07/02/2023
apologies to an opilione
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 a 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 exam 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.