Doubt, doubt, so far from shore, too tired to wave, too light-headed to drown, farway but not quite unhinged- how long could one carry on waiting for something to happen? If one were to be quiet enough and still enough for long enough- maybe they could somehow transcend the void. Balancing precariously in between existed a no-man's land of confusion and dread for those who were looking for a means to an end, to tie the loose ribbons into a bow, to bury the box under the roses. Waiting, waiting- there is a part of him still in the room, lingering.
Listening, the ticking away of seconds, the hum and click of hot water running through pipes, the thrum of the walls, distant doors opening, closing, and beyond, life- engines, motion, work, a threshold to cross. Is that the sound of a flutter of air against a taught guitar string? It is unfair, do you not think, that our possessions can outlive us? That an unfortunate arrangement of scrap metal and plastic and dials and faces and hands, inanimate and flat, existed longer in this tangible realm than he could have, or should have, or would have if he'd let himself- he was made of so much more.
But he had endured only thirty-two years before giving up his flesh and let his blood out into the bathtub, swept a flood through the rooms that seeped down into the basement. Beyond that flood he left behind just these lifeless reminders of his legacy.
The watch would beep once for the half hour and twice on the hour. It's easy to lose count of how many times the beeps signal passing hours and half hours, lying awake, lying in between, wondering about the other side. Wondering why and why and why and why and how will the acoustics of this place he had strummed and sung the words that he then kept in his heart chambers but now could not be located, could be not be scattered like ashes or pushed out to sea like the tidal wave from the bathtub, could not be explained or heard as they always had and were assumed to always be. There was that song I had meant to ask about, a song conjuring images of whale sounds and ocean bed orchestras- what did it mean to him when he'd written it, how did he mean it to be heard when he sang it. Not knowing is a quagmire, a vacuum, a moment between two telephone calls two minutes apart, both with the same message- he is gone. Will his melodies turn my dreams of his performances to nightmares? Will the standing ovations of my sleep become cold sweats? Why did the whales occupy his thoughts enough to swim across the frets of his guitar? Did they know something about him that I never will? His music is a message- now it's a whole new kind of message. A haunting.
There have been more questions to ask of him after his suicide than there have been minutes since I last heard his voice. I am still, I am quiet, I am waiting. Then again, he made his choice, so what now is mine? Do the whales and the swans, the greenhouses and the green glass bottles. the library's morning dust shafts and the rattling keys, the old tyres in the garage and the carvings in the sycamore, the mishapen ashtray spun from clay and the pedals under the pottery wheel- do they mean what they did when he made them matter so much in those songs, his songs, those that made me love him, more than I otherwise would have if he had never sung them to me.
All there really was to find in that waiting place was a lonely half-slumber wherein time will only move as fast as you allow it to move, and this is numbing. Is that enough? No- because the time he remains gone presents itself dauntingly ahead, and each tick of every clock is steady in its predictability, angry in its redundancy. When will it be the right moment to get up, to move on? When will music sound like music again? When will it be time to face another day and will it be right to face it when faced with it?
There's something else to be sure of- existing in the moment now is escape enough from the other world that most exist in whilst also worrying about the past or dreaming about the future, hoping for gains and grieving for loss. The menagerie of life that existed in his lyrics, the places he'd fossilised forever in folk songs, the corners of the world he had heard and given voices all their own- it is up to me, I suppose, to decide to shake his memory off by reducing them to clutterings and rhyming schemes. Or to let his memory go, by letting them continue to live after he'd brought them to life and then ended his own. Let his memory go on, far away enough to feel the future breathing down my neck, but not so far that a sunbeam whistling around a guitar string couldn't be a sound I might consider a reminder of him. How he'd been there, how he is now not there, and how just because he is not right where I am right at this moment in time, he isn't anywhere at all. When I used to listen to his music, it brought me a feeling of potentialities, of possibilities. The songs were unlit candles, unopened envelopes, undrawn curtains, unwoken dreams- wantings and hopings and wishings met with a shower of shooting stars that hadn't yet landed. If I want to live with eyes wide open, thinking of what can be, what might be- all the possible becomings- it isn't because of him. Not anymore. He gave it to me, I found it between the quavers and minims and beats of the music he wrote, it was hidden but only so that those of us who listened could find it. Now he is gone, but just like he can't take the contents of his recording studio, his bedroom, his garage, his attic, he hasn't taken this. I know that it might actually be easier to pretend I'd never known it, and eventually, perhaps, that I'd never known him. To dispose of the remainders of his life, reduce them to trash, crush it- I could crush this thing that haunts me, which is only my memory of him, or the heaviness of the empty space shaped like him that he left behind, the gaping void in me. Yet if choosing this easier option means that I have to return the gift, I'm not sure I want to take it easily. If he wants me to remember, to hurt, to learn the true meaning of bereavement and understand absolutely the feeling of abandonment- well, maybe I don't care what he wants or would have wanted. But I want those things, and I want a life filled with music, with arbitrary and beautiful images evoked by song lyrics, and I want to live believing in ghosts.
If you think hard enough and long enough, a ghost imagined becomes a ghost you can sense right there with you. If quiet and still for long enough, there is music even in silence, and it's just his memory, navigating between the moments in which he is motionless, without mass and without matter, but with so much meaning, because we both put it there.
