Dear Eleanor, Shall I Decay?

Decay is a natural thing. And yet it feels far from it. One moment, this body feels like home and the next, it is as alien as the interior of a black hole. Perhaps if we had the chance to peer inside a black hole, we would find the glory and wonder of a mysterious new dimension, a cascading turbulence of color, the answer to every question. I wonder if peeling back the layers of our dying bodies would reveal a similar sight.

Instead we fear the descent into darkness, tread tenderly in the face of rot, turn away from the onslaught of death. What if we faced the unfaceable with courage? What if we welcomed the creak and mold of age? Would we find stars in our dying lights? Would we see the face of God behind retired eyes? I wonder… I wonder…

For as my teeth burst from my gums, stained by nicotine and the relentless echo of time, a creature dies within my chest. Or perhaps, it’s just waking up.

Am I ending or just beginning? What an odd thing to wonder at the simplicity of youth. How disconcerting to feel like a stranger to memory, to see all the moments that passed you by without a second glance dance in front of you, taunting you, reminding you of vitality wasted.

Did you feel like this, Eleanor? Like you were both everything and nothing as the light left your eyes? The thing is, I’m not finished yet. I’m not ready. I am still miniscule beneath skin and boundless in nature. I have stories and thoughts and projects and miles unfurling against my creaking bones, begging to be released. Yet at this moment, I’m bound to a chair, legs dangling like severed tentacles, hands wrought with tremors too violent to even hold a spoon.

It’s hard to imagine only yesterday these trembling hands were wrapped around paintbrushes and caressing the soft hills of your gently heaving chest. Only it wasn’t yesterday, I know it wasn’t yesterday, because yesterday, Eleanor, you’ve been gone for almost fifteen years. Strange how I haven’t lived a day since you left. The seconds float by in hazy fits of breakfast, lunch, and dinner through a straw, of sponge baths from nurses who smell like cigarettes, of the constant nagging call of B4, C3, D2, Who’s got a bingo?!

Well let me tell you, I want to take that goddamn bingo game and smash it on the ground, watch the numbers explode into a thousand tiny pieces, and rearrange them into a stained glass mural of the end of all things. The end of creaking and blinking and dreamless sleep. The end of drug after drug after drug after drug. The end of missing you, my love.

And yet, what comes after? Will you be there when my heart surrenders? Will your perfect fingers smooth the wrinkles from my skin and lift my soul from the coffin of humanity? I imagine the last breath escaping from my lips, bursting into a cloud of color, swirling into the painting I never could create. That painting will become a doorway, I’ll curl my fingers between yours, and together, we’ll dive into the unknown. We’ll chase the center of the black hole, dance around galaxies, and realize time never really existed.

Because all this time, it was just you and me, two pulsing, bleeding forms of energy enslaved by blood and dust, waiting to decay back into the river from which we both came.