Piece (1) ~
THE SUN ALSO RISES
It’s strange that I’m called back to writing because the person who gave me the tools to speak and, later, to put pen to paper is calling me back into the house to reminisce, retell old tales, and say our goodbyes. Strange because when confronted with the fact that I must speak, all the thoughts that sounded so confident in my head now seem to gush out from my bowels, cascading over torrents of words until speech coalesces into a moist, sticky mush. Then, I can only write to flesh out this strangeness and mold its grey contours into some semblance of sense—that is to say to carve out eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, teeth, a tongue, and tan out skin to give sensation to what confounds me.
There is a way of inverting subject matter in Pulaar that serves to illuminate what is at stake in a conversation by flipping what would normally be read as a passive statement into an active state. For instance, I was recently told something to the effect of “life is short” but the literal translation of the sentence is “dying is quick.” Suddenly, we have urgency. The state of life as an immovable–if finite–subject, takes on momentum by doubling down on an action and insisting that we use our temporal perception to follow the new action-subject to its implied end.
Perhaps when one says “life is short,” life is defined as something nebulous because we spend all of our conscious time in a state of living and everything and everyone we interact with becomes a part of our lives, but because of this we know precisely what death means; death is a physical absence of dialogue and interaction. Perhaps this is also why the statement “dying is quick” becomes so terrifying, laying everything at stake in stark contrast to the comfort of moving through life without feeling and taking for granted those exchanges. It brings to our attention that we have always been dying, we are dying, and we will continue to die.
Now, imagine there is someone you love deeply and who has loved you deeply and some convulsion, or accident, or the vicissitudes of life has kept you from this person for the better part of a decade and you receive a call confronting you with the choice, “see this person now or see this person never.” Maybe, you would think my goodness, what have I lost? What am I losing? Perhaps, again, what’s lain into the light is the city one was born in, the language one spoke, the people who held one up as a child till that child could walk their own path. Maybe you will ask whether those people will see the light in your eyes and how it has led you through countless valleys thick and heavy with darkness that clings close to the skin and chills the bone, to lock eyes with a loved one whose light might be dimming.
I was confronted with the fact that I will die when I was a teenager. I refused to engage with this and tried to put on a show of normality but something, a susurrus of shifting sand sliding in the back of my skull, invoked an anxiety that there was never enough time to do anything. It seemed as though everyone looked at me as though I was already gone, small murmurs and hushed whispers accompany me like sendoffs as though I walked within the shadow of death, who loomed and was ready to snatch at a moment’s notice. Something about this facilitates a habit of avoidance and shifting the eyes away to pretend like everything is fine. Everything must be fine otherwise this could invite into our lives and hearts something—initially—truly painful, strange, and confounding. Now more than ever, I know I am deeply terrified of dying. And when one refuses to speak of their terror, it chases one from one home to the next.
“Dying is quick” illuminates something that I believe takes people the better part of their lifetime to come to terms with. I believe that this inspires in us the desire to enjoy all that life has to offer; if death can take the initiative then so can we. Maybe that means I will have to take a frank look at what I missed in that better part of a decade and maybe that means I didn’t miss anything at all but I’ve just been waiting for this moment to call me back into the house and say my goodbyes.