The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

January- The Family Tree (Part Two)

            Gerard decided to stop smoking shortly after. At first he said it was because it was too much hassle to remember to buy them, especially in the winter. We had been getting freezing rain on and off for the past while, along with a terrible wind, and he seemed to be setting up a routine of staring out the window, debating with a scrunched up face, and then smoking butts in the ashtray as he avoided the weather. When he finally ran out of that option, he assured me that he was done for good. I noticed, however, on the other side of the apartment another ashtray that he could have tried to gather butts from, in addition to his old jacket that still had a half pack, and the real reason for his cessation began to reveal itself more. He was afraid of his health, or rather, he was afraid of losing his health. My father's heart attack had scared him, because even if he wasn't exactly in the same boat in terms of how their bodies wore their ages, Gerard was the same age. This meant that he could get sick as well. There was something uncanny about aging that I had pieced together from his prior statements and from observing his new actions. It was the one process of the body that could not be reversed. As I saw demonstrated with him, body mass could be changed, even the stretch marks left behind could fade if one really wanted them to. Hair colour, also changed, and with all of our discussions on biological determinism, surgery was now a valid option for masking the appearance of the body beyond what had happened "naturally." But you could not undo age, in spite of what advertisements told you. It was there and always would be there, and there was no cure. It was the only thing we couldn't argue our way out of. But Gerard, even without me bringing up his new changes in habits, would always try to at least talk his way out of something.

            "As far as I'm concerned, we have a choice in absolutely everything we do, except two things: being born, and dying. And even some people disagree with me on the dying front when you take in the consideration of suicide, so perhaps I should say that the second choice is deterioration. We have no choice in birth or decay, and decay can be either physical or mental. Usually people who view suicides see 'nothing wrong' with the person. They are merely looking for physical decay. Usually mental has been going on for awhile; it is never a sudden process. What is? People only think processes are sudden from their own perception, when suddenly, something changes that's visible. People see a butterfly come out of a cocoon and think, so soon? But that butterfly has been waiting for such a long time to do that, it's just that no one ever noticed it before. Nothing ever is sudden, even birth takes nine months to fully form, and though we acknowledge pregnancy, we don't always acknowledge that time period beyond our own expectations for the foetus. We keep thinking of the person, but the mass of cells, they are constantly shifting and changing and accomplishing so much - and certainly none of that is sudden. The same goes on, for children, they grow like fucking weeds, and you blink, and it's gone," he sighed a bit there, and ran his hand through his greying hair. I was listening from my place in the kitchen, surprised by his sudden rant but wanting to bear witness to it. He had been talking a lot about children recently, and I suspected this was from the amount of time he had been spending with his brother and his new family. Were they really new, though? I found myself questioning. They had always been there, like Gerard insisted, and then he just stopped looking and so everything, of course, felt sudden.

            He went on, "Even when kids aren't growing like weeds, the body is still doing things, the mind is still processing. Even cancer, people only notice it when it's a tumour and they can't deny it anymore, and then they start acting against it. People try to stop themselves from making it worse, but it's already gotten that far. Growth, good and bad, flowers and weeds, is always happening. Every second counts, nothing is ever wasted. Every breath is one step closer to not having a choice anymore. So at least I can choose now to not have smoke in my body as I go forth and maybe prevent some ridiculous bargaining later on when I suddenly realize that my world is different," he concluded, trying to stay light-hearted at the end and poking fun at himself. He had actually been smoking while he was making this speech, discovering the old pack in his jacket as he meandered through the apartment, but it was his last one. He hadn't wanted to waste the package, and halfway through, he stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray full of butts. He handed the rest of the pack over to me, and then went to clean up the ashtray. Without thinking, I pulled one out and began to smoke it, only vaguely wondering about my own mortality and my body's physical changes as I made my way through my life. It was still hard feel the effects of aging for me, even though I could see them. Holding up pictures of myself in high school to now I surely looked different, but I didn't feel like that. It was more so maturity than aging for me, but I knew that eventually the maturity would morph into something else. I breathed in and out the smoke, and realized it was happening right then. Day by day. I wonder if Gerard felt different than he had seven years ago, if his change of skin peeled back into this mortal aging, and as he came back from cleaning out the ashtray, I asked him.