07/02/2023
apologies to an opilion
Once when I was a child I remember playing in the sandbox in my backyard. I don't remember what was happening that day before or how I was feeling, what I do remember is finding an opilion, daddy long legs, and pulling its legs off. I know now that an opilione is an arthropod that evolved and diversified during the devonian. They exist now across the world relatively unchanged, feeding on smaller arthropods and living almost exclusively in backyards. I remember that I was a little scared of them, I pulled all it's legs off to be less scared of it. I remember knowing that it would cause it pain and knowing that it would die, I watched the legs that had been pulled off move and twitch on the sand. I was scared my parents would come outside and just immediately understand that I was outside killing something, I remember putting the legless body in a small bucket and leaving to go inside. I remember hoping to forget that I had done that.
At about the same time in my life, during elementary school, I remember coming across a praying mantis in the schools yard. It was hugely exciting for me, I had never seen one in person, now here was one outside, free to hold and examine for myself. I remember getting pinched by it, it didn't let go but I remember thinking it didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. When the recess bell rang and we had to line up, I still had it on me. It was too exciting for me to know to leave it where I found it. One of the teachers, a man in his fifties, walked up to me and grabbed the mantis hard in one hand, and threw it aside. I remember feeling horrified that someone would use their power over me to hurt something of mine. I remember looking at its twitching body on the cement as I walked back inside.
I was probably a little older when my dad took me fishing. Not the first time he took me fishing, but one of the first times I caught a fish myself. I remember standing on a bridge over a lake that smelled horrible. My line caught and my dad helped me reel, I had caught a pike. I remember it wasn't very big, but it had the plastic part of a beer case sticking out of its mouth, like you would see in a cartoon of a polluted lake. I remember my dad had a plastic mallet that he used to break its skull. He said it was painless, and I remember asking him if we were going to eat the fish, he told me you couldn't eat fish from that river. I remember looking at it's body on the grass as I got into the car to leave.
I was 22 years old when you killed yourself in October of 2017. I remember seeing a dead pigeon on the road that day, but I don't remember if it was before or after I was told you were dead. I just remember focusing on that bird, and the air, and my skin that day. Everything became death, the entire sky turned into a ghost that touched everything. My skin was a ghost. I remember the day before the messages of love you had sent us, I hadn't gotten around to properly replying at the time. You drank poison, and the police said that you had left not just a note but a notebook written in code. I remember that book, we haven't translated it, and as time goes on it feels less like my business to do so. I have your letters, and every gift you ever sent me, on my desk. Those are ghosts too.
I remember when I told my parents and I remember how clear it was that they couldnt do a thing for me, it was as if I had brought them a doll with no head and asked them to sew it back together, but I didn't know where the head was. You changed me then, and how I am as a person is filtered through this fine mesh that was attached to my life. I've never gotten any better, I still think about that opilione, about that mantis, about that pike.
I remember the sky but I still see a ghost.