I wrote this a long time ago.
There’s a perpetual smile hanging from the sides of Brooks’ face. The kind that makes you want to ask him all sorts of things, because you can’t help but find comfort in his response. His weathered face only plays witness to the strange and many years he’s felt the breathing of the earth and mourned the absence of her children.
Waking to the morning of his 112th year on this earth felt different than all the days before it.
Not because his limbs were weak, near rubber and without a drop of blood left of his own. Nor was it his failing memory, only to answer to the call of *Nathaniel, a character from his favorite television show twenty years back when those devices hummed in all their dying glory. It was the unrest one feels during their elastic days of youth- the fear of everything. His accordion heart squeaked and moaned, but with a firm tap to his chest, rhythmic beating returned. This sudden aliveness, with all the fury and wonder of a boy, found him with a pen in hand, scribbling a jumble of words that shot straight from his shoulders, and out from his trembling fingers. Normally, when one finds themselves in a raging moment of genius, creation, or supernatural experiment, time is lost in another reality, and passes quickly out one’s feet. However, his writing was as cautious as a caterpillar, as steady as a slug. Should you ask, he spent a week and a half in that very room, reciting the whistling of every window and the cracking back of every staircase below. The house stayed up with him every night, for all of the spooky nights that followed.
The rest of us know that spark scrubbed him clean in a few blessed minutes. His eyeballs jumped out of his head where they rested behind his glasses for the better part of this past century- but there they were, rolling on the ground, collecting dust. The tips of each of his fingers were blazing, lit up like birthday candles on a cake for a man who lived more years than neither him nor God intended. One of those freak happenings nature allows to remind us all of the eternal life that it’s promised. He’d grown a giant, a foot for each year he’d lived, he was sure of it. What was left was a prune, as blind as a wealthy man, and as scorched as a cactus, sitting in an empty room cradling a piece of paper holding the weight of his thoughts on his 112th year of life.
With age rivaled only by the oaks that drooped and swept his rooftops, he’d have a world of wisdom to impart on the children fitted with briefcases pacing in all their loneliness just a busy block down the way. He’d have words to shake their eardrums and make them weep in shame. He’d tell a story of living a thousand good and honest lives, with many nights, but not enough days. Silence would be his only tragedy, because his googly-eyes have seen more sadness and prevailing redemption than anyone blinking at this. here. moment.
With one last gasp he read aloud the words he recorded, with all the breath he could muster, joined by a few growling coughs and slurred vocal chords, he said:
These are the words I leave with you,
And here they will live far beyond these hands that birthed them
Then again, they will only live when they are read
So read them loud and often
In fact, mount them on your wall…
Until the paper peels and withers like this skin I wear
And then, write them on the inside of your eyelids.
Life is the tired pursuit of the imagined, spent mostly in our heads
It’s nonsense! So swim in the whites of answers left blank
Pay careful attention to the notes of music, they will soothe your weary heart
Photograph yourself often and only in your youth
Because age will hand you a face that will frighten both you and I in the dark
Should you go alone, rest assured you were once loved
Reading the words of a cage loosely holding a soul by its strings
Will only give you the creeps
The day of my birth is upon us,
So for the thousandth time,
Recite the poem
Happy Birthday to Me!
