Sometimes the proliferating cells of my absence, the online articles about me, use the present tense, sometimes the past tense. The flicker between the present tense and the past is where I, where you, where everyone with an aching memory exists. I have a hold over certain people, almost all strangers, who come looking for me. Beloveds.
The thought of me is cast like a lure on a silken spider thread out on the water. The Olentangy River flashes in the sun, then darkens under pregnant clouds. The riverfront has changed so much since the spring I vanished. Stand on the waterfront and look out where the water was shallow that spring, only two or three feet deep, when my father and his brother waded everywhere in the flow, forded the river, hyper-vigilant for my body. My father slipped and almost drowned. He was rescued by the arms of his own brother. These moments roil in time as water roils everywhere tonight and forever.
Did you guess that when my apartment was finally broken up there would be a word carved in the wall behind my bed? How long do you pay the rent on an empty apartment when someone is gone without explanation? How long do you stand and stare and fear to touch anything? To lift a sweater and breathe in the essence of love. It was just a lonely word. A word without its sentence. I was a young man. I hid a word. Behind my bed where I slept alone, I hid a word.
You study my face. You study my face with the intensity that you study a lover’s face. You memorize the curve of my dark eyebrows. You study how my eyebrows arch, how they bend down to the inner canthus of each eye. How my smile is half-given in most photographs. You might meet me on the street, might see my face, aged ten or twenty or thirty years, on the internet. Some of you study the faces of dead young men in online repositories of images. Networks of Does. Late into the night. Looking at faces harvested years ago from woods, from water, from snow. Looking to return me where I belong. Thank you for your care.
You study how I stand. In some photos, I wear the white coat of the medical student. I assume the stance. The way you can pick out a policeman in plain clothes by the way he stands, you can see this care growing in me. Some of you notice the sign language in my hands in these photos. The hidden message: “I love you.” Some see it as a secret message to some particular someone. Others say it is to anyone in the world. You believe I planted these messages in photographs as Hansel dropped breadcrumbs in the woods. Are we not beautiful in our fairy tales and our wandering?
How we search for one another. Even when we are only images in a story.
It was April 1st, the night I disappeared. Two hours into April Fool’s Day. You watch the grainy security video tape of me in the night. Standing outside the restaurant that no longer exists. From video to video, my disappearance is grafted. The cells of my absence grafted in your body. April 1st. You make of that what you will, depending on who you are.
Some point out how much my appearance changes from photo to photo. It’s hard to connect some of the faces, the different young men, together. Some who knew me in the flesh say that I changed like the wind from season to season. Potential pro-athlete. Party boy with a D.U.I.. Straight arrow medical student who doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Budding songwriter who wants to live with his bare feet in the sand.
You listen to my last recorded words, the voice mail I left for my fiancee. All her life she will have those words. “You are amazing…” You listen for any shadings in the small handful of words that follow, searching for any hint that it is a goodbye. But the words are bright and clean. Two more nights’ sleep and we would have been sitting side by side on the plane to Miami. Through the years, as her hair silvers, as she sleeps next to another, the image will return. The two young bodies side by side on the plane. On their way to the city of bodies, of constant flux, color and danger, dance and bright reflections.
My mother’s death by debilitation was just weeks before I vanished. My father was killed by a windstorm two and a half years after I vanished. Only my brother remains to remember the most of me. The things he will tell his children. The good memories. Two boys, two bodies in the ocean together. Fighting the waves.
My father is where I am or he is not. A large branch crashed improbably down and felled him, as he stood in the backyard, like a scene out of an opera written several centuries ago. An opera you would call “overwritten” and then smile for the sake of it. Because operas have no real bloodshed. And because our weird smiles are catharsis.
First, I am in a mist. I am a mist. Amiss. Missing. Then, slowly, you start to see in me a myth. Mything.
My fiancee calls my phone every night. For many months. Each night it goes to voicemail. One night, it rings. It rings several times. She feels a sort of terror that is awe of hope coursing through her body. She shares the words of this feeling online. The cell phone pinged off a tower only fourteen miles north of where I disappeared. The service provider says it might have been a glitch. It might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.
Someone goes back and rereads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” The small, perfect story of a man who casually moves a short distance away from his home and changes his appearance, who watches the space where his life was to have been. Unable to re-enter it.
Until, many years later, a lifetime unspent, he does.
Return. He does return.
A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see me going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time. Maybe I take something that nobody notices missing. Something insignificant in the eyes of others. But everything to me.
A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see my murderer going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time, a visit where we sat together and smiled eye to eye.
The detective points out that I had the key to my apartment. If I was still alive. Why break into what was mine? But if my life was no longer my own, the only way in would be that way. To break in. I could never walk through the front door again.
Either way, the rooms were cold by then.
The place where I slept. Where I washed my face, looking at it.
Whoever came in, felt the cold.
The thought of me is cast like a lure on a silken spider thread out on the water. The Olentangy River flashes in the sun, then darkens under pregnant clouds. The riverfront has changed so much since the spring I vanished. Stand on the waterfront and look out where the water was shallow that spring, only two or three feet deep, when my father and his brother waded everywhere in the flow, forded the river, hyper-vigilant for my body. My father slipped and almost drowned. He was rescued by the arms of his own brother. These moments roil in time as water roils everywhere tonight and forever.
Did you guess that when my apartment was finally broken up there would be a word carved in the wall behind my bed? How long do you pay the rent on an empty apartment when someone is gone without explanation? How long do you stand and stare and fear to touch anything? To lift a sweater and breathe in the essence of love. It was just a lonely word. A word without its sentence. I was a young man. I hid a word. Behind my bed where I slept alone, I hid a word.
You study my face. You study my face with the intensity that you study a lover’s face. You memorize the curve of my dark eyebrows. You study how my eyebrows arch, how they bend down to the inner canthus of each eye. How my smile is half-given in most photographs. You might meet me on the street, might see my face, aged ten or twenty or thirty years, on the internet. Some of you study the faces of dead young men in online repositories of images. Networks of Does. Late into the night. Looking at faces harvested years ago from woods, from water, from snow. Looking to return me where I belong. Thank you for your care.
You study how I stand. In some photos, I wear the white coat of the medical student. I assume the stance. The way you can pick out a policeman in plain clothes by the way he stands, you can see this care growing in me. Some of you notice the sign language in my hands in these photos. The hidden message: “I love you.” Some see it as a secret message to some particular someone. Others say it is to anyone in the world. You believe I planted these messages in photographs as Hansel dropped breadcrumbs in the woods. Are we not beautiful in our fairy tales and our wandering?
How we search for one another. Even when we are only images in a story.
It was April 1st, the night I disappeared. Two hours into April Fool’s Day. You watch the grainy security video tape of me in the night. Standing outside the restaurant that no longer exists. From video to video, my disappearance is grafted. The cells of my absence grafted in your body. April 1st. You make of that what you will, depending on who you are.
Some point out how much my appearance changes from photo to photo. It’s hard to connect some of the faces, the different young men, together. Some who knew me in the flesh say that I changed like the wind from season to season. Potential pro-athlete. Party boy with a D.U.I.. Straight arrow medical student who doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Budding songwriter who wants to live with his bare feet in the sand.
You listen to my last recorded words, the voice mail I left for my fiancee. All her life she will have those words. “You are amazing…” You listen for any shadings in the small handful of words that follow, searching for any hint that it is a goodbye. But the words are bright and clean. Two more nights’ sleep and we would have been sitting side by side on the plane to Miami. Through the years, as her hair silvers, as she sleeps next to another, the image will return. The two young bodies side by side on the plane. On their way to the city of bodies, of constant flux, color and danger, dance and bright reflections.
My mother’s death by debilitation was just weeks before I vanished. My father was killed by a windstorm two and a half years after I vanished. Only my brother remains to remember the most of me. The things he will tell his children. The good memories. Two boys, two bodies in the ocean together. Fighting the waves.
My father is where I am or he is not. A large branch crashed improbably down and felled him, as he stood in the backyard, like a scene out of an opera written several centuries ago. An opera you would call “overwritten” and then smile for the sake of it. Because operas have no real bloodshed. And because our weird smiles are catharsis.
First, I am in a mist. I am a mist. Amiss. Missing. Then, slowly, you start to see in me a myth. Mything.
My fiancee calls my phone every night. For many months. Each night it goes to voicemail. One night, it rings. It rings several times. She feels a sort of terror that is awe of hope coursing through her body. She shares the words of this feeling online. The cell phone pinged off a tower only fourteen miles north of where I disappeared. The service provider says it might have been a glitch. It might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.
Someone goes back and rereads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” The small, perfect story of a man who casually moves a short distance away from his home and changes his appearance, who watches the space where his life was to have been. Unable to re-enter it.
Until, many years later, a lifetime unspent, he does.
Return. He does return.
A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see me going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time. Maybe I take something that nobody notices missing. Something insignificant in the eyes of others. But everything to me.
A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see my murderer going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time, a visit where we sat together and smiled eye to eye.
The detective points out that I had the key to my apartment. If I was still alive. Why break into what was mine? But if my life was no longer my own, the only way in would be that way. To break in. I could never walk through the front door again.
Either way, the rooms were cold by then.
The place where I slept. Where I washed my face, looking at it.
Whoever came in, felt the cold.
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