compendium

daddy

daddy
i was ten when they buried you. / at twenty i tried to die / and get back, back, back to you

At night I sat on the edge of the building, swung my legs over the chasm, and pulled down my oxygen mask. The skin around the corners of my mouth still remembered what it felt like to have it there.

I breathed and my lungs fluttered like wings.

Have you ever seen a fledgling try to land on water? But it's young and inexperienced and shiny new, and it doesn't know to tuck in its wings, and when they grow too heavy to keep them aloft it lets them drop and the water soaks into the downy feathers it have left and it cannot lift them ever again, and it floats and floats and floats until a predator catches sight of an easy victim?

They are killed by how brand-new they are.

My lungs are old and wearied, but they are brand new at the same time. They don't know how to take in too much of this new oxygen. They don't know how to stretch and inflate, they don't know how to sink and tuck in.

I sat there and I breathed.

I breathed to die.

I breathed each studious breath until one of the streetlights across from me flickered out, and I lost my nerve and pulled the mask back over my mouth. It was true that this would kill me either instantaneously - if I gave up on my mask - or slowly - with all the brief times I had to pull it away and shove food in my mouth before I died of starvation. Either way, my lungs were going to kill me, one day.

To distract myself from the August cold, I walked along the raised edge and set up candles, all different kinds of candles I had scavenged in my time in the almost forsaken city. Tall, skinny, short, stout, round, square, wide, flaky, cracked, smooth, white, brown, purple, gold, red. Lilac blossom, clean towels, cinnamon apple, ocean waves, lemon and grass. I went around with my stingy little lighter and lit every single one. It probably looked like some strange one-person cult was going on up here, but it smelled really nice. And overwhelming. But sometimes you need to be overwhelmed. After a while, I couldn't smell anything anymore, and that was what I wanted to happen, so I laid down and tried to sleep.