By Nicholas Dighiera
I'm listening to Frightened Rabbit, to singer Scott Hutchison’s lyrics—"Are you a man, are you a bag of sand”—and I hear a human so overwhelmed by care he wrote a song called “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and died some years later after hucking himself off the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland, us knowing this imminence as he also wrote a song called “Floating in the Forth” ten years before the huck, in which he admits to saving suicide for another day, and can you imagine holding that, always being this close to that, caring so much about everything that life hurts, always, caring enough to be wholly overwhelmed by love and sadness and depression and joy and your heart’s own beauty, living a life that’s vibrant in every dimension, even the dark ones, which reminds me of my friend Ben, whose colloquium finished with, “Put off today’s scheduled suicide until tomorrow,” him not knowing that tomorrow would eventually come, and oh boy did it come for him, me, texting his ex-wife last night, asking how everyone is holding up without him, but for me it’s my now dead brother and me swimming in the river behind my house, in our early teens, Scott Hutchison and Virginia Woolf always underwater, Ben, a consummate lover of Woolf, but afraid of water and its darkness so he found a different kind of water to drown in, and now I’m out with my sons on five dollar Walmart innertubes paddling across Lake Crescent because the trail to the cliff is closed, 3/4ths of a mile over water of an undetermined depth, the title of a book by a friend named Rich, and remembering Rich’s daughter died of cancer and there’s not a goddamn thing he can do about that, reminding me that Sherry, his coworker and maybe crush, a woman of words, before she was accosted by a brain tumor, lost her ability to find said words, and there’s me and my boys up on the cliff at the end of those 3/4ths, looking at water so clear that rocks we know to be 40’ below the surface appear to be right on us, and we jump, into the blue day, the sun a nuclear weapon, far away, the only way to keep us warm without killing us, the three of us humans off the cliff into the air, the same air as my brother and I jumped through at the river behind my house, the same air Ben sucked into his dry lips, the ones that moved, even when catatonic, when the woman he loved more than anything put water on his lips, the last little droplets for a beautiful soul, the same air Scott Hutchison soared through, finding freedom from himself, the same air that stones in an overcoat’s pockets denied, the same air as the cliff jump in West Virginia where my oldest son outjumped me, the landing blowing his sandals off, the same as the winter air in Seattle, the three of us jumping off the frost-laden dock, in the dark, through the ice, the water so cold my youngest couldn’t walk after I yarded him out, the same water he swam in after walking 23 miles on his 9th birthday, his request, him, floating in the darkness saying, “My butt feels better,” the same water holding Woolf’s coat and stones and pain and love, the same water in the pond next to crematorium #1 in Birkenau, filled with ashes of the slain, where I sat on worn steps leading to infamous showers, and cried and cried and cried, the same water rolling in off the coast of Northern France, standing in a sea of white crosses trying to imagine volunteering to run into every machine gun bullet ever fired, dropping to my knees because it’s too much to bear, the same bear that ran after the van outside of Tok, Alaska, all my possessions inside, my sister in the front passenger seat for a ridealong, me, joy in my heart because I thought I could be loved, the same love that sailed out every window of every house I’ve ever been in because I shooed it away, the same house where I said I cheated, the same cheat that crushed a beautiful redhead, the same redhead that loved me enough to follow me anywhere, the same anywhere that’s now vacant, the same vacant that Ben now is, just dead ashes in the vial in my backpack in Eastern Washington, in the United States of America, a country founded on occupied land, on one of seven continents on Planet Earth, formed by an explosion a long, long time ago, one that still radiates in my heart, filling my chest with so much love, I have so much love to give, I just don’t know where to put it, as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith said, I clapped and yelled his name, an audience of one in a conference room of many, a meet and greet at a corporate Amazon building in Seattle, William H. Macy smiling back in my direction but not knowing me, him, with a face like a baseball glove, but my dad’s glove, that I secretly put my little boy hand in when he was at work and wondered what kind of man I would be, back to the river behind my childhood home, a couple years later, asking my brother what kind of men he thought we would be, him never becoming a man as he tried to swim in a dusty, dry ditch after getting hit by a car and dying on me, dying on us all, so here’s me, alive, sometimes against my will, holding all of this, the water and the stones and the air and the sun and the love and the vial of fucking ashes, always being this close to that, knowing now that this, this is the kind of man I will be, I am this man, this is the man that I am.
Nick Dighiera is a meat machine animated by electrical signals generated in the brain by a mélange of chemicals necessary for survival amongst mammoths and short-faced bears, he strives to put love into the world with his writing, and would like to grab a beer sometime and give you a hug big enough to smash his heart together with yours so that, for a brief instant, you both will feel less alone in this terribly beautiful existence.
Photo provided by Nick Dighiera.
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