Running Out of Fingers

Some thoughts on loss

Howdy Internet

For the past year or so, I’ve been trying to try to work on a piece called the Four Funerals. When I started, the fourth funeral was metaphorical, but people keep dying. I think it’s six now, if you count metaphor. Which y’all know I certainly do.

It’s been a little over two years since Pilgrim died. I wrote my way through that one the best I could, but it was exhausting. I have tried to muster a poem or so out of each passing, but it doesn’t always come easy. It doesn’t always unfold full as I’d like - sometimes it’s just a few words. Just checking in. Sometimes and still, it’s just too much to open up, and so it sits inside me waiting to boil.

I don’t know why I want to share this now, to try and piece together some homage to loss, but I do.

Maybe it’s because we’re going on the road again next week. The same road that tried to heal the loss of Pilg, a loss which turned out to be only the first stop on a long two years of funerals.

Maybe it’s because I fear more coming. Fear the inevitable slip of getting older. Because when the trip began, I was in a bad place and could not trust myself not to will these kinds of tragedies. The mind is a powerful palace and we often find whatever we are looking for.

There was a season when I could not look away and feared my looking was the wizard behind the curtain, some mystical-manifesting-mumbo-jumbo.

Today, I am at peace with the looking, but still tire of finding. Still keep my self on a short leash and try not to think too much of what it means to wonder why people go and if our wondering has anything to do with it.

Below are a few short musings, some journal entries, poems, and questions.

I have plenty more and I hope someday I am ready to write it all for real.

Monday, May 6th 2024

I have mostly put away what ached me all those years. Dark and heavy months of waking solely to remember what I had worked to forget. Suffering, is so sweet in sips, but I drank myself sad over and over again. Kept sipping on youthful angst, on parental hate, and the thick lip of holding it in. Getting better felt like a long elevator I was stuck on, like the bottomless pit of fairy tales was close and closing, me always reaching for the next level down, lighting every button, every joint and window pane aching. Lit and lucid and lower than before. The me, I was, now no longer. The me, I am, now not enough trench coat to hide all us in. The self, a nesting doll, a boy cowering in the shell of a man. Me, again, but now arms heavied with holding, with baggage, and rugged luggage still packed from last winter. Me, still putting old poems in new notebooks, still unraveling at the thought of this being me better, of this being healed and over it. I still measure time in months since a funeral, still feel shy around hopeful cause losing things is a tough habit to kick. I am sober now, sure. Strong and healthy, sure. Disciplined or stubborn or deflecting, sure. Still spinning plates too, but these at least are good plates to have around, heirlooms if we make it that long. Kintsugi if we don't.

I am not unhappy with where I've gotten, not ashamed of where I have been, but I am still lonely. Still unsure how to talk to folk, how to make art outta the not knowing. I am still looking for something inside myself and I do not know if it is a mirror, if it is an old friend or a new one. I am still playing with the ineffable, and frustrated as ever, but mostly I am trying not to think so much about the things that derailed my little blissful train to ignorance. Trying not to make poems out of passing glances and trying not to pass a moment without poem-ing the shit out of it. Trying to make the magic I am called to. Trying to pick up the phone regardless of its ringing. The dial tone a type of prayer to me. The electric Om of gods cut short, of conversations I’m not ready to have.

We do not have to make things to be a good use of time. Don't need more money or more jokes, more likes or more poems. We don't need nothing, but we do still want it, and there is the beginning again. The roller coaster cresting the same hill, the teenager I still let steer sometimes, asleep or flirting or stoned at the controls, here comes the big drop again, really? The tunnel and twisting, Texas still glistening. Me, tied to the tracks and screaming, another round please. Please do not let me leave this park without my stomach in pieces and my heart too ballooned to hold to. Haven't we ridden enough roller coasters to know the best part is always the waiting, the heat of the line, the click-click-click of the climb. The anticipation or whatever.

• Three weeks after I wrote that, my clock reset.

Wednesday, May 29th 2024

Grandma Mavious died on Saturday the 25th. No flash of wisdom or fond memories to share yet, just sad and tired and making note.

Tuesday, September 26th 2023

Isaac is dead. Unfathomable. I know not what to do with this. This ever-expanding loss, each passing day a new eternity without him. Forever still so long, forever always just as far away as yesterday.

Kelly and I have been married for 10 years. Unfathomable. Forever always fleeting, love this deep knows not of time.

Footnotes:

• We found out about Isaac passing a couple minutes after we checked into our resort in Cabo for our ten year wedding anniversary. The entire week melted away and we suffered in silence surrounded by drunken tourists. Time now too thick and liminal not to get stuck in. And let me mention, a resort is a hell of a place to mourn sober.

• A week later, the day after Isaac’s funeral, we woke up in a roadside hotel to find out Gnome Cones had burned down. One of my metaphorical funerals, now cremated. A business is a creative act, an extension of self, and though I had already “moved on” from the Gnomes, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like the knife being twisted.

Monday, January 16th 2023

I was sitting with Pilgrim’s Shrine or Hidey Hole or remains, whatever it is we call, whatever it is we’ve left collected in the unused awkwardness at the end of the hallway. A built in laundry chute, a too low to the floor cabinet to ever be used, and Pilgrim’s safe space from any thunder storm or firework show. I lit a candle and cried a little, talked out loud like a prayer would be, but this was just me and Pilgy. I smell his IPA chew toy and he is here again. I say out loud, that Kelly’s dad died, call her Mom so he knows the relation. I say out loud, that I wish he was still here, and the Rainbow Bridge Wind Chime howls loud and long in response, holds that note eye level, up over the Japanese Jazz pouring in the living room, makes sure I hear it, him still here in some mystical way, some “time is not real and neither am I” type shit, that slow hand magic we do not have the guts to keep looking for. If all dogs don’t go to heaven, if some of them are still here haunting wind chimes and chew toys and my poetry. Then what do I tell my wife, when she asks me where her father went. No poem big or holy enough to hold that kinda forever in.

Monday, December 19th 2022

Kelly’s dad passed away on the 14th. I don’t have anything to say, just sad and wanted this space to document it.

David was a good man and I miss him already.

Thursday, September 8th 2022

I’m driving to a funeral today. A four hour car ride in silent wonder, wondering what it means to leave home forever. Texas highways, the slow way of saying goodbye. Six lanes of palm bearers stretch out like a good nap. Three hundred miles of fists clenched in unknown mourning. We drive on hopeful, not for this trip but the next one, not for the living or the dead but for those still floating here within us, for the memories and moments that made two lives one. We drive on knowing well what we are leading, this secret funeral procession, this long winded anthem, a holy high note held tight from Dallas to Austin. I-35 never glistens like this without a song, so we sing. We all wrote it for you before we knew we’d be singing it a cappella. A good bye written in two parts. The good we already done and now the hard of selling what no one wants to bye.

It has been a tough two years, but I am genuinely better than I’ve been in many more. Suffering is still a form of grace and I am grateful for the growing pains.

If you like being sad, then you can read the full essay I wrote when Pilgrim passed here:

Thanks for reading y’all,

Alex