Exophagy

For this one I gave the camera a slight smile and my most knowing eye, trying to make it twinkle. The day before my dad and I had been in a K-Mart looking for a thank you card for Jack and a football for the beach. He kept asking about Australia. So much of this still doesn’t make any sense to him. To anyone… I ended up telling him my little secret about Australia. I have an easier time talking to my dad about things that I’d keep secret from most others. Probably for the same reason that I talked to Arby so much. No matter what I say… it’s not really going through. I can’t say I can expect him never to believe things I say. That’s not it. But I trust that he’ll assume what I’m saying is bred from some naiveté, instead of from honest, inalterable intention. The reaction I get, and the fact that he still assumes we have so much in common when we’ve never been on the same page… gives me a pausing calm knowing that he’ll always wonder first if I’m merely being metaphoric.

 

He asked what I thought would happen. I knew what would happen. Nothing. The world will keep spinning and people will keep spending money and birthing and dying and working, and retiring, and so on and so forth. I know that ten, pfft… five years, if that, down the road… it’ll be like it never even ever happened.

“Kind of a selfish thing then? Kind of a… selfish kind of thing is what I’m getting.” He said.

“Absolutely.” I answered back. “Most absolutely.”

When they left I squeezed them both tight and said goodbye, watched them walk into the terminal for the PATH train back to Jersey. Holding Bethany there in the station was the closest I ever got to considering it. And the closest I ever will. The man who asked if I’d thought about what it would mean to family stood only a foot away while Beth and I said our goodbyes. But it was the little girl who wordlessly, uncoercingly, and completely unaware brought me the closest I’ll ever come to being so exophagous.

She’s the closest anyone would ever get to understanding fully. Which makes some magic because she doesn’t know a thing about this and already she sees it so much more clearly than those who know so much.

That girl can see inside me. It is nothing to her.

…

I’ve got that birthday in another three days. 21. Blackjack. The last bureaucratic, biological milestone. Between there and the rest of eternity the only thing I’d have left to look forward to is the potential of one day qualifying for 79 cent coffee as per some senior’s discount at a diner.

            There’s having kids… but who am I kidding?

            …

            There’s something legendary to be said for the guy who is never forgotten, all throughout history his name is echoed… That’s really, very cool.

            There’s something though more appealing to me, to see if I could accomplish more greatness, more work, more influence and impact the world more powerfully… and then to immediately disappear, leaving it as though I’d never existed in the first place, forgotten, unknown, inexistent.

            …

            The same feeling as winning the lottery and living your whole life and never telling anyone.

            The same as knowing perhaps the world’s greatest life secret and with a quiet, knowing smile, taking that secret to the grave.

            … … This city… is…

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