Thank you my teacher, my friend, the world, everyone, everything. I have summed it up for myself and for you as easily as I can. I know my words can be lengthy and my letters cumbersome, for the knowledge you give me so effortlessly, is almost like holding the whole school in my hand. Quickly out of nervous gratitude, I try to give you back everything all at once, which is not easy with a school in one hand and the keyboard in the other. My tasks are as heavy as my wording and nothing is as astute or comes as succinctly as I would like it to. However, with as much brevity as I can muster, I believe this is why I am your student.
I saw you once, reading out of the Book of Life and tearing at the page, belting out the passages like a drunk butchering “B-b-b-bennie and the Jets” at a piano bar. The tale was tragic and you could only tell it with sarcastic bravado that would hide the tender sadness that pooled embarrassingly underneath. You were memyself&I at that moment, but I had not known it then, self recognition being one of the courses I take from you now. My heart leapt out to you, but I didn’t know why, because that despair was still beyond my grasp, and you swam irretrievably lost in it. Yet then seeing you later, and then again and many years later it seems, in many places and many ever changing faces, you kept on, and the reading has become easier. You were lost, but you never lost your place. The pages turned, turn still, and you have many more chapters that will follow. You read out of the same book, yet the paper, ever sharp, ceases to cut you, the story is sweet and pleasing, the weight of the book has strengthened and assured and bolstered you, and you have not had to change the endings, nor sought another book altogether. I see you read and at times you seem to be telling the story in reverse, for each page makes you younger, more alive, more awake, a return to a true self that I have never been to since childhood and perhaps even before.
Now, I have reached the same page in the Book of Life that you suffered over, and it is my turn to read. The words will not form in my mouth, as they are stuck in my throat, because they speak truth so honest, my heart will not let them go. I know not how to turn to the next page, or to go back. I have the desire to burn the book, jump out of the story, or from several stories, return it to the Library of Life – claiming unfairness, asking why I was given the unabridged version, this insipid translation, raging that the pages are sticky and therefore must be turned two at a time, if at all. For me, the page is unreadable, a language that I cannot comprehend, that is ancient or too modern. I need another Rosetta Stone, or at least the new G5 to figure out what this font has in store for the future. If there is to be a future. There has to be. There must be.
“Teacher teacher – teach me love. I can’t learn fast enough.” And also why teacher why did Rockpile only make one album? When will Nick Lowe eventually get the props he so desperately deserves, for even if it was for a brief moment, he was technically a part of the Cash Family by marriage and he is himself a consummate musical genius and consistently overlooked by all but music geeks like myself.
I have reached this page in the Book of Life and am stumbling over it and yet I know I have to read it. There is not a hexagonal “STOP” icon at the bottom of the page, like the ones on school aptitude tests, that would make sure everyone would have adequate time to prove their inadequacy. This story must go on, as it will, and I am destined to be a major character, whether it is going to be the good guy or the bad guy or even the ingénue.
Driving by “Caskets Plus!”, somewhere on Glendale Blvd., there was a ballet pink casket in the window, lined with creamy satin quilted pillows, which matched the Zinfandel tea rose cashmere dress I was wearing, it was as if the coffin were the final Garanimal component to my outfit. And teacher, even though it was so well color coordinated, not only in hue, but texture and style, I was not ready to get in it. My teacher, “Suicide is Painless,” better known as the theme from the iconic television dramedy “M*A*S*H,” you have shown me, is a boisterously bitter lie.
In the fast lessons of the last year, you have taught me that suicide is in fact monstrously painful, not necessarily for oneself, but for all those who love you, and who you would love, even a little. I have suffered from it a few times, yet not as much as those around me. What you have taught me thus far is this. Suicide is like taking all the people you love and lining them up by how much they love you and then shooting them one by one with a shotgun. The severity of injury would coincide with the magnitude of love that binds you. Those closest to you would be paralyzed, with a shot directly to the spine, leaving them legless and loveless, yet totally conscious, but lost without you. Next, would be those unresolved with you, the by why how what when then is of little importance, their injuries would be internal and hard to detect, for guilt hemorrhages from the inside where no one can see it, until their skin is turned bluish purple from the wounds that cannot find a way to heal. Thereafter would be those who you never knew loved you as much as they did, to which delving out a bullet that might be permanently lodged, or come out the other side, or merely graze, or even miss entirely – you will never know, because by then, you would have died, and have limited access to that kind of information.
The Book of Life will have shut forever, you will have lost your place, have to start over, having left for the rest of your world a permanent, unsightly dog-eared corner, an obscene scribble in the margin, a slight library/vomit smell emanating from the paper, a page forever ripped out. Your suicide was really a mass murder and you might have just brought the rifle to a high school cafeteria or a Luby’s for the damage you’ve done.
Tell me teacher, where to go from here. How do I keep on reading from this Book of Life? Even though you are so far ahead of me, I remember exactly when you were at this page, this juncture, this crossroads, this turn in your tale, and you have not put the book down. Is the Book of Life an Encyclopedia Brown type novel, where you find your ending by choosing a path, reading backwards to forwards, turning it upside down for the answers? I am here teacher. I am in class. My number 2 pencil is sharp and from our lessons in the Book of Life I have learned one thing, Reading Is Fundamental.