Call Me a Messenger

30 Minus 2 Days of Writing (2013)
Day 9: “15 minutes”

They say the course of an entire lifetime can change in the span of fifteen minutes. During that final moment of violence in Ben’s unremarkable life, I imagine he required no longer than just a few seconds to take his aim and fire. I don’t really know for sure, because I wasn’t there. I suspect it had been a very long time since anybody had come around to check on Ben.

The day after Ben died, I received a package he had sent to me via overnight delivery from the day before. It was a plain cardboard box containing stacks of manila envelopes, notepads, and loose papers filled front-to-back with methodical pen loops and scribbles. As far as I knew, this was everything Ben had ever written. Amid the stack of documents and journal booklets, I recognized the tattered blue spiral notebook he used to carry around back when we were kids in high school. I must have checked that box a dozen times before I realized that Ben hadn’t left me a single note of written explanation. I heard he had left behind a note to his mother somewhere in his apartment, but the poor woman could never bear to share it with anybody else. Anyhow, I never needed to read that note to understand Ben’s intention. The message he had sent by delivering that box was as loud and unsubtle as the gunshot wound to his head. In his own clumsy and awkward way, Ben was asking me to speak for the dead.

As much as I wanted to set that box on fire, or kick it off a cliff, or to leave it behind in some dank, forgotten basement, I’m really not sure how I could have ever said no. Today, I find myself acting as an unwilling participant in a macabre sort of message exchange. I am the forgotten voice of an extinguished mind reaching outward toward these living planes, rife with like sensibilities, like mistakes, the rhythm of repeated beginnings, this place of futile repetition where we toil and remain.

Call me a messenger. I come bearing news both good and bad, and I speak with all the ferocity and the anonymous temerity of forgotten heralds who veil themselves beneath the words of greater and more memorable men. I am forever plagued by the tedium of repeated phrases, familiar beginnings, conclusions with prosaic certitudes, because nothing in life anymore can ever again be original or strange. None of the words spoken in my lifetime have ever been mine. I am merely a captive echo to the multitude of towering voices shouting across the redundant tides of time.

Today, and for the rest of my life, I am destined to echo the forgotten whisperings of the most obnoxious corpse of a pest who ever wielded a pen. How’s that for a eulogy, Ben? Ben is the one who shot himself, but here I remain, the walking dead, with a conspicuous bloody hole in my head the size of a lifetime’s worth of guilt and obligation. It offends the senses and dulls the sentiment. Just a bit. I am not him, but he is me.

30 Minus 2 Days of Writing (2013)
A painful exercise in forced inspiration brought to you by
“We Work for Cheese“