While the Snow Falls

I was being taken to my own funeral. I was being rolled and carted around in the darkness of my casket, to my own funeral. And the darkness of that little wooden casket did not just hold the body of my living self, now rotting, but my eternal punishment. The wooden casket that had been rolled into the house of the holy, with my family sitting in the pews, and the pastor waiting to speak of my life cut short, held hell. And when the priest spoke, he spoke of love and loss from a heart that was filled with meadows and blooming flowers. He spoke of a life that was mine, but not quite me. I sat there trapped, in my hell, as each person kissed my rotting body and they spoke once more of a life cut short. Some begged and asked me why, but their hearts too had snow falling. They understood why more than they would admit. The little voice inside them understood exactly why, but every single one of them would still ask because they shut that little voice out. They put him in cages and drowned him until they thought that they were just like everyone else. That they did not have that voice screaming inside of them.

The first voice that spoke to me as I lay in that casket was one not of tears or anger. He said very little and I almost did not recognize him from his words that were few. But the more words he let slip out of his mourning mouth I knew more the person he was, and the snow that now filled his heart. From highschool. An annoying art kid that I couldn't seem to shake. He was weird and never stopped talking and quoting Plato and Aristotle and always had his nose in some weird complex book. The one that spent all that time and all those days obsessing over intelligence, yearning for it, in the end only to go to trade school and spend his life in shops and under cars. He said little now but I knew the days when he talked non stop and drove me crazy. When he would ask me why I was so quiet and why I didn't kiss girls or go to parties and I would blush and tell him I was happier on my own and he would laugh once more and quote some weird book and when my face told him I did not understand he would dumb it down for me. “If you find happiness in solitude, the only joy you will find in life is death.” I told him he was weird and we never spoke again, but I started kissing girls and going to parties. That's when the little voice that was in me, as it had always been, began to drown. And I drowned him. Drown him in drinks and girls and college, and he screamed. I was supposed to be a painter, he yelled as I applied to schools and scholarships.

The voice that was above me now joked about my solitude. About high school and our conversations. He joked above my dead body, but he was just the same. He didn't see it now, but he was supposed to be a philosopher. He was supposed to write stories and theories that blew minds and shook perspectives, but instead he would change oil and tighten screws while the little voice inside of him screamed. It would scream until he too lay in his own coffin, until he died and he could no longer run. And when he was just like me, in his bed of death, as he thought about Plato and Dostoevsky, he would think that just maybe, he would become a Van Gogh or a Kafka, famous in death, but it would no longer matter, because he too would be in prison.

With the sounds of weeping and footsteps, there soon came the voice of my boss. The voice that urged me to keep clacking those computer keys. Looking down on me now, snow fell in his desolate heart. He wanted to now, but he would never abandon those clacks. He would clack away until the day he died, and then he would give his son to the clacks, just as his father had done for him. As he clacked the little voice in his head would scream. Scream that he had enough. That he had the wife and kids that he loved, and once wanted more than anything. That he had a nice house and enough money to fill swimming pools and lakes. But Musk and Zuckerberg never had enough. They had enough to fill oceans, he would tell the voice. So he kept clacking while the little voice kept screaming. “Enough! Enough!” But he wanted to fill oceans so he kept clacking while his babies hit 4 then 14 then 40 and they had babies of their own that he could never remember the names of because he was too damn focused on those clacks. And when his heart beat for the last time and he died in front of the computer he clacked away on, his wife and kids that he dreamed of hated him and those stupid clacks he couldn't let go of. And the little voice inside of him shook his head at the misery of a man that once had everything he could want. And it wasn't until he was trapped in his fat dead body alone with that little voice inside of him that he realized he would never be a Musk or a Zuckerberg no matter how many oceans he filled because he was trapped now with no one but that little voice that shook his head and said “When you want everything, you can never have it all.” Again. “When you want everything, you can never have it all.” Again. “When you want everything, you can never have it all.” Again. And again. And again. While his money filled swimming pool and seas and oceans and he rotted away in the dirt.

Standing above me and my coffin was now the voice of my best friend. The sweet and bubbly voice of the man that wanted nothing more than to explore. The one that fantasized and daydreamed about discovering anything new. Animals, parts of the ocean, adding places to maps. And in the daydreams and fantasies he would sit behind that clacking machine and tell himself stories. Stories of his own success. Stories filled with the abandonment of clacks and the turn to adventure, but the stories had no truth. And he fantasized about jungles and oceans as he moved into the suburbs and clacked the days away. And he would say to himself that there was nothing wrong with telling a story as he clacked away. But the stories would one day drive him insane, and one day he would be fired from those clacks for telling himself too many stories and not clacking enough. And one day he would fill his pockets up with rocks and walk into the ocean as he told himself stories of scuba divers and brand new never seen fish. And when he and his trapped soul would sink to the floor of the ocean, he would be left with nothing but those stories as the fish and sea creatures picked the flesh off his body.

There was another exchange of places. Small conversations as my body sat under the prying eye. More scuffling of feet until the next voice came. The voice that I recognized immediately before a word passed her lips. The voice of my wife. My widower. I once asked her. Asked her about the little voice that I had inside of me. If it was normal. If I needed help, and I didn't. At least not according to her but she still shamed me and told me that she never had such a voice in her head and if she did she would lock him out, but I never knew if she was telling the truth. For someone that was closer to me than anyone else I could not know less about her. With each time I looked at her the little voice began to scream so loud. Screaming that he was cold, that there was too much snow in my heart.

Now, above me, the voice of my wife whispered about love and children and heaven and God and all of the things that were the lives of other people that I thought I had to live. She whispered of my paintings and how I might just become a Van Gogh or a Kafka, and I could watch my dreams come true from the dirt in the ground. How I spent my whole life with a screaming voice in my chest as I clacked away, but now, now I have something. Freedom. A freedom in my art that could have never been gained in life. Your art is not attention worthy until you are attention worthy and the sane are not attention worthy. The typical are not attention worthy. The human are not attention worthy. It is only the tragic that are worthy of the attention of the admiring. In death, in tragedy, your creation becomes unburdened by the weight of mortal skin. Art is created in pure, raw humanness, but can only flourish in the absurd and insane. Death, is both of these things.

The next person that came to talk as I lay there was my son. My son that came with wet sobs and hoarse cries. As I felt him over me, in the pain of his weeps, I felt the snow falling again. The son that should have had a father without a voice in his chest that wailed at the sight of him. The son that deserved a father that did not come with a black cloud of smoke. And one day he would realize this. He would see the man that his father was not. And he too would one day abandon the guitar that he loved so much and begin to clack on keys. And he too would one day drown out the music in his heart with the voice of the angry TV man. And just when he would lose hope in the song of his soul, he would meet a man that would promise to make him into a musical star. A man that would bring the music back into his heart. And he would once more pour his life into the music only to be left in the shadows by the man and that same man that promised to make him a star would leave him behind and go off to become the next Elvis or Jackson, and my son would be forced to clack keys to feed his addictions. His dreams of becoming a Slash or Hendrix would be drowned out by the sound of clacking. And he would have no choice but to keep clacking to get away from the life he was running from. And one day, after the funeral of the sister that he no longer talked to, he would get a bad batch, and he would snort his last line of coke as the music in his heart died for what he thought was the last time, only to come back as he was stuck in his rotting corpse with no weed or coke or alcohol to help him cope, only his own thoughts and the deafening sound of music.

And finally there came a visit from my daughter. She did not weep, wet angry tears, but rather soft and accepting. She was young now and calm and patient and the little voice in her hadn't begun to scream yet. It would one day. One day she too would have kids that she didn't want. Kids that filled her with anger and rage, and when she was frustrated and said and did those things that anger makes a person say and do, that little voice in her would cry and cower away and beg her to stop. That little voice would try so hard to bring her back. This wasn't who she was, she was kind, and loved animals and poetry and nature and other people. But she would shove that voice down, and dump her angry hot snow on him. And one day when the rage inside of her was bubbling and the little voice was crying, she would think of her dad, and his little voice and his snow balls and she would bring a gun to her chin and in her final act of rage she would shoot. And there she would remain, trapped in what was left of her body with nothing but her voice and her rage and her hot snowballs as people wept over her body all the same.

...

When I killed myself I expected relief from the things that I had been running from all my life. Had I known when I jumped the cage in my heart would open and I would be plagued with the newly free prisoners of my mind, I would never have stepped off that ledge. The thought of jumping would have never crossed my mind. The river that I drove too and stood over in my last moments would be just another scene in a painting. Had I known living, what I only learned in death, I would have gone home and let the little voice that I had ignored for so long lead my life.

But I didn't know these things. So in my final mistake, I shoved down that voice inside me, one last time. I shut the voice and all of my other tormenters in their cage, one last time. And let my Frankenstein brain that told me what others would do and what I should do take hold of me, one last time. And finally, I thought one last time about what would be expected of a person like me in a situation like this, and I decided to kill myself.

As I stared down at the rapid, angry waves, I couldn't help but let the memories come back to me. A cozy memory of my childhood, before the snow began to fall in my heart. The memory of making sourdough with my mother. When she would open the jar of starter and I would peek over her shoulders and watch it move as she stirred. In a way it seemed to be trying to drag in food. Begging, in a desperate, ragged way and my mother, with her sweet face and stern voice, would tell me all about the bread and its hunger. The waves were hungry for me now. They were begging just like my mothers bread. They were trying to reach out, to drag me in. It was almost mesmerizing, the desperation of the water. Such a sorrowful life was mine, but it wanted me all the same. The waves wanted to sweep me away and drag me to a sweeter place. And just when I thought the river might take control of my brain and draw me to my death, another memory hit me. This one less sweet, this one was no longer filled with the warm lights of candles and motherly love, but more harsh surroundings. Surroundings of highschool, when I was quiet and never kissed girls and never went to parties and everyone was worried and they gave me brochures and told me most people that kill themselves regret death the very moment it touches them and takes them away. The faces of worried parents and teachers was the last memory to hit me on that ledge. Not the memories of my wife or children. Those were shoved with all the stowaway useless facts that sat in the cold, snowy recesses of my mind.

Despite the thoughts of innocent childhoods and depressing youths that ran through my brain now, in the eye of my final choice, I felt a sort of indifference to the death that was soon about to shake my world. My own death, and when my indifference was pierced by a sliver of selfishness, I told myself stories. Stories of great artists that died sad deaths. How all the good ones must be swept away by tragedy. Tragedy that made people weep in the face of what they left behind. That is what made them the greats. Not so much their work, but their deaths. Their art that was no longer burdened by their mortality, flourished as they rotted in the ground. Those are the stories I told myself to fend off the silver feeling of selfishness that soon became a branch, and then a tree. Just maybe, after my death I would become a Van Gogh or a Kafka. And just maybe people would weep at the sight of my paintings while the person that truly was me, floated away in history.