basically FUCKED with, no house, no coffee pot, no dog, no street, and no gold, because that’s how it’s works.