DAY 24: Hot Cockles

A Christmas game. One blindfolded knelt down, and being struck had to guess who gave the blow.

Every day is important; each day makes us. Even the nothing ones—especially those, given how they silt up, slowly burying other, seemingly more momentous, moments beneath their weight. I see that now.

What we used to blithely call ‘wasting time’ was actually a euphemism for the tenement architecture of our lives; there wasn’t an ounce of waste in a ton of those lost hours. Proof of this could be seen in the fact that even as we imagined we were killing time with movies and phone calls, careers and frozen pizzas, time was slowly but surely killing us. But who knew? It may not end up being a compelling defence to have to make before a ticked-off Jesus come Judgement Day (quite possibly today, now that I think about it), but still it’s true—who knew?

In these final hours, I meditate on the passing of Nod and—of course—on words. There’s more power in words than people think. How does the Bible begin? In the beginning was the Word. Nod was the miracle of the undergraduate poet, the sensitive young person who discovers that he or she can combine adjectives and nouns higgledy piggledy and come up with all sorts of fantastic monsters: cowering towers, fierce slumber, panicky taxis, shy murderers, and the like.

During my time in Nod, I came to believe that if something can be imagined it must be possible. Want proof? We imagined space flight, then it happened for real. We imagined holograms and they happened too. We imagined teleportation and just a couple of summers ago I read how some Australian scientists teleported a beam of light an inch or two. So is a Rice Christian or a Blemmye or a burning ice cube or a green sun or a widowed scarecrow just some meaningless assemblage of sounds and letters? Or, in some way, are they all real? Wow, I’m really babbling here in Babylon, holed up in my tower of words.

What would it be like to be an animal in that cold frontier beyond words? A grizzly pacing out infinite forest? A blind crustacean at the bottom of a frigid black sea? To see without words, to emerge from words’ insect haze and breathe only air?

I can’t tell you what it’s like. Instead, you get all this. Words, words, words. Meaning swishing slowly back and forth like the tail of a hackling dog, menacing centuries. Nod.

I lower Zoe from the fourth floor. In a basket, on a rope. She lands gently on the sidewalk, untangles herself, then runs off toward the park without looking back, grizzly dangling. Goodbye again, Tanya.

So this is my final entry. Time to say goodbye to it all, to the world and all of the words I’ve loved so much. Goodbye to it all.

I go to my bed and lie down flat on my back.

Goodbye to chocolate and puppies and hard ons and old running shoes and used books and Christmas morning and crisp newspapers and babies and Coca Cola and sunburned skin on white cotton sheets and bad moods and late night eating and high speed Internet and Charlie Brown and ice cream and Beatle music and Beach Boy harmonies and fruit smoothies and thrift stores and black and white photos and favourite books and cold beer and snow storms and heavy rain and meals in restaurants and arriving and departing and exhaustion and the need to piss and tiredness and bicycles and cars and kisses on the neck and stretching and arguments and water and salt and paintings and shade and Dickensian waifs and waxy pine needles and hot sand and the smell of cedar and every line Shakespeare ever wrote and shaving and sore muscles and crunching ice cubes and mail boxes and popcorn in movie theatres and pay cheques and the smell of limes and