My One Damaging Procrastination

This piece is part of the 3rd Symposium (theme: Procrastination) of the Soaring Twenties Social Club, “the home of the 2020’s artistic renaissance,” founded by Thomas J Bevan. I’m new to this group, but if you’re currently subscribed to I Won’t Keep You, it is because of your awareness of STSC!

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Not one to procrastinate, I do what I should before what I want. Maybe I procrastinate living a bit, but this post is about death. 

I am procrastinating getting over Your Dying. I’m so slow to get about this task that I’m nowhere close to the stitched edge of healing; still an open wound of ooze. 

Do gunshots cauterize themselves? 

Are they ragged or smooth? 

You used your gun once, for the first and last time.

It was one day before the full moon when you held metal to your head. Could the moon have been Heaven dissolving the spongy darkness for you? Are you chuckling at my liberties, an atheist who now believes in Heaven?

You packed up your life and moved on, likely at the stroke of midnight. I will never forgive myself for missing your suicide text. 11:42 post meridiem. This isn’t a delayed forgiveness, it’s a never-meant-to-happen-forgiveness. Thus, undelayable.

“When we started hanging out, I had told you I was planning to move. To be honest, I had planned to move many times in the past. . . . it saddens me, but there is no other way to say it other than I have now done so.” 

Suicides are only postponed, never prevented. Yet the phrase “procrastinate my death” never made sense until now. 

Were the owls out with their screeches and cries, trying to convince you otherwise? 

“I’ve always felt alien in this form, trapped and yearning to be free from this planet.”

Did you procrastinate Your Dying? 

Those moments between Drinking Tea and Emptying Your Mind? 

I refuse to get over Your Dying; a postponement of closure. 

Your death is a gnarled root, extending its thirsty reach far away from the ancient tree. It trips me every fucking time I try and soothe myself with joyful memories. Leaving me face-first in the dirt, filling my fingernails with the fluff of you we buried under the mulberry tree. 

“I’ve never been more of my happy self than when I’ve been around you and in your presence. . . .never had I known such beautiful and amazing friendship til we met.”

I’m as dark as a comet’s core, holding your death closer to my lava-swamp heart than I’ve ever held your life.

Deadlines for healing come and go, and I dilly dally on the slope next to you in the moonlight, where the blood has washed away but the loneliness remains.

The prairie Inhaled Your Propellant. I exhaled all Hope.

“You need to breathe. . . Donate the organs if they’re healthy, cremate the shell that remained.”

If only I could approach Healing with the same thoughtful planning you approached Dying. Is this the one last thing you will teach me? 

I promise to try and finish the task of Hurting and get about Healing. 

“I love you for that and for so many many reasons.”

Te quiero, buenas noches, mi mejor amigo.