Lying Naked and Face Down (pt. 2)

New York: a big enough city that it's easy to forget it's a small town. I try to pass off as coincidence the fact that, at various points during the day, I walked by Xxx Bxxxxx Street in Soho, and also Xxx Hxxx Street in Brooklyn—both addresses piled high with flowers and cards of condolence—the addresses, respectively, of the late Heath Ledger, and his former fiance, Michelle Williams.¹

To be fair, I had business in Soho, and the Brooklyn address is only a few blocks from where I live. Both locations really were on my way. Still, I traveled the extra block or two both times, knowing full well where I was going—yet each time, the pile of flowers (and the pathos) caught me off guard: whether I was surprised at my own sadness, or just pretending to be surprised for the sake of passersby, even I don't know for sure.

Either way, I'm forced to conclude that I'm actually upset, for reasons I don't fully understand. I am upset by the death of this person I never knew, and even in the midst of this upset, I think that's pretty strange.²

Celebrities thrive in life because they're so adept at wearing our projections, and I suppose it's no less true in death: I project onto the exit of this celebrity all of my own unrelated, contemporaneous sadness.

I am sad for all of the things I've lost in these last months—the romantic notions of that wonderful future I was supposed to have, a particular future I now realize I'll never see. I grew so attached to this one route to happiness that I'm having trouble imagining any other way.

And this death dramatizes my own loss of hope, and of imagined, better futures. ³

This idea (more than the death itself) shakes me deeply, shakes me so I can't sleep, till finally (and without irony) I too take a pile of Ambien, and lie naked and face down in my bed, hoping to make it till morning without dreaming.

1. Actual street addresses removed, once I saw Google traffic coming in, and realized stalkers (like myself) were using this blog as an instrument to disturb the peace of these mourning individuals. (We should leave them be, and find our own people to mourn...)

2. A friend of mine died this week. He wasn't a close friend, but he was someone I liked very much, someone I cared for and trusted; and I missed seeing him, even before he died; and now I miss him in a wholly different—and final—way. He has "left the building," and when he left, some of the air got sucked out of it, and it reminded me (the way it does whenever someone I know dies) of the terrible loud sound of nothing. It reminded me that our gradual accumulation of things, throughout our lives, amounts to nothing—because life is also about losing things, getting less and less, growing smaller, and then finally, sometimes loudly and sometimes quietly, exiting altogether. And I'm sure this week I've been conflating my feeling of loss for the one person with the more publicized loss of the other, the stranger, the celebrity.

3. A feeling I've not felt since the death of Nate Fisher (!).