Life is a movie of sorts, just random moments strung on the plot which is you. The people we meet are actors, the places we visit are scenes, the events the drama that make it all real. Of course too, all movies come to an end. Any film student knows that climax must be resolved. That’s why I’m interested in white light stories from those who leave and return to their hospital beds, or drowning victims who look up at an aquatic sun to see childhood moments, a red wagon full of earthworms. The idea that we all will have front row seats in a velvet theater to watch our lives flash before us, like a slideshow or a moment that marks the end of all moments, is not sad to me. It seems much more interesting—at least to those who have lived without fear, without regrets—than becoming electric fizz, the white dot on a turned-off television that blends into black after the news.
She will be part of my end-moment, perhaps just a flash, maybe a few seconds between family vacations draped in light and a flurry of bed scenes, but she will be there. It’s a strange thought when youth is now and I’m more conscience than ever of the privilege which has allowed me to float undistracted on a river of perfect circumstance, toward a destination where anything is possible. Optimism in abundance, death should be the last thing on my mind. But now I realize that knowing anything is possible is a privilege in itself, that it’s a luxury to dance just a fraction of a second from what could have been, life and death included. She taught me this.
At the same time, it could be no other way. If the river flowed forever, I’d take the scenery for granted, I’d sleep instead of gaze at the dawning stars, intimate moments would fail to be intimate. Just as I constantly collect images, my end-moment slideshow is constantly being edited. In a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with silver canisters of tightly coiled film, busy hands examine the footage, hold it to florescent light, squint at it through magnification lenses that move from scene to scene in a vertical search for the essential, cut and cut and cut until only the important remains, then condense it into a grand finale of memories that will premier at my last breathe, when I’m alone, for me alone.
There was an air of importance in today’s waking routine—the acting perfect, the lighting spot on—that makes me think the editors’ magnifying glasses will pause and separate the images into the keep pile, maybe even meet over the lunch hour to talk about these simple and unexpected scenes: the way the morning slanted through the balcony’s sliding doors until the room was a flood and the bed an arc that contained the last two animals who had yet to understand their own importance; the towel that wrapped her hair remained just a towel, yet in its simplicity I saw immigrants crossing oceans, bread baking in ovens the world over; a child wrapped in swaddling cloth that I could no longer blame for stealing so many salvation prayers; the white walls that reflected sun suddenly revealed their patient strength, their obedient tension. I became aware that six stories below was the Earth’s womanly face which we rarely kiss, and below her nothing, not even gravity. Bare back exposed, hair matted around her nape, lace like white patches on a dark blanket of skin, she became the tapestry of all the women I’ve loved but failed to convince that they too will be in the final show, that they too will be with me in the end. Her nakedness on the balcony, contrasted against the machine sounds and traffic below, froze time, silencing everything outside our little box to a whisper, but sang sadness too because I knew my mind incapable of recording such infinite detail (“I wish I had my camera,” I said, compelled to say something). Her big-eyed silence could have muted an airplane engine. Soon after, in one breathe, she was interrupting ideas with new ones, weaving them perfectly together on the exhale, joy and regret for not waking with the sun mixed like make-up in her natural blush, and as I traced her lips I felt a fool knowing that she would never dwell on all this death talk, feeling I had yet to learn to burn spontaneously whereas she had been born fire.
Though hard to say now, I feel she will survive the cut. She’s too vibrant to pass unperceived, let alone below a magnifying glass that will intensify her aliveness. Ironically, it’s her aliveness that brought me here, to the recliner- and footstool- office I’ve arranged on her porch, to type this prose that fluctuates between movies and reality, male and female, being and nothing. The fact that she reminds me that my own death is inevitable is exactly why I want her in my end-moment. I can’t think of any other time in which I’d want to be more attentive to the present than in the very flash in which it will be taken away. In her curious laughter I find a cure that will not save me, not even as the credits fall, but it takes away the dull ache so embedded in knowing but not being able to understand, and turns the mystery into the frivolous game, the kitten romp, the human need to roll in the sheets that life should be all the time, not just in the velvet theater with buttery fingertips. I’m not in love, not in the way most would describe it, I’m not sick with the desire to merge into her everything that I’ve felt before, but she makes me accept death, she makes me love life.
LOCATION: Santa Cruz, Bolivia
