Signing Off
By Kate Dowling

It should be a pleasure, barrelling along down country roads on a sunny, sparkling winter morning, en route to meet an old friend.  Instead: unease.
​
Our rendezvous is in a village an hour’s drive away, the halfway point between my house and Kerry’s.  We’ll have coffee, catch up on each other’s news, and she will sign these papers – at last.  If she shows up.

I’ve been trying to see Kerry for months.  Just to sign the annual report documents for my family trust – a two-minute job which, as a trustee, she’s cheerfully carried out every year since the trust was formed, fourteen years back.  But this time: a series of rainchecks.  And a seeming reluctance to set a new date, even.  Can I check my schedule and get back to you?  (She never did – within days I’d be chasing her again.)  The delays dragged on, week after week, until I was privately furious with her.  Several times I offered to FedEx the papers instead, along with a return envelope.  She demurred, strangely insistent that we meet in person.  Can’t wait to see you!

I’d have sent her the papers anyway, once deadlines loomed for them to be filed.  But I couldn’t: I don’t know Kerry’s address anymore.  I’m perplexed about that, and a little hurt.  Six months ago she sold her house and bought a new one, further along the coast.  Around the same time, she met a new man, Shane, who has since moved in with her.  Both seem delightful – on Facebook.  I can’t be sure; she hasn’t asked me to visit.  Oh, it would be easy enough to suggest – dropping a casual hint here or there – but I’ve waited for her to initiate it.  After the moving crates were unpacked and the house was in order, surely she would summon me to visit.  Come see my new place!  And meet Shane!  Half a year has passed without an invitation; I have come to realise that there will not be one.  That would have been unthinkable, once. 

My attention refocuses on the challenging curves of the hill road.  The top section lies mostly in shadow until noon; black ice is a risk.  Yellow-starred broom flanks the highway, and shaggy fields, dewy with melted frost.  As the twisting road crests the hill and straightens out, my mind sweeps back along the lanes of memory, equally convoluted.

We’ve been friends for twenty-five years or so, Kerry and me.  We met as volunteer lap-scorers at a motorcycle race meet, of all places.  Aloft in the circuit’s lap-scoring tower, we discovered a shared sense of humour, cracking jokes and giggling while we marked off laps and noted competitors’ finishing order.  That was the spark.  Soon we were firm friends; BFFs before that was even a thing.  We yakked on the phone almost every day, and met up weekly; it would have been more often, had we not lived an hour’s drive apart.  Fun wasn’t all of it, though: in true best-friends fashion we nurtured and counselled each other through the tough times: break-ups, job stress, money worries, infertility. 

Kerry’s sunny nature lit up every room she entered.  I was older than her, but Kerry was the more confident, outgoing one.  Dependable, too.  You could count on Kerry if you needed help, and people did: I learned she was the sole ‘together’ sibling of an otherwise hopeless family, whose members lurched from one personal crisis – debt, addiction, petty crime – to another.  Perhaps in reaction to her chaotic upbringing, Kerry was organised to a fault; even the cans in her pantry marched in single file, labels impeccably aligned.  This keen sense of order, and her strong work ethic, saw Kerry shine in her career as an office administrator.  So when I decided to put my apartment into the legal protection of a family trust, she was an obvious choice for the role of independent trustee.  Kerry was like family anyhow.

The evolving demands of daily life sank their claws into us, though.  Travel, work, relationships, children; our responsibilities and commitments increased with each passing year.  We were either busy or tired; usually both.  Meeting up became harder.  The long drive between our homes made visits with babies and toddlers rare and impractical, and our children, born years apart, were the wrong ages to be natural playmates. 

So it was inevitable, I guess, when the ties that bound our friendship began to fray.  In hindsight, the signs were there.  When I remarried a few years ago, Kerry was my bridesmaid – a special role for my special friend.  Yet in the limo on the way to the ceremony, she busied herself texting friends about her exciting day, cackling at their droll replies.  Irked by her inattention, I eventually asked Kerry to put the phone down and “focus on the day”.  But it was a euphemism.  What I really meant was: focus on me.

I once read a theory that people are drawn together because they give each other something they both need, and drift apart when they aren’t getting it anymore, or no longer need it.  Kerry and I have drifted so far apart, we are specks on each other’s horizon.  And while we drifted, carried by the tides of life, we replaced each other with new people we met along the way.  New friends who give us what we need. 

The highway descends through lush pastureland.  Sheep graze; some have lambed already.  It’s the cusp of spring, season of renewal – but what I’m feeling is the chill of finality.  Winter is nearly over.  So too, perhaps, is my oldest friendship.  Because the prospect of chasing up Kerry year after year, each time a new set of trust papers needs signing, fills me with dread. 

I can’t be frank with her about it.  How do you say to your once-closest friend: “I'm sorry, but you're not reliable any more”?  How do you tell her that she’s too far away, physically and emotionally, to be a capable trustee?  That her ambivalence and procrastination are signs she’s moved on with her life – and that you understand?  Questions I'm not brave enough to ask, except within the confines of my own head. 

Today, after Kerry finally signs these papers, I will suggest that she step down from the trust.  Even if I have to more or less insist upon it.  It’s a pragmatic decision, intended to make life easier for both of us.  And yet, even though I know it’s the sensible solution, it feels like a betrayal – like I’m cutting her loose.  I don’t know if our friendship will survive such an obvious lack of faith on my part, however justifiable. 
​
It’s normal for friendships to run their course.  Kerry’s and mine has done better than most, to last a quarter century.  Many wither long before that.  Sooner or later, you recognise the signs: the intervals between contact become progressively longer, signalling what we can’t bring ourselves to say: I’m not interested anymore.  Starved of the nourishment of communication, the friendship dwindles until it evaporates completely, existing only in memory.  Sometimes one friend abruptly bails, ghosting the other until they take the hint.  Or an argument boils up, after long years of amity, and bridges are irrevocably burned.  But it is rare, I think, in a long-term friendship, to know exactly when it was – even to the hour and the place – that you consciously gave up on it, and accepted it was over. 

Road signs signal the village ahead.  I slow the car down and turn off the highway, finding a handy parking space on Main Street.  As I unclick my safety belt, I glance across to the coffee shop.  Kerry’s car is parked out front, unoccupied.  No doubt she is inside, perhaps already seated at a booth or table, waiting.  Tethered to me by a slender thread of obligation which will soon be snipped and allow her, finally, to drift free.

A document folder lies beside me on the passenger seat.  A sheaf of papers nestles within, fringed with yellow ‘sign here’ tabs.  Scooping the folder up, I take a deep breath and push open the car door.

 

Kate Dowling writes short stories, creative non-fiction and memoir from her home north of Wellington, New Zealand. Her freelance work has appeared in ProDesign Magazine and the Evening Post newspaper. She has previously lived in England and Spain.

 

* * *

 

Wisdom of a Bum
By Rafiq Ebrahim

Coming out of my son-in-law’s Dunkin Donut shop in downtown Chicago after having a crisp hot butternut donut and steaming, stimulating coffee, I lit a much-needed cigarette and faced the icy cold wind.  I began to walk towards the Chicago Art Institute where I was scheduled to meet a local artist, one of those seedy artists who had graduated from pavement paintings to canvas, and interview him.  As I took a few steps, I sensed a shadow following me. The shadow materialized, smiled and said, "Hey, buddy, can I have a fag?"

He was dressed in an old almost worn-out jacket and crumbled jeans. There was stubble on his unwashed oily face and his teeth, as he tried to smile, showed stains of nicotine. He had a massive growth of curly, unkempt hair on his head. Surely, he was one of those homeless guys, living on streets or in tunnels near downtown Chicago.

I offered him my pack of cigarettes, so that he could pick one. He put his greasy fingers, took out one and smudged a few more inside with grease. He seemed like one who has not had his dose of nicotine since ages. Having quickly and eagerly lit his cigarette, and inhaling a few deep puffs, he remarked, "Ah, so nice to enjoy the smoke in this chilly weather!" He coughed and added, "But it is only the first few puffs that you really enjoy. After that you feel lousy. Do you know why?"

"No, tell me why," I asked.

He came nearer and said, "That’s a mystery. I even don’t know why. I keep trying to figure out. Perhaps the mixture of tobacco, nicotine and other harmful ingredients get concentrated after the first few puffs and is bent upon killing you!"

That took me unaware and I almost choked on the smoke coming out of my mouth. "You don’t mean that, do you really?"

He nodded vigorously. "Sure I do. That’s what makes your lungs whistle and protest against the intake of such concentrated smoke Wait till I reveal some more facts."

This guy was just out of his mind, I thought. I had no intention to listen further, but he continued, "To give the tobacco elasticity, more deadly and unimaginable ingredients are added." He went on and on, putting all sorts of accusations on the contents of a cigarette.

Had there been an executive of a tobacco company listening to what this homeless guy was uttering, he would have trembled like a tuning fork.

I simply gasped. "Stop it. Don’t want to hear any more so-called facts."

He laughed aloud, and almost danced a few steps before muttering, "And you must know that death is nearer to you than you think if you smoke.”

"Then why do you smoke?" I asked, already getting a very bad taste in my mouth.

"That is a good question. I smoke only when I am in a company of nice people like you who smoke, but shouldn’t."

I could only shrug my shoulders as I threw away the cigarette I was smoking. "Well, thanks for the info. I’ll remember it," I said and moved away, sure that I had seen the last of this figure. But no, he was following me.

"One minute, dude," he said. "Could I have a few more of those lung-destroyers?"

I took out my pack. "Sure, have one, have two, have the whole pack."

He bowed and thanked, pocketing the pack. "It was no nice meeting you. I feel the pleasure was mutual. If you want to see me again, I am always here in the mornings outside this donut shop, having a chit-chat with very nice people who come out of the shop. Some give me quarters, others fags and we do have nice conversations."

"Tell me," I asked, being curious, "Is this the way you get things and make a living?"
    
He laughed, coughed and said, "Oh, no!  I used to do that, but now it is just a relaxing
exercise. My main income comes from playing with the desires of men."

"What does that mean?"

"Say or do something that has the potential of fulfilling a human desire."
    
"You sound interesting. How do you do that?"

He lit another cigarette, smiled and said, "Five nights in a week I go to Elgin and stand near the entrance of the casino, selling good luck charms, those aluminum ones available for a dime in gift stores. I sell each one for two dollars to my victims who are about to enter the casino, telling them that this charm would boost their luck to win a jackpot.  Gamblers readily buy my merchandise and go in with a sure hope of winning."

I simply gaped in amazement, and he added, "I earn around a hundred to two hundred dollars a night, spend most of it on beers, fags and food, and the remaining cash goes into my bank account. I sleep in a tunnel in downtown with two quilts and a pillow. Once a week I go to a salon for a shave, shower and change of clothes. What time is it now?"

I told him that it was almost noon.  "Time for my lunch," he said. "Care to have some hot dogs?"

Before I could reply, he said, "Want to know what ingredients are there in a hot dog?"

"No!" I yelled, not willing to be informed about hideous and obnoxious ingredients he would mention.

"Okay then. Hope to see you again. As I said before, I am here every morning except on Sundays,’"he pointed out. "On Sundays I go to the nearby church, and sometimes when the preacher fails to come, I am given an opportunity to preach."

 

Rafiq Ebrahim is a freelance writer and novelist. His short stories and articles are mostly humorous and are published in leading newspapers and magazines in Pakistan, USA and some other countries.

 He has written three novels. Glowing Embers, The Other Side, and Beyond the Crumbling Heights ​

 

* * *

​

A Life Less Painful
By Finn Janning


My brother died the third of October, 1993. Or maybe he died the day after, on the fourth of October. Does the date really matter?
 
Death is death. It awaits us all.
 
My brother, whose name was Jesper, died at the age of twenty-six, someday in October, somewhere in Denmark.

* * *
​
The phone is ringing—three times before my mother picks it up.
 
“NIF chapter house. It’s Conni,” my mother says.
 
“…”
 
“NO, no, it’s not true. It can’t be true,” she says.
 
Intuitively, I know that my brother is dead. My mother doesn’t scream, but her voice is different. Strange. Unfamiliar. It fits an improper situation. Should she sound differently? Could any other words match what she just heard?
 
The sound of her voice scares me.
 
No.
​
The negation hangs silently in the air between us.
 
No.
 
Everything but this “no” falls to the ground. I fall. I can’t remember how; it’s as if the fall is edited away. A part of me remains sitting there on the kitchen floor next to the phone; a part of me becomes a sculptural observer of my own life. Another part of me gets up and moves on.
 
From that moment, I become someone else.
 
* * *
 
Three hours later, I am standing in front of the mortuary at the main hospital in Copenhagen. I sway like a boat where the anchor has not reached anything firm. The waiting room is leaking. Something seeps through from nowhere. Liquid. It picks at and scratches my skin. It feels chilly. Freezing, even. It’s not only entering the room; I feel invaded. I am just a room being moved.
           
I begin to shake. Snap for my breath. There is no other way. I open the door. Automatically, my jaw falls and leaves my mouth open. No longer capable of controlling my muscles, I walk softly, like a ninja. I’m alone with death.
           
It’s not true. It can’t be true.
 
I close my mouth and notice the artificial taste of perfumed flowers. It seems unnatural. Ill-timed. I take in the room, its whiteness that has never known dirt. The clinical cleanness kills all forms of life. Death ends in a dead room. And yet, perhaps as compensation, on the table next to the door is a bouquet of flowers. Besides the flowers is the bed where my brother lies, the only things in this white room flowers and Jesper.
 
I know that he is there. I can sense his presence. Yet, I begin to study the bucket, the apparent contrast between life and death. I postpone my meeting with death for a while, wondering: What do the flowers and my dead brother have in common?
 
The bouquet consists of fresh yellow flowers filled with green leaves. In the center of it is a big heart-shaped leaf. The heart sticks up a little from the yellow and greenish background. The vase is made of steel. I don’t know the name of the flowers; I just look at them and then stare before I notice a greasy fingerprint on the steel surface.
 
Jesper?
 
I repeat the colors of the flowers as a way of getting a foothold. I am standing on a fragile ground of green, yellow, and red. Simple as traffic lights: the green birth that brings hope toward the red death that stops all hope. But what about yellow, this color in between, the pause or waiting, waiting for death, or does yellow not illustrate that being alive is both living and dying in one?
 
A few hours earlier, my mother spoke the definitive words: “Jesper is dead.” Actually, he was already dead when he died in my mother’s and my world; he was dead in our world before we passed on the news to my father and sister. Perhaps green and red are merely illusions, since everything is in a constant state of emerging? I become aware there, standing next to my brother’s corpse, that he died before me knowing it.
 
How long had I lived a lie?
 
Jesper lies on the bed. It’s not death lying there. Death is somewhere else. Life might be absent, but as far as I can see, he could be sleeping. Yet, there are no sounds, no tiny moments. Dead people don’t sleep. They do nothing.
 
Nothing. There are no standards for death; it is placed outside of language. Language arrives with life and leaves when it is all over. I can’t say anything. And yet, this is what I want to do. I want to converse with death because it addressed me. Can I accept it? Match it? Give death its own right to express its nothingness?
 
While I touch his face for the last time, I realize I must live double; everything is up to me now. His death awakens me, not on a higher level of illumination—I’m not sitting under the Bodhi tree—but on a rather quite banal one. I become conscious that I am alive. It’s only me breathing.
 
I am alive. I breathe. I cry.
 
* * *
 
We are twenty or so persons waiting outside the church. Someone is saying, “No parents should have to bury their kids. It’s unnatural. It’s unnatural.”
 
My mother has told the priest that she doesn’t want a long speech. Not that she wishes the ceremony to be over. On the contrary, she just can’t bear listening to anything. It is as if silence brings her closer to the nothingness of death. Closer to Jesper.
 
Entering the church, on this particular day, I notice things that I have neglected during earlier visits to churches. The whole architecture is a violation. At the very end, right underneath the forced embracement of Jesus, is the coffin. It’s covered in flowers and banners that says, “Rest in peace” and “Thanks for everything.”
 
How can a life end in a little box?
 
Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” The mind and our spirit are embodied in the sense that they exist within the body. My body begins to shake. There is no difference between mind and body, even between soul and body.
 
Standing there in the church, I feel like a hunter looking for a prey to whom I can pass on my impotence. I am wounded. Worse: I am bitter and full of helplessness. I am angry and frustrated.
 
“Jesper doesn’t belong here,” I say to my mother.
 
“Shh,” she says.
 
“Is he inside that coffin?”
 
“Yes.” She takes my hand.
 
“… it …”
 
As promised, the priest holds a short ceremony. I can’t hear him. It’s as if my body is without any functional organs. He looks friendly, though. When the words are done with, six robotic men arrive. Without any facial expression, they lift up the coffin and carry Jesper away. Just as they pass the bench where we are sitting, I feel how the pressure from the coffin squeezes us together. We all seem to shake in some spastic movement.
 
“No,” says my mother. I hold her close. I am afraid; her “no” frightens me. This tone. It’s so definitive. My tongue is swollen; I feel like I am suffocating. I swallow a glass of mouth water.
 
“NO. MY SON.” This time, she screams. She reaches over me as if to grab the coffin that is almost at the end of the aisle. Pull him back to life. I can feel her pain. Nothing is private. Is this proof that Ludwig Wittgenstein was right when he said that a private language, only understandable for a single individual, was meaningless? I believe so, although it’s not the same as reducing the world to language.
 
My mother’s scream is grating my heart as if it was a piece of Parmesan cheese. Slices of red cover the floor.
 
Outside the church, I see the faceless men stuff my brother’s coffin inside a waiting car. They close the door. Start the engine. They move, and I fall. My body can’t carry any more. Someone behind me helps me to my feet. Just as the car turns left and leaves with my brother forever, I am about to fall again. Only this time, a strong hand grabs me under my shoulder. I don’t turn around. Don’t want to know who won’t allow me to fall.
 
Why must I not fall?
 
* * * 
 
I thought of that question for some years: Why must I not fall?
 
Then I decided it was a philosophical question, nothing to do with gravity or weak muscles.
 
Philosophical wisdom is related to self-knowledge. It is when you lack it that you fall. “Know yourself” is one of Ancient Greek philosophy’s most-known aphorisms. It was carved into the entrance of the Apollo Temple in Delphi. And it was this that Socrates activated when he walked around the square of Athens, turning each one of his listeners toward himself or herself. He taught them to take care of themselves. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault,  Socrates operated not just with one aphorism but two: “Know yourself” and “Take care of yourself.”
 
The better you can take care of yourself, the better you know yourself. And vice versa: the better you know yourself, the better you can take care of yourself. They are intimately connected. Which came first is like answering which came first: The chicken or the egg?
 
Philosophical wisdom doesn’t come from references, but from your own way of living, thinking, and feeling. Philosophy is an open invitation to the ongoing struggle between self-deception and self-insight or knowledge. No one becomes wiser without experiences, that is, without meeting and facing other ideas, thoughts, and conceptions: philosophizing.
 
Socrates, the wisest man in Ancient Greece, had self-insight. He knew what he didn’t yet know. Most of us hardly know what we don’t know.
 
I was not allowed to fall because someone full of good intentions didn’t want me to suffer. That’s an illusion. Life is painful. There is no cavalry coming to save us. We all have to philosophize for ourselves—with a little help from our wise friends.
 
I have come to realize that time doesn’t heal all wounds. Saying so is impotent. But philosophy can make life less painful as you endure taking out the stitches of a wound.

​Finn Janning grew up in Denmark. He has studied philosophy, literature and business administration at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), and at Duke University. He earned his PhD in practical philosophy from CBS. His work has been featured in Epiphany, Under the Gum Tree, South 85 Journal, and others. He lives in Barcelona, Spain with his wife and three kids.

 

* * *

 

How I Remember According to R.E.M. (Without Lyrics)
By Jonathan Jones

By the time I first started listening to R.E.M. they’d already released six albums Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Life’s Rich Pageant, Document and Green. It was only with the release of their seventh album Out of Time in 1991 that I started to forget myself; a new invention. I had been due to see them on their world tour in 95, but that was the year Bill Berry collapsed on stage with a brain aneurysm, and the date was cancelled. By September 2011 when they finally broke up I felt no recourse to nostalgia, considering what I first felt on hearing them. Genuine gaps in my memory that I used to think were R.E.M songs, and which turned out to have nothing behind them at all.  “[. . .] the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Blind drunk on green Thunderbird, the warm May weather strikes the opening end chord. My language is amateur, and the feel of wet grass on my face is humiliating. The casual observation that there is no justice or moral authority in tragedy. Punishment is always romantic by nature. You can afford twenty years with time to spare before you realize too late. Still drinking on a Saturday afternoon, we would have searched for a way to go into the future to destroy the technology if only we’d known.

I put this one down to a couple of vodka chasers. The songs jump and bobble, as a small boat made of newspaper floats downstream. I’m singing from outside the song, and someone tells me to kindly shut the fuck up. So I start to quote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” three sheets to the wind, and somebody punches me hard in the face. When it comes the cold skin on my lips feels black as trees. If this isn’t Saturday afternoon anymore my memory is undecided here. Other peoples’ faces already forgetting, seeing everything, and all I can think is a whirl of tape rewind, dark mandolin. SIDE B you start to make choices that playback mirrors. There’s little to choose between transition and break. The video starts with a quirky, almost surreal glance behind the scenes; MTV stream of conscious. Music has no instruction manual to install the shelves that are slowly filling up, except here it’s as though I can almost dismantle and reassemble the sound of a car pulling out of a driveway. Lyrics as I recall seeing them scribbled down somewhere, maybe notes from modern history, sixth form, last period on a Thursday where the formula was drill. Everyone talks about the same two songs. Certain memories want to be popular, but deep down I’m skeptical.

I pivot off this one like a lamp-post at 3 a.m. in the morning. Sooner or later the lights will turn from green to red. Quite innocuous, look left then right then left again. Step off the curb to the side, and it’s my third day back at work. 8 a.m. and I am like brown paper pavement in 30-degree heat. Elvis talks Marilyn down from the edge of a bridge. Two actors and a film crew pause the action. It’s not feeling anything for the songs as such only I don’t recall the last time I wrote out a lyric by hand. How to name people without naming them is a standard of subtitled thoughts. A girl less twenty years and I can’t remember now how my own voice sounded back then as L.A. burned in the wake of the Rodney King riots. My address book takes the muse of a gridlocked freeway, and a mess of old letters. To name them I just have to say April or September 93. Feet sticky with the beer sweat floor, I didn’t trust myself to be drunk the first couple of days. This isn’t the right room.  People are laughing in the midnight corridor. Then they stop. There’s a library here and a wood, and a covering of snow mid-November. The world retracts, recognized for five minutes then ignored on a clumsy flight of stairs.  It wasn’t a song to dance to, yet most people knew all the words that year. From the game of life, to the theory of evolution, to the space age.

Saturday mornings sipped through a glass darkly in piano loop. So often memory doesn’t wait to make the introduction. I’m talking to Tara and Lewis about a town they’ll never see themselves, and how I used to imagine their America, days of constant transmission; pictures of high untested quality. No-one considers a connection between the 21st century and the way the other country lies. Face down you feel the kick to your groin that never leaves you. You blew it because you couldn’t let go of the simplest conjugation I was, you were, I have been. The storm today, and the storm I walked back through my first week at university. This isn’t the right room. “[. . .] the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” My students stare at me and wait for their name to be called, dry-eyed in the shallows of their lost search engine. Long paths leading past the lecture halls and my own room that was the wrong room altogether. Irrevocable time. A book I took with me those first few weeks, imperfectly translated. A language I had never learned. Flashback inside of a flashback like some silent undersea detonation. I was explaining “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to an old friend I don’t see any more. And back home for the weekend. This is the end of the second album.          

Comes in with the harder guitars. The band for a six-month window is easily the most famous on the planet. September 94, my sister visits me one evening. Twenty-two years later she doesn’t recall when I remind her. We were younger. Different people. I want to talk to her about R.E.M., but I’d only be substituting a line for belated penance. The times I knew I had looked to hurt her, and still she came to visit me, and now she doesn’t remember. The first time I bought her a drink. No theory. Still nothing in common at 18 and 20 and then she’s gone again. Campus deserted. “[. . .] the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” The snow drift commute like a lack of maturity posing as world-weariness. Winter was laying foundations and those first R.E.M. songs I’d listened to in the summer of 91 seemed to belong to a primitive space age. Anger in memory is deferred gratification. The technology rather than the terror is what suggests you belong to a world before wireless connection. Hard guitars that come in at just the right time. The tickets were there in my hand like old friends, cancelled and refunded.

Still drinking with strangers I couldn’t care less about, and they all looked like me. The strange esprit de corps of second guessing Tarantino dialogue with the sound turned down or Star Trek – The Next Generation on a weeknight. Stuck like carpets and curtains to the half-light of November 94. It’s a montage effect that never quite comes off wearing odd socks. That one was actually my favorite for a long time only I don’t remember it that way; a choice between American romance and English realism and the faint discernment that I wasn’t learning anything. Today’s lesson takes the form of a short anecdote. One night in Cambridge, winter with its strawberry blonde hair takes you to bed. R.E.M. somewhere in the background. This isn’t the right room. You’re never really listening to the songs and seeing it at the same time. Memory panics at the thought of its immortal soul. Not so easy to put down anymore, a glass half empty or half full. Sweet disconnect. The only twentieth year you’ll ever have so make the most of it. The students listen to my voice’s taped recording explain Nagel’s philosophical treatise on “What is it like to be a bat?” Vodka sleep, a sense of smell that’s not so keen. The bar lights beneath your chin. Clubs where you couldn’t make out the faces smothered in guitar feedback. “[. . .] the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Still trying to think what it is about that one line, which sums up and rewrites the scenery. Not exactly an R.E.M lyric as much as an indirect suggestion. It doesn’t register right away the cold concrete split of the lip as you hit water. The idea of tragedy that you can play around with lightly, like feathers falling and rising. Materials for videos and songs that no longer speak to the times.

You find the transition where you least expect it. Albums that are no longer instant classics take me up to the start of the next century. After Monster R.E.M. released another six, New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Up, Reveal, Around the Sun, Accelerate, and Collapse into Now. Having blindsided me in my late teens with songs that knew more than they were letting on about growing wise, at their best, perhaps like all bands they were speaking to the very young. It was roughly ten years listening to a now obsolete format. Having managed to stretch three albums out over my early twenties that irreparable gulf between music and memory is a cycle of breakdown whose ghosts are lyrics not to speak of anymore. Such are the signs of mortality for the under twenty-fives. You put them in there and then you take them out again because the illusion of permanence is what they are selling. It’s hard for anyone to know I suppose when the moment has passed. A fruitless exercise in that it resists taking form where the urge to prolong and enhance memories both good and bad confuses proper judgment. It should not surprise me that this list should still be in order.
​
• “Find the River” (Automatic for the People – Warner Bros, 1992) “Near Wild Heaven” (Out of Time – Warner Bros, 1991) “Let Me In” (Monster – Warner Bros, 1992) “Man on the Moon” (Automatic for the People – Warner Bros, 1992) “Everybody Hurts” (Automatic for the People – Warner Bros, 1992) “Crush with Eyeliner” (Monster – Warner Bros, 1994) “Try Not to Breathe” (Automatic for the People – Warner Bros, 1992) “Shiny Happy People” (Out of Time – Warner Bros, 1991) “Tongue” (Monster – Warner Bros, 1994) “Radio Song” (Out of Time – Warner Bros, 1991) “Nightswimming” (Automatic for the People – Warner Bros, 1992) “Strange Currencies” (Monster – Warner Bros, 1994) “Me in Honey” (Out of Time – Warner Bros, 1992)


Jonathan qualified in 1999 with his M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University College and in 2004 with an MRes in Humanities from Keele University. He now teaches writing composition at John Cabot University in Rome. 

In the past Jonathan has had several pieces of his work published in The New Writer, Poetry Monthly, Iota, East Jasmine Review, The Dr T.J.Eckleburg Review, Negative Capability Press, Dirty Chai, Cordite Poetry Review, The Manifest Station, The TransNational, and Dream Catcher.
 

* * *

​
 

​