the reverse-denouement

__FRANCISCO:

For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

_____Shakespeare












delerium, tommy oshima


this story it to be told in reverse. we are to start as old men, either embittered by sun-glare and lonely evenings, or happy-chappy smilers whose smell is a curiosity to the children who sit on our laps.

the first chapter is death, and that is the most important one. read that one and you've read it all. the second is the one that happens just before death. final words. will writing (if a person is of sound-enough mind to do so, and i know, me, if you ask me anything, i will only hum Bach back to you and giggle and say sound!, get it?). there is all that. the organization of death. polishing my two coins for the long aquatic trip. the rocky-boat. the humid dank blackness that's been waiting for me soo long behind every 3am, every car accident, every illness, every shaky moment i almost fell flat on my head hard enough. every broken everything. have you ever seen perfect blackness smile erotically as though finally satisfying an itch?

and the story will weave through the unravelling of wrinkles. Slowly unwinding the ones on my forehead back to taunter skin. restoring my eyes to humanoid colors, abating the trembling of my hands.

at some point i'll start to dance again. and perhaps if we dig back far enough, through ebb and flow of dates and times and love and unlove and happiness and that other thing, oceans of self, the whole volume of life with all its seconds and banged pinky-toes into corners of rooms, and moments of driving too fast listening to songs you won't remember the names of and being happy for reasons that defied reasons that you won't remember the sense of (and is that the saddest thing)

and finally, somewhere three-quarters of the way through... there you'll find your pictures. from the beach. the ones i vowed i'd never forget. (and then wished forever i could). with your hair held up, two hands, so it looks like you owned the sun too. and the sand. (me anyway. (but i am easy). and then you'll see that those pages are soo withered. soo crushed and bruised and worn and you can barely see anything left on them. just... a scattering of words,

the reverse genie-in-a-bottle trick.

dreams i can't make sense of

our souls are friends

reinventing physics

and ten thousand stars of the stardust of your hair

and that's all your story. me in tatters. a whole history unravelled back to dust and sighs. (i mean silence in either case). a whole person reduced to soo much nothing it took... 2 years to crawl back out.

finally the pages restore. they are uneven sized and the fonts change erratically. you don't know what you're reading. it breaks for long periods of silence and there's a mute-force to descriptions of my glares and pouts. my body starts to break back down into a pre-birth death. a different kind of death, the one i like best. the one that had no beginning. the one that leaves no trace. no memory. no misunderstanding at its wake. there was is cannot be simply nothing ever conceived or known about this sort of non-being. it is a perfect death (non-birth is).

these small oh soo white pages. (you loved the pictures of them). these early stories are soo sweet. it hurts to end in such a happy place. and in the pit of a dark continent, amongst a civil war and confused parents...

there is no back cover.