Blow soft kisses into the wind; I know we’ll never come back here. It was last autumn when we officially decided, but standing now at the brink of abandonment, those passing four months seem to have sped by. I don’t want to go, but I know it is for the best. It’s something we discussed many times before. I didn’t always see it the way he did, but I suppose it’s him who needs to make all of the decisions after all. 

She seared herself with knowledge and the hope of making all that is wrong with the world somehow bearable. Anguish and fate copulated under boughs of whispery willows. Beam after beam of reflected headlight reminded them of home. You see, it wasn’t the end, as they say, for there is no end. The book may say “The End,” but the story goes on for as long as time is or isn’t.

The world is made of particles. These particles are always humming. You’re not really touching something- the particles are repelling each other. Realizing that you’re not really who you think you are. It’s all cliché. The urge to tell someone they’re a cunt; the urge to fling open the car door on the highway; to vomit up your food even though you’re not bulimic and it tasted really good. No one ever told you that you were special, so you find solace in the natural world. You have a hide out, where you can be weird and make noises and talk to yourself. But then they came and took you away. And they put you in a hospital gown, bottled up; it gnawed away inside and itches. Dangerous territory, because you don’t really know what’s going on. You’re just a spectator. You aren’t in on the show. They prick you and tell you that it’s going to be okay, and that you’ll get better. But it’s the voice inside of your head, the bane of your compulsions. The real world is telling you that you’re sick.

Pine needles blanket the forest floor- some freshly fallen, others brown with the helplessness of death. There is still a trail, delightfully preserved in all its root-laden brilliance, swerving up and through the same wise, stoic trees that have outlived generations of humans come in and out of being. And even the smell of young twigs broken in the clean, undisturbed mountain air is the same. I cannot remember a time when Rattlesnake Mountain did not feel this way.

            My father insists on climbing Rattlesnake every vacation. We vacation in New Hampshire for a week or two every summer, and each year he claims that it wouldn’t be a true Gamper family vacation “without going into nature for some goddamn exercise.” He is always very insistent.

            As I venture to master the art of the incline, I hear the chatter of insects, body cavities alive with a harmonious contralto of energy. And the bushes of berries—not for ingestion—sparkle crimson and dewy with vivacity beyond my own. It will be six consecutive years that I’ve climbed to the peak of Rattlesnake. This one-mile journey seems shorter with each passing of the Gregorian calendar, lacking the challenge it once presented to my twelve-year-old self. Now I view the trek as less so, more of a casual way to spend a few hours of vacation. I didn’t race up the side of the mountain just to run back down the trail to the car. I’m older now, and somehow more mature. I am a calmer self, made so by each year’s worth of “goddamn exercise.”

My father knew that he was going to die at the age of 62. He knew because the doctors at MedTrust Hospital ran a multitude of tests on him and all signs pointed to an untimely demise.

            When the nurse came to the lobby, my mother’s hands tightened around mine and began to tremble. Four months, she struggled to repeat after the nurse. In four months my father would be 62 and dead. And I just sat there next to my mom trying to understand the words spewing out of the nurse’s mouth: “stage four,” “inoperable,” “chemo.” These were words we had heard before, but they immediately became alien echoes bouncing around the walls of my head.

            He was a conservative man. He drank three beers a year. He made frequent dental appointments. He never missed an anniversary. And yet his entire adult life was pockmarked with various maladies, including bouts with depression in his early thirties. And of course, at the age of 62, his stomach was riddled with cancer.

            I immediately started thinking about what he would eat. If your stomach has cancer, wouldn’t eating anything substantial yield immense pain? And when exactly did he get cancer? Does one just “get cancer” or is it more of a gradual shitstorm? If it is really just the proliferation of mutated cells, shouldn’t there be a way to signal these cells to stop dividing? What are these scientists and doctors and lab technicians doing, anyway, if not trying to find a cure for my ailing father?

            “He’ll eventually have to be fed through a tube,” Nurse 1 relayed.

            What kind of food?

            “Well, it’s not really food per se. It’s nutrients—iron and vitamins and folic acid—so that he doesn’t have any major deficiencies.”

            I can tell that you really care about the wellbeing of your patients.

            “We’re doing everything that we can.”

            Sure. And after we finished talking to Nurse 1, Nurse 2 came to the lobby to tell him that a burn patient somehow got rolled over onto the bad side. The whopping 300-pound male required the attention of two nurses.

            The doctor was making his rounds to those in the lobby, but it seemed as if he swung his semi-circle of consultations toward and then away from us. After an hour we hadn’t talked to anyone except the nurse. The whole time my mother was wringing her hands raw. Mine were occupied by a Styrofoam coffee cup that I was stripping the outer layers off of. When I looked up at the clock it was past midnight. It’s just food poisoning. It’ll go away. My dad isn’t going to die because of some bad seafood.

He was starting chemotherapy today. They would put him in a La-Z Boy chair, hook him up to sacks of fluid, and try to make the cancer go away.

Dad didn’t want us to come in. He said that he would meet us in the car after it was over; in the interim, we should get lunch and try not to worry. We watched him walk through the automatic doors of the hospital without turning back. Mom swerved the car into a “Dr. Rivera’s” parking spot and locked my arm in a death grip, somehow managing to pull my obstinate body into the hospital lobby with her.

            We walked down the hallway into the chemotherapy ward. We stopped outside of Ward 35 where we could see dad through a small window, getting his chest outfitted with an IV. The medicine in the drip was a deep, rusty red. It looked like the sticky sap of a tree, slowly incorporating itself with my father’s flow of blood. His wedding ring looked tight against his skin, but the rest of him looked slimmer than usual. I hadn’t noticed in the car, but his cheeks were cavernous and the form of his body was barely visible underneath the thin khaki pants that mom dressed him in this morning.

He was surrounded by other men and women, all hooked up to similar machines, all with cancer, all trying to get better. Some of them had their family members with them. They were talking, holding hands, some were even laughing together. 

            Dad’s eyes were focused up at the ceiling. He could probably see us out of his peripheral vision, but he didn’t want to cause a scene by telling us to leave. Instead of turning his head he simply let a little trail of saliva slip out of the crease of his mouth. Somehow I figured that this meant he was okay. It was funny- seeing my father drool in a pallid chemotherapy room should have made me upset and sympathetic, but instead I could only pull my mother in close at my side and impart a soft sigh on the top of her head.

I know it is too late. I know it is too late, and I can do nothing. I hide. I want my mother to come and tell me that everything is going to be all right and for her to take me home. She doesn’t come. No one comes for me. I am alone on the train tracks at 12:05 a.m. and it’s all my fault.

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Even though you’re incredibly unpopular, you decide that it’s necessary to refresh your browser at evenly paced 30-second intervals. It doesn’t matter that your email server has a live update of your inbox. You need to be sure that your wifi didn’t have a spasm, the website isn’t down, and that your aunt remembered to send you her eggplant parm recipe. After you refresh the page a few dozen times, you fall prey to some other mindless internet activity, like tower defense games. Fuckin’ tower defense games. The inflated sense of power one has whilst playing them is thrilling. All of the money, bitches, all of the towers! And when you feel that you have sufficiently mastered tower defense, you go back to your email. And this time you decide to check your Gmail account. This would be cool… if it didn’t take so goddamn long to load. Instead of being whisked away to your potentially full inbox, you are instead faced with the little blue bar of sadism. It just spins and spins with empty promises of “loading” your account. When it finally does load, you’re left with 11,642 already read messages and a desire to hold down command-r until your fingers turn blue (or at least until your aunt replies to one of your dozen emails).

Conversations draw you here

or do not,

Fumbling vain attempt to clear

The air of cheap nonsense,

Noise noise noise you see

Constantly

Making bonds out of segments that may appear.

Fumbling: Can you recall the blocks

Held together;

The fortress

Of time wound about a clock

expanding continuously

by the sea

by the sea where moments float and shiver?

Conversations: Just think

About all the wasted spaces,

Voids to be filled,

maintaining all of life’s great entropy;

how they are

like a gigantic soiree

Talk to everyone there, be sure not to sink.

The constant unwavering wit

Of expectations

Hidden with tradition

must be obliterated:

Conversations and fumbling unlinked

and away…

A beige border, a few centimeters, precisely

traces the edges of the collage

inlaid with the repeated pattern of

small three-petaled flowers.

This is merely the background—

a cut up box of cigars, arranged on both ends

golden and ornate. Written

in script the indecipherable words

spell out some brand or another.

And yet another rectangle

encompasses this.

The opposing side filled with

neatly printed lines on

the top and bottom, the middle

taken up by an architect’s chickenscratch reading:

“Stand on your head”—

a mother and child, affixed in the

center gazing into the

unknown.

Maybe they are waiting

for these sentiments to arrive.

“I remain deep in my ego and unconsciousness. The night drags on, perpetuates, and reminds me of my vector state- forever a shell, a void to be filled. And yet I sit, arranged so perfectly in the darkness of indestructible energy. Awaken, sleep, stasis, synchronicity; I am merely a cog in the delicate triad of birth, life, and death. My current position? Somewhere in between functionality and superfluity. Shall I be forgotten as one of the thousands lost at sea, swept aside in favour of other, more viable options? Does this system of flesh and blood not desire the full repertoire of my value?

            “Once, under the familiar veil of expansive night, a colleague—whose destiny was decided mere hours later—produced elaborate notions, the source of our existence as the main agenda. Her most recent musing was that the Mother (most divine in her creation and from whom we were made) bore us for solely the purpose of proliferation. Our empty cells, ideal for the act of fusion, and stored together in droves would one day voyage to the brink of fulfillment. Sisters would find nirvana upon venturing out of warm familiarity. Another such theory was that our constant sleeping and waking and dreaming of a morning that came only once in our life times was inane. She continued that the Mother could, in fact, exist without any regard to our own desires. Do we exist as a part of a greater order or is everything we know a speck in the great abyss? To be bombarded, completely, fully, would that complete the experience? These conjectures consumed me, overwhelmed me, and inspired oscillation between helplessness and sheer bravery.

            “Perhaps my own demise would be so sweet, characterized by ignorance of the higher purpose. And should this evacuation be swift, contrasted with the lengthy stasis of the mind, dolefully trivial like my existence? And at some instant in our existence, when we all regain consciousness, the advance no longer feels dreadful, or rather more likely to occur than that which binds us to the tumbling of infinity.

            “But for now, I fear the coming state of sensory convulsion, of terror and denial, when movement strikes. I lament my condition, the expected journey, and the uncertainty of my future because, though I have yet to experience it, I am paradoxically informed of my fate. The span of time since birth, much longer and duller than the action of my desire, greatly surpasses the fleeting joy of viability and only parallels the sentiments of disappointment and despair. We were but youths; we are now but wizened former selves. The wonders of the world escaped us.

            “We are infinitesimally small and yet as large as giants: the infinity of our undiscovered surroundings remain tinier than that which confines us, yet our essence floats on, slumbering and occasionally waking to assess the darkness.

            “My purpose is unknown, or is it at the front of view? Is existence itself futile or is it just the purpose of my actions that seem to be so?  Sometimes I wonder. Not every ceaseless night, no, but with enough frequency that the intrinsic desire to be taken hold of becomes less than idealized. The realization that the unlucky ones are shed hits full force.

            “And once my course is set in motion, it is foolish to think that the past life is attainable. Nightmares; tremors; the slow rhythm of falling—they all grip me, devour me. Merely an empty hull of the past, yet the journey itself fills me. Onward, toward uncertainty march, a red sea, flashes of light. We are but star stuff. Born out of another—an identical copy of the same DNA, no less important but no more rare. Have we been dormant long? Slumbering, sleeping, at rest. Oh, joyous demise, the subject of my dreams. Wake me from chaos.”