Kisses For A Eulogy

I am full of eulogy this evening. There is a constant narrative in myself that dictates what it sees in the past tense. What has passed, what we thought about it, what seemed to be true at the time that in retrospect seems suspect.

I am full of those moments where you're seeing the world naked for the first time and wondering why you aren't more embarrassed. Those moments where clarity exceeds your years. Where you are seeing what some people take a lifetime to get hammered into their skulls. Where you're hemorrhaging with the voice of experience because it has become too full, too bright, and life has become engorged with vision.

They often happen in the middle of stifling heat waves. When the windows are open to catch lazy breezes and an ounce of air where it is sucked deep into waiting lungs. They pile one on top of each other in my San Francisco memories. The place where I was born. Returned to at fifteen with my mother. Like home. Like a homing pigeon come back to where all the messages originate. The dovecote waits for its inmates.

Nineteen years ago I put on my Bessie Smith album during an unusually sultry heat wave. I had lovely windows in my apartment which I had thrown open to full capacity to catch whatever errant chill might roll by. I was wearing my lemon yellow printed organdy 1950's dress which, due to its transparent nature, was made more demure by an old slip. I wasn't legally old enough to drink, and didn't drink much besides, but I had connections. I poured chilled plum wine into a glass. Probably not a wine glass. As Bessie sang the laundry blues I got it. Got life. What had been; what was yet to come. It all made a kind of pattern.

I was enjoying the early scratchy blues on the thick air, all of it blowing through my dress. As was nearly always the case, I lived in the moment, and I lived outside the moment, in a tumultuous tangle. I was keyed in to all the people in the city. I could hear all the dirty living out there. I could feel everything sluggishly easing through my casements and back out again. Like a stage set it wasn't completely real. I was standing part way outside myself. My room mate was out partying.

Our building on 27th avenue was almost next door to a Russian Orthodox church*. Have I mentioned how much I love strict religion for its pageantry?

I was reading (for the hundredth time) E.M. Forster's book "A Room With A View" when something dolores wafted over the printed letters, something I could follow with my blood, something tangible like liquid love. I turned Bessie off with apology. I followed the sound to my windows, already thrown wide open, and found the source of the lament in the side yard of the church next door. There was a procession in progress of priests in tall stiff hats followed by pall bearers carrying a box of dead trailed by mourners. The priests must have been doing the singing but I could feel the spirits of the mourners following the notes like identical hands shaping the air. Slow, deliberately, they took their time, made their song into the dark, as I watched.

Voyeurs are not romantic figures. Nor are they admirable. I intruded into the hot sinking air with my eyes, with my silent strange eyes watching.

Maybe not, though. I felt the spirit of the dead too. I followed it with my other self. The one not trapped in flesh. The one always free enough to see 180 degrees around. That self crawled inside the coffin and laid next to the corpse. That self said "Goodbye person. There is love enough for both the living and the dead. So feel peace."

The music faded. The entourage rounded the corner. I was left with the heat. With the humid earth funneling through the city lights and shimmering against the break of windows. Bessie's wisdom was still circling, resonating in the quiet. What was true before had become suddenly vivid. Technicolor truth.

We all end up in the same place in the end. It doesn't matter how we go. It doesn't matter if it's too early or much anticipated. It's all the same when we exit. The only thing that truly matters is how we acquit ourselves in this moment right now. Not when we know we're about to die but when we think we have the rest of eternity to be an asshole if we want to.

I was nineteen years old.

I was seeing inside the coffin.

I was just emerging from the crushing weight of the impossible cocoon of a dissociative half life.

I was just coming out of insanity with some of my head not lost.

Like waking up on the side of the road and remembering the gravel speeding up your nostrils in the dead of night. Asphalt tar streaking through you like a near-death imprint.

Waking up to wonder how you got to this stretch of road?

Soon I would trade in my sweet pretty shared apartment for life on my own. Life completely free of any unsolicited advice, company, opinions, or reality check. Soon I would be communicating directly with the cockroaches deep into the night while watching the needling in progress out my living room window.

That night lives in my memory like a portal to something so much greater than myself. It has sustained me through many transitions. I took a shred of it with me and stashed it into my private drawer. I'll never know the name of the corpse.

But I'll always send it kisses for a eulogy.




* I found this picture on Uzvards' flickr pages. This is the actual church I'm talking about in this post. From my window I could see the side yard of this large church which is where I saw the procession described. I loved this church but am now asking myself why I never went inside.