She is aged.
And she comes over to me.
Things start to come into focus.
When I come to; I’m walking.
I’m almost to Franklin’s house.
I feel shaken.
Shaken because I don’t know if I was dreaming or remembering.
I can’t make sense of it.
And as my weighted feet carry me forward, I start to wonder if I’ll ever regain control of my body and my mind. I start to wonder if I’ll ever be in control of myself.
I stumble for a moment and catch my breath.
I should be worried about the fact that I have no recollection of how I got to this particular place.
In some ways I feel as if I’ve begun to give up on myself.
When I finally get to Franklin’s place, I start to feel a nervous sort of rush wash over my body. It feels as if I’ve been here in this moment a thousand times before, but I suppose that’s what happens when you’ve lived a life as long as me. Things start to jumble together.
Things start to repeat.
I stand for a moment and stare at his front door.
I want to knock but it’s as if my fist is weighted down. It’s as if my body is refusing me. So instead I look at the door with blank eyes.
I’m waiting for something to happen.
Waiting for my muscles to take control.
And finally my hand lifts.
And finally I knock.
I hear a rustling inside and I watch as the door handle jiggles.
And then my gut feels as if it’s on fire. My entire body soaks itself in a sense of dread.
And it’s a pause.
A breath.
And Franklin’s wife answers the door. She doesn’t say a word as she stands looking at me with a face that betrays more sadness than I have seen in all my years. She looks at me and her lips open in a failed attempt to speak.
And then the fire in my gut, it spreads to my body.
I look at her and open my mouth:
‘Are you ok?’
She shakes her head and tears roll from her eyes.
She shakes her head and her body starts to shake.
She shakes her head and I feel lost.
And it takes a minute, but she finally regains composure. Hands to face; she dries her eyes and looks me over.
‘Why are you here?’
I’m starting to wonder if maybe she finally caught Franklin cheating on her. I’m wondering if she finally hit a breaking point and decided to cut through the denial that has been weighing her down for several hundred years.
But I know that’s not it.
I pause.
She asks again.
‘What are you doing here?’
Her voice is stern and tired.
Her voice is gentle and in shock.
I can’t seem to find any words that fit this moment. Every syllable seems to be like a jigsaw piece that does not fit.
It’s a nervous twisting of nervous fingers and finally I open up my mouth. I open up my mouth and I ask her where Franklin is.
She steps back.
Her face scrunches.
Her chest rises and falls.
And that weight that her body had betrayed to me; I can feel it too.
‘Why are you doing this?’
And she asks this with a genuine concern in her voice. She asks this with a gait that moves in a sad rhythm.
‘Doing what?’
And she looks at me with puzzled eyes. She stares at me as if I’ve lost my mind and I want to tell her she’s right. But I suppose there’s no point in stating the obvious.
Her words come out in a hushed anger.
‘Coming around here and asking for him like that. How could you do that? Why would you do that? You know that he’s been dead for years.’
And it’s at this moment that I feel the hollow nature of my chest as all the breath escapes from it.
‘Look, you knew that my past was going to catch up to me at some point. I thought I could outrun it forever, but that wasn’t true. I slowed down. I faltered. And all my yesterdays, they took everything.’
This is Franklin.
This is my best friend.
He’s just a memory.
Like my wife.
‘We all have to reckon with our life at some point. Unfortunately it just wasn’t something I could handle.’
He’s been dead for years.
He shot himself in the head.
He used a rifle.
The stain on the wall eventually came out. But not before his wife figured out how to let go of everything.
‘I couldn’t make things work.’
Franklin is dead and I don’t know what that means.
I’m standing outside.
On the sidewalk.
‘There wasn’t a funeral because my wife didn’t think to have one.’
And he knows this because I know this, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to remember any of it.
I sit down on a bench.
He sits next to me.
‘I was caught cheating. I was caught and she threatened to leave me. It wasn’t something that I could deal with. It wasn’t something that I wanted to deal with. And no matter how hard I tried, she wouldn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t take any of my explanations. I couldn’t fix any of it.’
And Franklin was an asshole.
‘I tried to make things right. I tried to pretend that things were going to be ok. But it was a lie and I knew it and she knew it and we both knew that there was no way we could un-tie the knot that I had spent a millennia tying.’
Franklin was an asshole, but at least he was honest.
‘So here I am. Dead except for the part of me that hides away in that fucked up brain of yours.’
