The Dark Sea Within: Tales and Poems by Jason V Brock

Author:Jason V Brock [Brock, Jason V]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781614981947
Amazon: 1614981949
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2017-06-01T22:00:00+00:00

Windows, Mirrors, Doors

I

The apocalypse arrived on a Tuesday. At least for Marion.

However, this was not some 9/11-type catastrophe, or the collapse of civilization due to a global pandemic. No, she had learned real apocalypses were always personal. They always involved a cast of characters, too. Sometimes just one, but frequently extras . . . though never more than required. The circumstances—the inciting events, the setting, and so on—just served as a backdrop for the emotional and psychic dramaturgy that encapsulated that most human and elusive of all cosmic principles: the moment. Additionally, and ironically, said moment is different for everyone, even those who come to share it due to accidents of fate.

For Marion, it was the death of her identical twin sister on a stark, bitterly cold Tuesday morning. The cast had included her, Annette, the doctors and nurses; the last act took place in the hospice, and the catalyst had been her sister’s cancer, which set those final performances into motion—piecemeal scenes that would eventually devolve into a protracted and painful melodrama saddled with a poorly scripted, wholly unsatisfactory finale.

Who writes these things? Marion sometimes wondered, and with more than a touch of sarcasm.

Another thing she came to understand after Annette’s loss was that these private apocalypses were not always quick; in many situations they were slow—in her case the leisurely unraveling of the threads of a life over the span of more than thirty years. Yes, death can be quick, binary—one moment living, the next not. Nevertheless, the end of all things for the individuals who survive such trauma—the demise of a loved one; a disaster, manmade or natural—often takes much longer to resolve . . . frequently months or years, if ever.

Slow and steady. But the race is never won, she reflected.

Of course, Marion had not come to these conclusions through any sudden epiphany; it was experienced as a gradual dawning . . . more precisely an erosion. An implacable, sinister loss of color in the day-to-day machinations of existence as the bubble of her daily life shrank in influence and experience. It would all perhaps end horribly, as is the way with reality, but for a long time she tried to concern herself chiefly with the possibility of new beginnings, with the mystery of a fresh, if unwelcome, start—spinning the anguish and pain into a different worldview she had not previously considered. After a time, this faux optimism subsided, and she eventually realized that the finality is what truly mattered. That was where the lesson was to be found, she mused. Endings only become apparent in retrospect; in the moment, the events as they are happening seem as impermanent as any others that precede them or those that inevitably follow. Only with hindsight does the true gravity of the delineation between the world before and the world after become comprehensible.

In the final analysis, the grind and joy of anyone’s life comes down to a few bullet points, she decided, at most a couple of paragraphs highlighting a few key moments:

· Birth—shared with Annette .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.