Pico de Orizaba

Pico de Orizaba
Taken from Huatusco, Veracruz, the closest town to Margarita's family's ranch.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

My Father Death, My Role Model, My Mentor (The Beginning)


I was born… was alive… wanted to die… I felt dead…  Dreadful paradox…  Death… a persistent presence since the age of 4…  Lurking, reaping, placing it’s heavy and hot hand upon my shoulder, clasping until the bones cracked.  Dead… was my father’s last name I inherited.  Dead was the love of my mother towards her only son after my father’s death.  Daughters learn from their mothers to be women.  How do young sons learn from their dead fathers…?  Death was my role-model. 

The first hole I put in my wall was from my head.  Sheet rock is softer than skull. Years with that hole in the wall as a reminder of my foolish desperation, like that black abyss that appeared in my soul.  It appeared in my universe at the age of 4.5 and absorbed all my light and it sucked me in.  Yo, hanging on to the paradoxical edge of life and death, surviving.  Like that Greek myth of Tantalus, foolish me, my arms were free, I jumped and I grabbed the branch of the apple tree, not to eat apples but to dangle for years above the abyss.  My purgatory…  I relaxed my fingers…  I opened my hands…  And there I was, stuck like Crazy Glue…  I didn’t drop.  I just dangled. 

I don’t have children.  A dead man can’t create life…  My father did not know he was dead, death walking to his grave at the age of 34.  Had he known, maybe he would have stayed right where he was, without dreams of being a doctor for his young wife and for the kids he would create and bless with death, and leave shortly after opening his practice.  Had he known we would walk in his shoes, would he have dreamed of us?  Would he have dreamed of leaving me to be raised by Death?...  to have death as my mentor?  I was a seed passed down from my paternal grandmother to my walking dead father to me, the offspring of Death…  Just as God gave birth to a son through his omni-potent penus, Death gave birth to me…

I planned growing into a man.  A man with a ticking clock.  A man with a time bomb.  A man with a gene promising his early death.   A gene for all unborn children of death.  All conversations of love and marriage, conversations about death.  My pending death and the inheritance written in my will the first time I thought about having children...

"Dearest... here is the heirloom passed down from my father, from my father's mother, from her mother's father... Now from me to you....  Embrace it with your short life and learn to accept, in my place, your step-father Death."  

In my mind, always 34 always 34.

I was 13-years-old when I learned I inherited my father’s illness.  I was 18-years-old when I took my life and then I took my death.  I said to myself, 

“this is my life.  This is my body.  I’m tired of the struggle, of the failure, of the helplessness, of the living alone, of the people who don’t understand, who don’t help, who only hinder.  Why await the inevitable? Why struggle against the odds? Let’s stop waiting for the bad to worsen.  Why wait for death to actualize itself…? It’s time to start over again…”

and I killed myself. I painted the walls and the ceilings with my internal ink.  I created pools of blood on the floors of my vacant apartment on Mercer Street.  I drained myself and fell unconscious sliding in the pools.  I awakened and drained myself again and lost consciousness before hitting the floor.  More accurately, I felt the blood drain from my head, from my tongue, a drying, a cooling and then a falling.  I never took drugs, I never drank.  For once I tried...  For once I tried to take my life in my hands.  But, I awakened and felt pain in my chest and thought about doing it again.  I had to bring something to its rightful conclusion.    But my father grabbed my hand.  He said, 

“it’s not time.  You don’t know it now, but you have yet to do some things in this life.  You’ve gotta let this thing go…”  

I fell asleep and awakened a few hours later… to the dawn.  I lifted up the phone...

Before the ambulance arrived, a detective entered the apartment.  The front door was ajar.  I must have left it open.  I was laying upon the floor.  I didn’t have the energy to move.  The detective passed from room to room and asked me, “where is the other person?”  I said, “There is no one else here…”  He contested, “that’s impossible, there is too much blood spilled for you to be alive…”

For some reason I didn't "publish" this as the first writing of the blog...  I controlled myself and never re-read it until today, almost 5 years later...  

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