MJ, then story #5

They say you never forget where you were when you first heard someone famous had died. With Princess Di I was camping with some friends in the mountains behind my house, and with MJ I was coming home from dinner on a cruise ship floating off the coast of France. My sister and I were both pretty shaken up. Some of my first memories are connected to his music. The first thing I ever wrote in school (1st grade) was a story about how MJ came down in a spaceship from visiting Mars and he had lots of new songs to sing.

Sad to see him go so relatively early. He was certainly a very very troubled soul, and might have done some horrible things (see "jesus juice"), but there was always the hope that he could turn it around and become something similar to how amazing/talented he was when he was younger. Very sad.

This story is about death. Written last week. Guess it kindof fits the MJ news, which feels weird.

Story #: It Wouldn't Work Unless She Was Perfectly Still

The young girl waited until her mother left for her second job, then she put on her black dress, wrapped her ponytail in a black silk tie and lay down on her bed, on top of the covers. She folder her arms across her chest and closed her eyes. She let slack the muscles in her face and neck and tried to breath gradually, horizontally, so that her stomach made no visible movement up and down. She thought herself perfectly straight and rigid. It took a while for the young girl to be satisfied of her stillness, and only when she was satisfied did she begin to pray.

“Hey big buddy. I’ve been missing you. What’s new with you over there?” She waited. Then she imagined she heard, or maybe she did hear, a response.

“It’s like being caught in a drying machine getting spun around and everytime you think you’ve figured out which way is up you get tossed again and can’t figure out how to steady yourself. It’s like that, except you don’t get sick or tired or need to breathe. You have endless energy and concentration to keep trying to stop the spinning, except it never seems to stop.”
His voice wavered and was dampened, like someone calling from inside the walls. She was calm and kind. She had to be for him. She prayed,

“Don’t worry booger, eventually it will stop. Nothing’s ever permanent. It’s probably just part of the process. The rules of the game, you know? I imagine it’s real tough on a soul to be free after so much time rooted in a body. Don’t worry. “

She put all of her calmness into that last “don’t worry”, as if sympathy and assurance were tangible, and could be floated out to her brother on the air of her voice. She heard or thought she heard,

“Have you ever been standing with your back to a wall, and you just knew the stones in the wall behind you were making faces or turning into gargoyles and stuff right behind you, but when you turned they were just stones again?

“Yeah. I know the feeling.” She thought hard for a way to describe it so that her brother knew she understood him. “Like someone is standing behind you ready to put their hand on your shoulder. ”

“Yeah, except I can’t turn around and check. I can’t turn around. So all the time it feels like someone or thing is just about ready to grab me from behind. It’s that feeling, or the drying machine feeling, or your voice. Sometimes all at once, sometimes everything is happening at once. How long has it been?”

She despaired a little to hear him sound so lost. She summoned more energy into her stillness and prayed again,

“It’s only been three weeks. Buddy, you should stop worrying about time and stuff like that. I don’t think it matters much now. All that matters now is getting you comfortable and figured out. Do you hear anyone else? I mean, someone that’s been through it maybe? Grandma maybe?”

“Once I heard mom praying for me. But she’s like you. There is a sound like combined voices, lots of them. They sound reassuring but I can’t make them out. They just combine and murmur in the background and it makes a constant noise. Sometimes I catch myself thinking it’s a heartbeat, then I remember. This place is weird. Even though it’s not a place at all. It’s hard not to feel scared. Oh, sister.

“I know, I know. Please be strong.” She wanted to cry out and hold him, but knew she couldn’t, so she kept talking. “The fear must be part of it. Maybe just the first part. Remember how scared you were to ride your bike at first? Maybe bud, the trick is to stop trying to make the fear go away, or make the drying machine stop, or pull yourself together. Maybe the trick is to let yourself come apart.” And she heard his voice in answer, she was sure of it this time,

“Thanks sis. Will you keep speaking to me? You make it easier. ”

“You know I will.” Then she paused and made a joke to keep from saying goodbye, “But you’d better find some heavenly way of returning the favor.”

“You bet”, he said, and then she heard her dead brother laugh.

Eventually she fell asleep and her breaths got deeper and vertical and moved her chest up and down in a steady rhythm. There were overripe lilies on her nightstand and she dreamt of rejoining cut stems with planted stalks and watching the flowers grow backwards to the buds and then down into the soil again. Her gardening hand fell away from her chest as she dreamt.

When her mother got home from work it was very late. She knocked softly, querying at the door to the bedroom, then opened it and stepped inside. She saw her young daughter lying there like some drugged Juliet on her bier, the nightstand light soft and angled on the black of her dress, with the lilies from the funeral drooping in the simple bedside vase, their overripe smell embalming the still room. The sight stopped her and she lost a breath to it. For a moment she felt as if in a holy presence, naked for her bare shoulders and ashamed for her work sneakers on the carpet. Instinctively she grasped for a rosary she hand’t held in her hand since she was a girl. Then she saw the steady rise of her daughter’s chest and knew her as a daughter and was filled with love for her, and mercy, and unimaginable pity. She moved to her and kneeled both knees at her bedside. She unfolded her daughter’s other arm and place it at her side. She took a spare blanket from the foot of the bed and laid it over her legs. The young girl did not wake or stir. The mother whispered, cooing, “it’ll be alright my bumblebee girl. It’ll be just fine. You just hang in there and one of these days you’ll wake up and it won’t hurt so bad. It’ll be better.”

She had said the same thing to herself too many times, and right then was the first time she believed it might be true.