Untitled (Spring)

When I die I want to be burned to ash, and I want my cremains to be halved between my sisters, Marcella and Isabella. I don’t care what they do with them—I have no desire for a specific place to be sprinkled. I can’t remember why, exactly, I felt the need to plan for this initially, but I suppose it rose out of a fear of what would happen to my body once I fully lost control of it. When I was a child I saw an episode on a horror TV show about someone who died, but he didn’t actually leave his body. It was told from his perspective, and he was still trapped inside, helpless but conscious and constantly thinking and terrified as he watched and felt everything, and it ended with him buried underground for as long as his body was here in the physical world.

If I could feel the flame burning, I’d still rather be blazed quickly than spend a relative eternity underground alone with my thoughts, myself. Even the pain of being burned to almost nothing is surmountable if I know that I would be able to do nothing to stop it physically. There’s something near joy in this realization—if you can’t fight, then you don’t have to worry about trying, and surrendering to the heat is easy. Even conscious, as an inert corpse, I wouldn’t be able to back out of being cremated after death—this is why I made the decision while I can.

Though, the idea of being split between my sisters has me still clinging to some meaning inherent in this worldly plane: my ashes should be cared for by the people who most want to.

________

I am in the autumn of my life as I ride my bike across Brooklyn, thinking of my inevitable, ashed future in an oversized and under-washed black jacket I bought at Goodwill. Made of the thermal material that always reminds me of my stepfather Dick and his long johns, it swallows me. I tried it on and thought of how I wore his giant jackets when I was a child, and the way he’d put them over my shoulders, and how I tried to imagine that this was a good thing, to be touched by a father figure, swaddled in his masculinity, my own budding self aswim in the musk and warmth of the beerstained denim, cotton, flannel. I felt so small, a feeling I’ve been seeking ever since. The size of my body feels like a betrayal to my youth. The deterioration of my body, now already in my thirties, is also a betrayal. My body is a betrayal.

At some of the most lost points in my life I’ve been able to find grounding when I’ve made myself feel small—looking out into the ocean for the first time, or up into the giant Kansas sky, flat on my back in a field. When I went to Mexico and saw the mountains, I was minuscule in the presence of God’s proxy.

I dreamt Dick was still alive, and he cooked Marcella and me a meal late at night in the dimness of the old brick house on Main Street, which in reality has since been demolished. I have nightmared my way through this house for years after my escape, trapped in its damp bathroom, locked in the dark kitchen, frozen in my childhood bed, which was two mattresses stacked on the floor, always with the sound of someone dead but breathing, the feeling of a shadowed figure watching from outside the windows.

We hesitantly ate Dick’s food since we had no choice, whispering to each other so he couldn’t hear us, dream secrets between sisters. I noticed one of his long black hairs in the noodles, and then another and another until I realized the food was covered in his hair. He stood at the stove, and never turned around, so in this dream, like so many, I did not have to see his face...