Thursday, February 5, 2015

Just Lay There Beneath That Stone. See If I Care!

I really miss someone, and there is nothing I can do about it. 20 years ago there was already nothing that I or anyone else could do.

There are no words – none that satisfy, anyway – when it comes to that barrier between me and the time I want so much to roll back, regarding someone whose life slipped away.

I sit and gaze in solitude, in silent frustration, at the computer screen. The name typed into the search engine stares back, like a tiny padlock on an invisible door of innocent yet forbidden knowledge.

What happened to you!?

That's all I want, and need desperately to know. Why did you have to die before they began storing stuff – like your obituary – digitally all over the web? You slipped between the very two cracks in the pavement of the information superhighway that were prone to slam closed again.

Why did our final conversation – 30 years ago – have to be so sour and alienating? Well… I know why, I admit. It did, because I was a relentless dick. I was the reason it wasn't nice, or even civil.

You'd had it with me. No formal warning – you let me find out the hard way that I was a bad chapter, now over. I figured it out, after a long interval of denial.

I never dreamed that wondering about you three decades later, and hoping you were well, was too much. Looking you up online, hoping to discover your life in full bloom of happiness and success, I instead found out you'd died when we were in our 30s (I'm in my 50s now).

Not you. That could not have been you, I kept whispering. What little there was to find online provided all the clues of the very thing I dreaded. Your father's obituary stated plainly that you preceded him in death.

All the death notices simply say that you died. Of what? Did you become ill? Did you lose a deathmatch? Were you lost in an airline disaster? Swept away by tsunami? What? And nobody to this day seems to possess your photograph. The only picture online, is your headstone – your now 20-year old headstone which already looks ancient, like it belongs so forlornly to the past that it might was well be that of an early pioneer homesteader.

What am I supposed to do, suffice with the ever fading image I have of you in my head?

This is really unfair, I ponder, staring at your name in the search bar. It dares me to strike the 'enter' key one more time, as if it will suddenly find that one quirky webpage where all is explained, and where resides a last perfect photo that I can download as a keepsake.

If you are looking down in bemusement at my helpless plodding, it serves me right. All I can do, or hope, is that all was somehow forgiven long ago. And all you need whisper, is "there there, now."