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One of my oldest friends is dying tonight. My mother’s best friend since seventh grade. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you her name. She wouldn’t want that. I’ll just call her Effie. It’s a nice original name. She deserves that.
Anyway, my mother just called me crying. Effie is not doing well. She was in the hospital for pneumonia. Things got bad. She’s on a ventilator, a feeding tube, and she is heavily sedated. She is just laying there swollen. Drowning in her own fluids. The prognosis is not good. Effie is dying.
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Effie was always my champion. In her eyes, I could do no wrong.
You’re a handsome and brilliant man. Any woman would die to be with you.
But my anxiety and depression…
That’s not all you are, Tommy. That’s your struggle. That’s what makes you a great man. You keep struggling. You just won’t give up, ever.
She used to read the things I wrote and cry and hug me.
You are so beautiful, Tommy. The world really needs you.
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She always wanted me to marry her daughter, Amy. Amy was…Amy. And it was all about Amy, don’t you see? Amy is beautiful and Amy is sexy and Amy dates the guys at my school.
Amy embarrassed me. She liked to taunt me. She used to wave her pussy in my face and ask me if I wanted it. She used to dare me to take it. She used to dare me to fuck it. I would blush and fall silent. Amy would laugh with glee. She loved to torture my shyness. We were only eleven years old.
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Mom, we have to find Amy. She has a right to know that her mother is dying.
No, Tommy. Stop it. My mom was crying. Effie wanted nothing to do with Amy. My mom was sobbing. She’s been my best friend for fifty years.
I’m sorry, mom. I’m sorry. “Words no good.” -Ezra Pound. Fuckin-A, man.
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Mom told me that, if Amy found out, she would loot Effie’s home. My mom is dying. I can go rip her off! That’s Amy. What a fucking whore!
I never wanted to marry you, Amy. I wanted to hate fuck you, sure. I wanted to shut you up with my dick.
Your mother is dying, you cunt!! And no one knows where to find you!!! Get your shit together. Lay off the Crystal Meth for a few days. You are really going to regret this if you have a future.
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Effie IMed me two days ago. I just want to tell you I love you. She immediately signed off. I think she knew she was dying.
Effie why didn’t you talk to me? Why didn’t you tell me. I want to understand.
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This can’t be all life is. I refuse to believe it. This is fucking ridiculous! All she ever did was work and work and she ends up like this. I want that shit explained to me.
Do you hear me “God” or government or fascist corporate masters or whatever it is that made things this way? I want a fucking explanation. I demand it from your silly information whirlwind!
Google Search: Why is Effie dying? Why are we so fucking fragile? Why does death even exist?
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I spit in your face for making me feel this. I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready to lose you yet. Effie, don’t die on me. Please. Love, Tommy — a handsome, brilliant man.
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P.S. Rae, I love you man.
P.S.S. and Rae, I’m dying first.
Either that or I’ll be right behind you
P.S.S.S. Rae, don’t die man!!
Sorry. I was crying through this whole damn thing.
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That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the breath of God is spirit. The wind blows where it wishes, and we hear the sound that it makes; still we do not know from where it comes, or where it will go. So it is for those who are born anew by the breath of God.
Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is.
In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom.
We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?
The sage calls a person who knows how to dwell in mindfulness night and day,
‘one who knows the better way to live alone.’
~Bhaddekaratta Sutta~
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. — downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph — the rhythm the rhythm — and your memory in my head three years after — And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud — wept, realizing how we suffer –
And my father still lives. There is no justice.
Suppose you see a face in a Toyota
One day, and you fall in love with that face,
And it is Her, and the world rushes by
Like dust blown down a Montana street.
And you fall upward into some deep hole
And you can’t tell God from some grain of sand.
And your life is changed, except that now you
Overlook even more than you did before;
And these ignored things come to bury you,
And you are crushed, and your parents
Can’t help anymore, and the woman in the Toyota
Becomes a part of the world that you don’t see.
And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,
And you stand on some mountain road weeping.