HOME | DD

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

The universe is a testament to itself. All else is a by-product. And the things we feel and see, hear and breathe, everything is merely a by-product of creation and imagination. There is ordinariness in everything we do. To transcend that ordinariness, to raise ourselves to that level, is to fall on pompous hypocrisy. A denial of our basic facts and state. We are ordinary. We are ordinary beings, human, cerebral, emotionally-inclined, and we will all die someday. We will all feel a pain on varying levels. We'll all suffer a bit before getting our atoms reused. Oh, well.

Dispassionate as I may be, there's more to living and dying than ease and fear. And what's easy to fear? Death? Living? Both are alike and similar on so many heights but we can only see limited sections in a very grand book about trees and rivers with tombstones paving the road. And fear and memory mix. Like glass and sand, particles and shards swirling about almost-fluid, almost-meaningful, but like a wash of laundry that twinkles in the light and does nothing more. And it's quiet here.

I can see myself clearer now. And my hands reflect like mirror or glass. I imagine death being a slow truck, a bus stop, the clear-paved road. I see the fog and the early morning. My mother at one end, slowly fading, my coffin and bed at the other, growing clearer. I imagine mortality as like an old friend. But I do not want to die.

I have given death much of my thought and a lot of my thinking. You may wonder why, as death is stingy and cannot afford to lose any chump change. I'd say it's because one day death will take everything I have. I guess that's why I am saying all this. I want to make something, an image, an after-effect, to lay down beside the spot where I stood. I am so afraid of dying I can mold it like paper in cornstarch.

So I have given my death a name. I call him Nemo. He is my brother. Wrapped in bandages and gauze, wrapped in plague and prison chains, he is Anglo-American, a severe contrast to my plump Taiwanese face, modern glasses instead of spectacles, and a Gap hoodie. I hold his hand, but he does not look at me. His eyes change color. Ice-blue. And I feel like crying. Why? Because he won't look? No, not really.

Because I know that death will not really be so easily personified. Because I know a childhood dream and a severely over-used imagination are all I have to confront and understand mortality. I hope it is enough. So, I will call you Nemo. You're my older brother. You have hair like flaxen wheat, not that I've ever seen this cliché but there it goes, and the blonde is mixed with grey and brown, mud. Now mud I have seen. In dirty tire treads, at the bottom of my shoe, I have seen mud in your hair but not only.

It is in my veins, a fat coagulation, a cholesterol like strangling hands, buttery, fat, fingers like sausages. I have seen mud at the bottom of pools, in a cup of water, granules of brown so dark they look almost black, but not the black of skin or the brown of a predetermined genetic disposition. This is earth. This is dirt. This is water, contaminated? Married? Mixed? It's water and earth. This is mud. It is what a human body shares in common. Carbon. Earth. This is what I will become one day. Earth. Dirt. Dust. A brown mud.

They teach you colors early in school. You learn names in many or more languages. Brown is the least remarkable of them. Perhaps because it is the color we all become. Either that or grey. So I pick your face, Nemo, and like a cabbage I turn it this way and that. You don't look at me. Is it because I am afraid of meeting your eyes or because you know I can look whenever I want? But I don't see those eyes of yours. Pretty and blue, but I don't see. I grab your head and press it against me. And your hair is muddy, both the color and the cleanness.

I guess, it's been years since you've had a bath. We're in a cave for some reason. We always seem to go to caves when looking for something. It's the place where things are buried in stories. Treasure. Or corpses. You finally look me in the eyes and I think it's because I've made you look at me. Your eyes seem to melt with water. It's not ice. It's melting snow. I fold myself into paper and tuck my face away. This is a connection that will not last. I'm desperate at this point. Is this my death? Is this the end of my life? Staring up at me so sadly I want to fold myself into triangles and slowly dissipate like a glass dream?

I'm smiling now. This is my death. This is my Nemo. You are my representation of an ended life with all its tragic impact, condensed into personification. You are a reality now. I hold you and your arms, though bloody and grey, seem to be holding back. I look at you and a warm brown stares back.