If I were to sort my life out in freeze frames, there would be an awful lot of silence and minutes stretching out into one static scene. Me, staring into a blank computer screen, watching the tireless cursor of a word processor winking in and out of existence. Me, waking up, blinking once, twice, dragging the heavy wooden window by my bed open to the grey wall of the next house. Me, sitting down on a park bench in a Monday afternoon, reading a book and not getting past a particular sentence for nearly ten minutes because an errant thought suddenly jammed the necessary pathways of comprehension in my mind.
After we had been in this gentle embrace for a while, Naoko touched her lips to my forehead and slipped out of bed. I could see her pale blue gown flash in the darkness like a fish. ... like a fish. ... like a fish. ... like a fish. And so forth.
It's worse when I have people with me. It feels like thinking through syrup, or talking through a mist-filled room. "Yes," "no," "maybe," I would always say. I would sound like I mean it, and you would feel so lucky to have a friend like me, so easy to talk to, so sincere, so agreeable. The irony would be lost on you, you with the neon smiles, the electric blue future. No one will hear the music fading into white noise behind vacant eyes. No one will see the camera zooming out, helplessly, hopelessly freezing that single moment. No one will hear the telltale cracks of something breaking.
A few good things about being with a man who is waiting to die are the random bursts of sharp turns he is wont to make. The cool and crisp brush-on-the-skin wind at four in the morning seems colder; the laughter of children playing under the afternoon sun brings more music to his heart than the tiny muscle can possibly contain; kisses taste sweeter than souls leaving, then returning. A man waiting to die sees the world in super-saturated colors, and loves like trainwrecks, like forest fires (which is the only proper way to love, really). One would be lucky to fall in love with a man just waiting to die.
