Obit 10 (for the Giraffe part)
My job was to synthesize random and unique news blips from all over the world. One particular day, I had just finished a descriptive paragraph about a body dumped in the giraffe enclosure in the Ukranian Zoo, and the lead-in was really good. Really some of my finer work.
Then suddenly the passage was gone. Where did the giraffe part go? Ctrl Z. And again. Maybe a different document? Untitled 5. No? No. No dead guy in with the giraffes.
There’s absolutely no telling how these things happen. Everything autosaves all the time. There’s external hard drives filling every available hole like my computer is some sort of hardcore porn star. Things don’t make sense for a moment.
***
This same afternoon, I throw away books for the first time in my life. Most were philosophy books from college, marked up with in-the-margin-scribbles, ostensibly the short-hand answers to everything.
There was water damage and black mold that could be blamed on no one and most certainly not my ex (nor his passive-aggressive roommate), and really my ex had been so generous (he reminded me) in having stored my books for so long (he reminded me) anyway.
While cleaning, I find a letter to my ex from someone with a sad housewife’s desperate penmanship. The date on the letter coincides with our time. The letter says nothing I want to know and of course read it anyway. Twice. Just to be sure I have this right.
This unexpected afternoon storm occluded an otherwise blue sky, our year together. There had been joy, certainly. There had been love. Art. But the new information about the other woman seemed insistent on pushing out the story I knew. Irony creates incredible illusions, certainly, but it doesn’t change truths.
***
‘Loss’ should be absence, should be not-there. But it’s the opposite. It’s incredibly heavy. I want to tell it that it’s no good being a dichotomy, that it’s super uninteresting, really, so 90s-angsty to be that way. I want to tell Loss to get whole with itself, go to a self-awareness retreat or do a cleanse–whatever it takes for Loss to go a little easier on us all.
***
I make a list of the books I throw away so I can replace them, knowing that I will likely not replace them. I preoccupy myself with trying to reconstruct the phrasing that made the lead-in about the dead guy in the giraffe enclosure so good. I am aware I have lost several important things this day, but fail to prioritize them, cannot exactly name one of them.
I want to know the mechanics of how to bear the weight of having lost a thing you cannot reproduce or replace. And I bet the answer was in one of those philosophy books I threw away; I bet the dead guy in with the giraffes knew the answer, too.
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