No one’s died in my arms.

Here’s the last moments of a dog with whom I was acquainted through his people and their devotion.

I’ve never lost anyone, they’ve vanished. Every death in my family, I wasn’t there, so I’m pretty much baffled, still. Friends die in rumors. Pets die at night, in stories, in accidents.

Both my grandfathers were sort of dead before I knew them. My grandmothers died wherever they were, however they did, or so people told me. I saw grief, I experienced grief, but the state never changed in front of me.

Even that one time I went to bear witness as my mother-in-law became a memory, one of the very few hours I wasn’t in the house was the hour of her passing. I saw her later in a dream, a ghost stopping at the foot of her bedroom stairs to watch me without interest before continuing through the door to the yard and out. That was about a dozen years ago, a couple days before I lay in her bed for the first and last time sweating wildly with a strange fever.

I believe in ghosts, the same way I believe in retinal inversions when I close my eyes. I don’t know what’s living or what’s dead, I know the things that get into my head, and they stay, and they stay, instead of letting me rest in peace.

The cat died on the new road, they said, I saw her eyeball tethered to its socket. I helped her give birth and saved her life once. I buried her. Later they removed her with a tractor. I should have marked the grave.

The dog died of, or with, leukemia, depending if you’re me a hundred miles away or my mother watching the injection take effect.

I don’t want to overdo it. I can be very, very cruel on this, beyond your gothic deadpan, to the thoughtless cool where feelings are fakery that fills seats. (Yeah yeah yeah I knew things would keep on sucking when I learned I was not supposed to identify with The Stranger. Move on.)

Everybody, all the people, died in those five years, that was even the last time I saw my father face to face, that was when I learned about Peak Oil, when i saw my life was glued down, when the dotcom giddy showed my network stupid to lack and care, and my mother’s another person since the surgery that kept us both from my grandmother’s deathbed. I told someone, I remember this, I told someone, “I feel like the end of the 20th century is the end of the game, like what’s next is overtime.”

Everybody milling round the parking lot, their cars are gone, they can’t go home, and what’s the difference.

One time, I said, I don’t remember what I said, just that I felt the room was emptying too fast, and they reminded me of the children, the nieces and nephews, and the friends’ kids, that had been born in the same years, some now almost voting age? and I held them as babies, threw them as toddlers, listened to them ramble as schoolkids, now they’re in the complicated times and I’m the same soothing void of respite I was to my own friends that age.

And, the marriages. My own. My friends’. Affirmations of existence, interconnectivity and affection, if distinct. We were there. The families entwined. But I can’t have participated, it’s impossible, there were no choices.

What am I saying? It was random? Where I went? Where I was? Who we were. It could have been anyone? but it wasn’t, so we danced.

Oh no no. That’s plenty, I don’t want to. There’s so many, of us, so many, we can’t all stroke its hand smile softly in the dusk, some of us for sure, we can be away right?

Fucking travesty. Calling people cowards. But we are. And traitors, too, and my right to say so is yours and also I’ve always been dead, been back and forth the tunnel and I’m telling you the only light that ever shines there is in living eyes, from the sun.