Alalia
[You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life .]
We are a family of militant existence.
Gary Owen Hutton and I both lived with a glaringly obvious speech impediment. We stuttered, simply put. As my maternal grandfather, he is the one I resemble the most out of all the Hutton family. Stuttering was something he noticed in me first, and between our frustration with pronouncing words like ‘frustration’, we bonded on a very intricate level.
He will be born into this world on the twentieth of August, 1942. We will both have to endure an adolescence of tied tongues, our minds out-thinking our dialect. This, is something he will tell me when I contemplate bashing my head against the wall when the way I say certain phrases causes a vocal stir. I become one of the only people he likes talking to on the phone, as the pressure of call-and-answer causes us both to mess up our sentences. This is comforting.
Our upbringings were one and the same and our suffering was mutual. I believe that a rough childhood shared in discussion between two people can bring them together if they’re similar in any way, shape, or form. It makes for a harmonious sort of human allegiance. The kind that’s tougher than brick.
To understand the rate at which one suffers and how well you able to relate is a trait of empathy I’ve always admired. I sense that this is an admiration he and I have had brewing in common.
The bleakness of my earlier years are quickly corroded by a visit to Grandpa Gary’s apartment. The furniture was vastly expensive, and each wall was decked out in wedding portraits of him and his wife, Gloria. To this day, I have never seen a person love another person so endlessly than the way that Gary loved Gloria. It was at worst; selfish, and at best; selfless.
Gary is at first only known as nothing but my grandfather to me, but soon I will realize that Gloria is not my grandmother. She is a step-grandmother. At a young age, I learn that the concept of a soulmate is not real sooner than I learn that the tooth fairy bears the same fate. My grandfather and grandmother will split up early on in the life of my mother because that’s just how life is. Both of them are very gentle and loving people, but at this point, I will know nothing of Gloria yet. I am apprehensive and uncertain.
She and I were both very shy, so most visits involved me slipping my way past her and into the view of my grandfather, who was quick to remind me to give my regards to Gloria. Potato salad was at first a simple dish I was a bit grossed out by because it usually featured onions, which is the vegetable of the Devil, but quickly became a comfort meal she prepared for the cloudier days whenever I came around. We find peace in each other’s tendency to go completely mute at random.
Years roll on by and now Gloria is overwhelmingly sick. She will soon succumb to cancer, and my grandfather is in the midst of a thick swamp of dread that will rid him of all his purpose. This is something he expresses with his movements, not his words. One day, she slips into the deep unknown. Suddenly, the apartment is stripped bare.
Gary Owen Hutton is suddenly nothing but a noun given to a being who only exists because the planet serves to be nothing but a steady stream of procreation. He is still and quiet, no dynamic in emotion. Grief can rip apart the worth of anything that lives long enough to witness death. Within months, he has aged very noticeably, and every embrace he gives to anyone is deep and full of longing. You take with him a bit of mourning on your commutes back home.
My grandfather becomes innate blankness.
Summer disappears and all of a sudden, there is ten days pending from the twentieth year in my life. My grandfather disappears from the world on the first of September, 2014, due to complications of a heart attack. I imagine the afterlife is vast and spacious, so he must’ve offered to show up if only to see Gloria again.
This has become the year of loss in my life. The father of my mother has passed on, and so has the mother of my father. I was much closer to the former, as he was much more local in my aging; the latter was infamously sour over the existence of my mother’s part in having me, so there wasn’t much fondness to be found in those fields.
Hospitals look very much like what most believe Heaven to. Long and narrow hallways, overlit sources of light. It’s almost enough to trick you into believing that there’s only one sort of afterlife meant for all who perish in those sorts of buildings. In a way, it’s very flattering albeit strange to think about when trying to keep yourself away from getting your hopes down. A very messy atmosphere, hospitals are.
A few months prior, my grandfather informed me that when Gloria was in the middle of cremation, he had felt this urge to jump in the machinery and rid himself of the world with her. This is not the first time someone in my family has contemplated suicide, but it is the only time hearing such a new take on it that it fills me with longing rather than sadness. He, too, will be cremated.
His ashes will be spread out amongst soil that Gloria’s ashes also rest. Within a lot of ways, I feel as if he’s truly happier for it.
Looking at a half-hearted suicide note I wrote when I was seventeen, it states that when I go, ‘Shady Lane’ by Pavement is to be played when my body lowers. There are days when I think about the process of entering and leaving, and what the wreck of a door swung open or slammed shut entails. I will think about this in close detail when the eulogy of Gary Owen Hutton is served and we are all engaged in praying hands.
The last time I ever saw my grandfather, he was draped in a violet robe with a five’o’clock shadow — the aura wasn’t eerie, simply peaceful. There’s never any need for the end of a lifetime to drop at such a shaky, depressing decline. Sometimes, you’re lucky and death finds you when you’ve lived enough by your own standards.
Funeral services are always cut short too soon in such a way that it makes you wonder how sane must people be to work at a place like this willingly. In African culture, they say that the reason why most grieving families are shown heaving themselves in complete hysterics is because that is what sadness means to them. It is meant to be dramatic and visceral. When asked about the way that we convey sadness, they believe people of other cultures to be cold and distant, when we are shown holding back everything we have raging.
I picture a gathering in Ghana of rattled family, all dressed in red and black. They are singing and sobbing simultaneously. This will all pass for them — this is a ritual of grief that passes through their spirits like sickness; experienced and released. We cope indefinitely, and that is our mechanism. Flawed and bears the tendency to make with our insides the way lava does to soil.
At the procession, the whole experience is at parts tarnished by the appearance of those who were married into the family, who will claim the rights of my grandfather’s ashes. A member of those not bearing my surname introduce me to the rest of their family, but I do not know who any of these people are and nor do I care. In the light leaks of conversation that happen, I stutter. On the surface, I am a cool and calm treat to be around, but my innards are cheap chocolate coating; ready to crack and erupt at the slightest tap.
My father is a cameo role in a brief thought. He moved out a year ago to look after his mother when she was sick. The contact made since then is minimal and awkward. I look in the mirror for fourteen seconds. Fourteen seconds is enough to fully analyze all of the pores you catch in your own reflection. Eventually, the mind begins to pick out all of the traits on me that resemble him the most. The sprouting follicles, the loose ends, budding pale spots; the effects of aging in hypertension, suddenly teeming at the sight of its likeness.
Our coughing patterns, our sunken eye-sockets, the rate at how our facial hair grows — I wonder about the alternate version of my life in which I am closer to him than my mother and figure out how I would apologize to him for not being there when his mother died. He would send me a text message four days later, wishing me a happy birthday. I wonder if his sentiments are genuine and not vengeful, but I keep that to myself and send some innocuous regards along.
Soon, I will begin to forget what he looks like and how his voice sounds.
Whether I am left the carcass of a distracted driver with heavy cargo or the victim of a late-night robbery; the venture into nothingness is something mandatory, something needed. I am comfortable with the concept of death, and when it has inevitably become applied to me. I am not sure if a deity exists, nor am I sure an afterlife exists. At the funeral, I am not sure if anything really exists anymore. With delayed blinking, the marriage of each eyelid helps coax my mid-day migraine.
Coming to terms with how unfamiliar of an alien I can be, the first few notes of Shady Lane echo ever so quietly. Looping, lingering. Opening and closing.
There are days when I think about the process of entering and leaving, and what the wreck of a door swung open or slammed shut entails.
Amity of most kinds tend to become fickle in the long run, but I still think about what I mean to my friends and family. I seem to be born from the patience and attachment of those who choose to surround me on a regular basis, and there is a gratefulness to be found in the brains of those patient with its flaws.
I, too, am born by disappearance and I, too, will one day become merged with that disappearance.
The dust left behind in the shape of a painting once there gives way to serve a growth in character, there is much passion to be found in whatever commits to growing old and collecting mold with you.
Within my body, I feel as if it takes in the happiness that those close to me are feeling and absorbs it — akin to photosynthesis; a human kind. I have no need for affection or intimacy, because friends of mine exude such powerful light when their significant others are nearby, that it becomes difficult to avoid tuning in on the mass of warmth.
I have found the crux of this year to be one of total growth. A feeling most identify as fact in that spirituality is all a farce separates from me now when I think about the future; I wish to see my grandfather again, bathed in the light of his wife, Gloria. I wish to be born again when this round is over, so that I can help my father fully process the loss of his mother.
I wish to brace myself for the day that Father Time has shut my door (as it is always nigh), and to stay working on suicide notes of all varieties. The idea of turning off the last light before setting aside some last words haunt me far more than a gravestone bearing my name. But, maybe every word I have ever uttered and typed out is enough. Whether it be a romantic letter, a two-weeks notice, or a self-written description of yourself — everything you create never seems to stop defining you post-mortem. And why should it?
Death in of itself is a constant, as common as daylight or dusk — most written works are a farewell in their own right when read in the right tense…. A speech made free from any delay.
“A paralysis of the vocal cords, resulting in an inability to speak…”
