The Difference

The Difference It’s mid-afternoon in April, and Llewellyn and I had been walking for hours. He wants the best casket for his mother, but the shops here don’t quite have what he’s looking for. Hunkering down on this bench, Llew says something about how quiet it is right now, and I can’t argue that. This time of day, light precedes the dark, and the cosmic blood of sky halos over us. ”Cremation”, he says. I’m confused. But he tells me she hated crowds, and that death probably wouldn’t change that. I don’t know if it’s the right time, if it’s for me to say, but I tell him anyway. I tell him there are moments where we find ourselves in the rawest of places. Here, the dead swirl around us, and their briefer selves play with crayons darker than black. Sometimes, the most vivid colors one can know are the ones that remain nameless, the ones without verbal fingerprints to deter us from searching further. It has become awkward, and we both know this. And like a death’s-head moth taking flight, he stands and walks a few yards away from me and lays down, arms and legs spread wide. I think he gets it now. From here, he’ll reach that place we all fear to go—the divide where subtraction has become the only addition we can ever know. This is when I recall my old father. And how a young boy waited for the first sign of his old man, by the arrival of his shadow on the porch blinds. And how wiser now, sees nature in the most cartoonish of ways—like a touring rock star shooting heroin, and in this— becoming his next word, breath, twitch, processing the next surge he takes like an antibiotic, and how smiling grimly, sees his latest groupie offering herself to him with a tramp stamp that says Bella Luna in a blue like the arteries of her body, everyone else lying around him like Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, and he wonders where he left the prophylactics.