Don't Read This!

(This is just for me).





Jim is dying. Jim and Mercer are taking it well. They are all accepting and grownup and facing the elephant in the room head-on. Hell they aren’t just facing it, they’ve invited it in for dinner and drinks! They are fine. That’s what they say if you ask them how they are. Fine. Accepting. Realists.

Well I’m not fine.

I’m sad. And mad. And upset. I’m not liking that goddamn elephant one bit. I don’t like its shifty little eyes or its big old butt or the fact that it’s gray. I don’t like not being able to push it outside where it belongs. Who the hell wants an elephant in the living room or ANY room in the house? Elephants belong in the wild, or a zoo or the circus or the elephant store. NOT in the house. Scat, damn pachyderm!

I’ve never liked it and I can’t imagine a time that I ever will.

Soon Mercer will be a widow just like me except for the penis thing.

And except that he has a chance to pamper and be kind to and make love with Jim before it’s too late. He won’t have anything to feel guilty about AFTER.

So I guess he won’t be like me after all because I didn’t see that my split apart was dying.

I should have seen it. He told me often enough by his actions and innuendoes.

I don’t know why I didn’t see it. Did I not want to see death coming in the door? Did I think that everything would be as we planned forever? Did I do the final disservice by not recognizing that death is the great divider?

Shame on me for making this about me.

But how can we not acknowledge the elephant without it opening the wounds of sorrow for other times when the huge creature invaded our world? If elephants never forget then is it so farfetched to think that humans might also remember? And to remember is to open the wound again and again. It never heals. There is no closure when you love someone and then lose them.

I wish I had an elephant gun.