Mornings are for Goodbyes
The lifeshot I want is at the very top of the cardboard box. I resist the urge to glance past at the many others buzzing inside their own assortments of photo-frames. All of them wound me, leaving me breathless, but the one I now clutch in my hands hurt the most.
I return to sitting on my bed and hold the scuffed edges of the wooden photo-frame, absently rubbing my thumbs over the etched designs. There is a tiny bronze plaque at the frame’s bottom face. I don’t feel called towards it just yet. I focus instead on the design engravings. They are of nonsensical things. Seashells, stars. They don’t have anything to do with the lifeshot, with that ethereal person in the frame, with Sylvia moving and flowing—a memory bleeding life.
As per usual, Sylvia’s words sing inside my mind.
The less the designs make sense, Evan, the harder people will look.
The echo embraces me, tries to keep me bundled in the cold. I cling to it and reply with the same old words. It should have gotten easier with each iteration. But the words grapple the insides of my throat, grasping at my tongue, trying to find their footing. They fall into the emptiness of the room, clumsy and disoriented.
“You think so? They won’t just roll their eyes and whirl away like some pompous art critic?” My dulled, rusted voice is the only one that shatters the silence plaguing my world. I sink into the echo of the answer that follows.
No, silly. People that think like that wouldn’t get a chance to see what this means to us anyways. The title helps, but it doesn’t explain everything. Mornings are for beginnings. That meaning is for us. Only us. No one else but us. You get the…picture.
A faint smile blooms on my lips, slow to arrive, quick to die.
I miss the moments when Sylvia’s breathing was the first thing I heard in the morning. The soft rise and fall of her body, the gentle air leaving her gentle soul. She grounded me when my infrequent yet debilitating nightmares—the ones that left my muscles aching—woke me before dawn. She was there, her naked back facing me, a brown birthmark below her left shoulder, amorphous like a cloud. She’d wake not soon after, turning, wearing a small smile, still bleary with sleep, and slide a lazy tickling caress of fingertips along my stomach—healing me.
Now, there is no breath to be heard, no fingers to join with, to sink into. Those soft threads of Sylvia remain as dandelion fluff. It makes me imagine Sylvia is just behind on the bed, about to pull me into a wrestling match where she inevitably wins.
Like every morning, my head is filled to bursting with possibilities. Dreams. Endings. What if Sylvia walks into the apartment right now? What if she slinks out from the bathroom coy and playful dressed only in her underwear? What if she’s here? What if I have the chance to really see her again? Kiss her? Hold her?
That isn’t possible—this animated piece of technology, this lifeshot, is everything that remains of Sylvia. A lifeshot, much like a regular photograph, is capable of capturing someone’s exact likeness. But unlike a photograph, it captures the person in several infinite moments, always in movement, always active, always whispering. I would know, I work with lifeshots—capturing them, developing them, shipping them back to their loved ones. When granted permission by a relative, I used to include the most intimately human lifeshots in my Memory Wall exhibit at the Vividia Gallery. That was months ago. I haven’t had the heart to update my exhibit with new lifeshots. It seems like a different life when I brainstormed titles for my projects with Sylvia. The last time was….
My eyes want to catch the glint of the tiny bronze plaque nailed at the bottom of the lifeshot I hold in my hands. The words there call to me. My fingers move, subconscious, feeling, searching, down from the edges of the frame to what is now essentially a metal epitaph. I trace the engraved letters. Four words. They have something to do with mornings and their beginnings. They roll like phantom tastes on my tongue and make me grimace with their bitterness, their untruth.
I don’t believe the words etched onto the plaque even though the cherished, haunting voice inside tells me to. Trust me, it says. Let me go, it says. The words on the bronze plate are from a separate life where I thought people I dearly loved couldn’t be wrenched away. I am missing something to make the words feel right again. Mornings aren’t for beginnings.
Mornings are for goodbyes.
I sigh. That doesn’t feel right, either.
Everything about my job as a lifeshot photographer had been incredible, filled with pride at seeing family members clutching lifeshots to their chests, feeling like the deceased person they dearly loved in that vivid piece of tech hadn’t quite left them. That satisfaction, that wonder.
Ebbing away.
It is almost time to leave my apartment. I have a lifeshot appointment with a client in an hour at the Groundwall Hospice. Then, I will go and develop the lifeshot captured there at the Vividia Gallery under the strict yet affable supervision of the lead photographer, Fey. It will take me at least thirty minutes to transit over to the Hospice—besides, I need to get dressed. Need to be a professional normal human being. Be someone who isn’t going to attract pitiable glances from strangers. Be someone respectable, be someone without anger in the face of another’s laughter. Be someone who holds his tears at bay inside the husk of his body, that cavernous hateful silhouette, when he speaks, when he is on the train, when he is getting coffee at Terrance’s Bistro.
Who was I before my grief? Can someone tell me, please. I can’t make the image stick myself, so can someone materialize in this empty void of mine, cup my face and scream at me the truth, please.
I sink further into my bed, exhausted, wilted. I need to get dressed. But it is becoming harder to unchain myself from this bed. The self-interrogation getting longer and more hateful through each passing day.
The person that flows within this lifeshot…she is my everything. Sylvia is the first thought the moment the sun crawls through the blinds. The first thought the moment my digital alarm yells at me to get up and get on with the day. I would already be awake, thinking about the cardboard box beneath my bed and all of its memories.
Holding the photo-frame comes nowhere close to holding the real person that it contains. How can it? I can’t touch Sylvia, can’t trace the birthmark on her back, can’t taste the jasmine perfume on her neck. I can only stare deep into the lifeshot’s three-dimensional microcosm. This lifeshot contains a scene of the public kite-park by the coast. Currently the sun climbs the horizon while the Groundwall cityscape gleams in the background. Yesterday, there wasn’t a breeze and the sun was higher in the sky. Today, the cherry blossoms rain their petals onto the dewy grass.
A cherry blossom petal kisses Sylvia’s cheek before drifting the rest of the way to the ground.
She turns and beams at me, or at least, the version of me that had stood behind the lifeshot glasses during the actual moment, a year ago. That particular Sunday is still young in my memory, missing only who I was, how I felt, because nothing from the past can replace what I am now, what I am becoming without her. Sylvia, today, wears her blonde hair done up in a messy bun, escaped strands of wavy hair fall irregularly on either side of her face. She holds the spool for a kite the two of us had made together in our cramped living room. The kite is in the shape of a dragon’s head with fiery red trails, flowing, flowing, across the blue. It flies in the air; its trails can barely be seen on the top edge of the frame. So, I tilt the lifeshot slightly so I can see it in full. My mind suddenly floods with an image not contained within the world of the lifeshot: Sylvia’s hand smacks away mine with a grin on her face. Hey! I got the wings, you got the tail. That was the deal.
“Sorry,” I mutter into the dead air of my bedroom.
My days are filled with apology after apology. I don’t know what I’m apologizing for. I didn’t do anything; I wasn’t driving the car. People die. They fade. They die. They fade. They die. They…it isn’t my fault.
Sylvia starts mouthing words in the lifeshot, her eyes squinting with mischief. There is a soft buzzing like a hummingbird in suspended flight, a comforting vibration, along the photo-frame. Something in me cracks and I lean closer to the lifeshot, my heartbeat quickening. Out of the thousands of possible options, it is very likely she says something different today. I’m hungry for it. Yearning to hear her voice. It has quickly become like a drug, dominating my life.
The words bleed through from the faint muffled sound to a deafening clarity as if Sylvia is talking directly into my soul. “…imagining the kite smacking someone in the face when the wind dies. Would you hate me if I laughed?”
I close my eyes. “I’d laugh with you.”
Sylvia laughs over my words. My chest flares with acute pain. This is what I get for giving in, for cracking. The hurt multiplies tenfold as I sense the ghost of her question crawl into my mind.
When I die, will you put me up on the wall with the others?
I let it drown me. The agony congeals inside my lungs. I can’t breathe, don’t want to breathe.
I shove the frame face-down into the cardboard box but not before I see glimpses of countless other lifeshots. My hands are shaking; when did they start shaking? Bronze plaques gleam under the ray of sunlight. Some have sticky notes stuck to them with maddened scribblings. Some with words done in black permanent marker marring their wooden frames, the hope there for the words to finally stick, to make sense.
Sylvia is in all of the lifeshots.
Sylvia’s in bed, asleep, turning and turning in a dream; Sylvia keels over the balcony railing, tempting fate, shouting at the top of her lungs—the metal photo-frame buzzing, screaming in delight; Sylvia attempts a cannonball, but slips at the lake’s pier, smacking into the water belly-first, resurfacing, laughter.
It is like being vacuumed into a whirlpool, almost impossible to escape. But I manage. I have to. I ignore the titled plaques and instead briefly scan the sticky notes and marker words, searching for a phrase or two that might just feel right today when they haven’t in the days before. But the words are still senseless, heavy, blunt.
The buzzing of the lifeshots become faint as I shut the flap and cram the box back into its grave.
I dress with muted movements—my soul feeling darker than the shadows beneath my empty bed. I put on the crumpled pair of jeans and yesterday’s shirt flung into the corner in yet another fitful night of sleep. I don’t look in the mirror. If I do, I know I’ll break down and weep. I don my lifeshot camera, a slim pair of holographic touch-screen glasses. Throwing one final look at my bed, all that was and could have been, I leave my apartment.
I say my goodbye for the day, even if I don’t mean it.
Goodbyes are a Prison
The Groundwall Hospice has access to an entire lake. It shimmers under the sun. Magnificent oaks surrounding the large meadow also shields the lake from every side. Ducks drift in groups across the surface, sending soft ripples outward. It is a day to spend outside. There are no cherry blossoms here, no kites, no coy smiles, no soft words, no love of a familiar kind.
And yet, I can’t get Sylvia out of my mind.
Through the camera lens programmed into my lifeshot glasses, I can see the elderly woman—my client—sitting in her wheelchair, wisps of gray making up the entirety of her being: gray hospice gown, gray hair, graying skin. She remains silent since the first meeting in the main lobby of the hospice. It was a hassle wheeling her onto the grass, but I didn’t complain. I pushed, straining at times. But I didn’t care. My mind was and still is elsewhere in a cardboard box, searching, while my body labors. The client’s daughter, holding her son’s hand, assured me moments ago that this was the lifeshot spot her mother would have wanted—if she could speak.
The elderly woman stares now at the soft clouds, something sage-like and altogether sad in her gaze. In a few weeks, perhaps even days, she will be gone.
I can’t stop making comparisons. The woman has her side to the camera—just like Sylvia in her cherry blossom lifeshot.
Working like this is not good for you. It’s weighing you down. You should take a break.
But how?
You’re gonna tell Fey it’s about time you had a vacation. This weekend. Dinner’s on me.
I exhale a shaky breath and concentrate on the appointment. Be a professional normal human being. I can’t stop working, even if the joy of the job has bled away. I owe it to these people, to anyone who wants to remember their loved ones as if they are still alive.
“Grandma! Grandma!” the little kid, no more than four, shouts. “Why are you looking up? Look at the camera!”
I watch the kid run into the shot through my glasses’ camera lens; there is not yet an ebbing of joy in the boy’s safe bubble of youth even when faced with his grandmother’s radiating sadness. To feel envious of a child is another sign that perhaps I’m almost too far gone in a direction I detest but have no means to escape. Be someone without anger in the face of another’s laughter, I remind myself, even if I fail to stamp the hatred rising like bile in my throat.
And yet, I manage to still the mental command to capture the photo. There is after all the ethical code of the lifeshot photographer. For all the evil in the world, the evil that surely broods inside of me, I won’t make the mistake of pressing that button with two living people in the frame, risk my lifeshot license and have it be revoked. Things can go terribly wrong. I heard of horror stories from Fey and also studied devastating scenarios of early lifeshot experimentation when I was in university. People fusing into one grotesque entity in a picture, transforming into some unrecognizable monstrosity—something that would be damnably damaging to their reputation, damaging to their mental health. I imagine the boy and his grandmother molding into one being, their arms flailing, their voices like the distorted bleating of a monstrous goat, crimson and grotesque—
I laugh.
Dark. Spiteful.
What is wrong with me? What am I doing? What am I doing? What will Sylvia think of the person I’m becoming? Who was I before the grief? Please, I need to know.
I can speculate on what Sylvia will say, her eyes warm with concern, understanding. But I know for certain what she would do: a tickling caress on my neck, my stomach, her healing touch, no words necessary.
I have the sudden urge to confront Sylvia’s voice, her words, like I do every day. But not here, not now.
“Michael is sweet, isn’t he?” the child’s mother says behind me, seemingly relating my abrupt laughter to the boy’s earnestness. The surprising remark startles me out of my reverie, and I feel a pitiable ball of relief expand inside my chest. It doesn’t make me feel any better. Did she not sense the darkness?
“He—he is,” I say, a lump forming in my throat. If only the mom knew what manner of sick thoughts I just had. I snuff the hateful scoff building up inside. I can’t allow myself to be this person again. In Sylvia’s absence, I can’t let myself lose control, to shed what manner of joy and kindness she had been able to patch back into me over three years of love and forgiveness. “I can see the love he has for his grandmother.”
“Yes.” The mom, folded arms, taps on her elbow with a finger. Her face loses the smile, becomes contorted with something I know very well. A prison. The face becomes stuck in it, bogged down, unwanted. “I wish he could have more time….” The mom lays her hand on her mouth and gazes far into the distance, seeing something there that I cannot.
I brush the rim of my lifeshot glasses, anxious and awkward. What manner of comfort can I give when I can’t even give it to myself?
“Having Ronnie here makes this easier.” The mom nods towards her little boy. “After she leaves us, his bright joy will help our family heal and move on. The only thing we can do. To keep on going until its our turn.” She says this like she wants to believe it. Maybe she will one day.
Moving on…. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? Sounds lonely. Doesn’t it? I’ve had opportunities to begin my own healing, in the ghosts of Sylvia’s questions. I’m not stupid. I know how to start the process. But I want to hurt.
Sylvia had offered to drive me to work a little earlier that day on her way to the office. And I’d decided to stay home, still feeling groggy after a late work night at the Gallery hanging lifeshots on the Memory Wall. She left whispering a quiet “All right, sleepy baby. See you soon,” into my ear. When is soon? I can’t help but be bitter. Not to Sylvia. No. Never. But to myself. If I’d gone with her that morning, had sacrificed those bare few minutes of more sleep, we would still be together, elsewhere.
When I know this, it is easy to hate, easy to keep on hurting.
Really, how can I leave Sylvia behind when the only chance for a goodbye I’ve had are when I wake up, and when I sleep? Mornings are for goodbyes. And what she’d once said: mornings are for beginnings. When will it be so, Sylvia? When?
I come back to myself and look at the mom. My eyes widen. She has been crying ever so quietly.
As if she too notices at the same time as me, she whips her face away, her voice hoarse, she says, “If you will excuse me. I’ll be right back.” The mother walks a short distance to a clump of tall oaks, and disappears behind one of the trees. She doesn’t come back for a long time.
Everything becomes a blur from then on. My mind is a mess of words and memories and questions. The questions I ignore because this isn’t the place for them. Instead, I give myself fully to the memories, trying to find a release. That too turns out to be impossible. This isn’t the place for that either. The words. I mull over the words. The sticky notes, the black permanent markings engulf my vision. It gives way to an anchored, muffled feeling in my chest, like I’m at the bottom of the ocean, and yet somehow, I resist that crushing, fatal pressure just barely. That, I know, is part of my sorrow.
The words didn’t come to me in the morning, and they won’t come to me here. This shimmering lake, this meadow of green and oak, this hospice with the dying, isn’t the place.
Only afterwards when I call a cab, the chattering of the driver a dull buzzing in the back of my head, do I recall tiny fragments from the appointment. The child sat a little ways away tearing out clumps of grass after receiving only blank silence from his grandmother, humming to himself. The grandmother stared at the sky, her lips a thin line, her wisps of graying hair being swept apart with each violent gust of wind. I remembered taking the lifeshot, remembered the way the flash of light bending inwards like a cone, into the holographic camera lens. Whatever thought the elderly woman was having at that moment would be stored inside the camera. Will she finally speak, say something that had been on her mind, only in her lifeshot when it is printed and framed? Months before, I might have felt an overpowering thrill at the thought that what I did for this family might give them a chance to hear their grandmother, their mother, say something after months of not saying a word. Though she still might not speak, an endless number of possibilities, an infinite number of iterations of what can be will continue to be articulated. Her wheelchair can turn to face the camera. She can smile. She can cry. Every single day the lifeshot, that imitation of a person, will have something slightly different to share with their loved ones while adhering always to that initial central thought. A cycle.
And that will be it.
Over and over again.
A Prison of a New Type of Sorrow
The lifeshot exhibit in Vividia Gallery is massive and it grows everyday with the continuous submissions of other lifeshot photographers—some freelance, some working for Vividia. The art displays dominate multiple walls across the domed central room in the Gallery. I know this place inside out, its every surface, its every art piece from the early medieval era to the modern holographics series mapped onto my brain. Currently a large school excursion group swarms the Professions Wall, pointing and laughing at the thousands of individuals captured in their respective lifeshots. In a large frame styled as rising bubbles, an ocean-diver swims deep into the murky darkness, dispersing a school of brightly colored fish. Without looking, I know it to be titled Dark Pressures. In a frame tinged sky-blue, a parachuter is falling down and down but never reaches the shining cityscape below. Escape Gravity. Most of the people honored in the Professions Wall aren’t dead. Some are. And the kids laugh, unknowing. Maybe it is better that way.
I observe the gallery visitors, see their joy, their contemplations. I scan the rest of the walls, my eyes purposefully and restlessly skipping over another covered from top to bottom in lifeshots.
The Memory Wall.
To get to the lifeshot development office I have to walk through this domed chamber. But I can never walk through this damn room without grinding to a stop. There is anger. There is this muffled, shadowed simmering of heat behind my face, inside my chest. It assaults me in the seconds before I leave my apartment in the mornings and howls into my soul in the moments before I finally succumb to sleep. This room and that wall make it worse, so much worse.
When I die—
I bite the inside of my cheek, hard, resisting the opportunity for another minute. I taste the iron tang of blood.
All the people in those shots are dead. These pictures are called lifeshots and every single individual is dead, trapped in their own mimicry of a small moment of joy, a small memory to make someone else feel better.
It doesn’t help me that way. It doesn’t work that way. Not anymore. Sylvia wasn’t a small moment of joy. Sylvia was an argument over the little things, make up over my childhood bruises, simple kisses, healing fingers on the side of my neck. Sylvia was wicked rose thorn, an amorphous shape in the clouds.
Sylvia was lazy Sunday, soft skin, a full bed.
Sylvia isn’t a small moment of joy.
—will you put me up on the wall with the others?
I wade into the question and become fully submerged. It consumes my senses, pulling me almost into a different world. A world where my memories haunt me with her sweet voice and her painful questions and her agonizing requests. It is a conversation I have six days out of the week, with myself, by myself. This is the place. This is the place for the right words.
“Do you want me to?” I mutter, echoing the routine, my eyes searching the Wall for a spot that is perfect. Throat feels raw like I’ve been screaming the entire day. Muffled sounds of middle-graders drift around—I ignore them. I ignore everything.
Well, that depends. People-watching might be fun.
“Not how it works. You’re not actually there. The people will be the one watching you.”
How do you know?
“I don’t.”
Then put me up on the wall when you’re tired of me…
I clench my teeth, pushing aside the chaotic smothering of emotion. Not yet, not until the voice leaves me. “I can’t do that.”
…beside that lovely person drinking chamomile tea. I’d want to be their friend.
“You know I can’t.”
Or beside that one kid blowing soapy bubbles from his bubble wand. I always liked seeing how many he could push out before they all popped. You know what I say to that?
“What?”
Yes please!
“I can’t. I just….”
Or beside…what? You’re gonna make me laugh. Stop smiling and let me finish.
Every bone in my body protests against asking it again.
Put me right by the entrance hall. I want to be the first to spark a smile on someone’s face with the strange, strange things I’d say.
“Do you really want me to?”
There is a pause, like every other time. And yet, it is different—I want it to be different. Yes, I still want to hurt, and so I will keep on hurting and hurting—but maybe I should only for a day instead of six days a week. It would be a start. A beginning. My meeting with the client and her daughter today was yet another reminder. This is what Sylvia would’ve wanted. I’ve known that, known that since the first time she poured herself into my patchwork soul. I’m not stupid. Just a little slow.
I need to say one thing now, a single lazy word, to begin the escape from my sorrowful prison. I let her say it all the times before. But it needs to be me. It always had to be me. I steel myself for the calm river of Sylvia’s voice.
Evan, let me be serious for a second about my hypothetical demise. When I take up every inch of your thinking, when I don’t give you space to breathe, when I become too much for you, when you look at me with hurt inside, with anger—hey, you know I’m right. Deep down that’s the truth. I know how you’re going to feel, because I know you. I know you. So yes. Put me up on that damn wall and visit me only on—
“Sundays.” A release.
—my favorite day, to spend with my favorite person.
Sorrow of Falling Asleep With Her in Mind
Trying to fall asleep.
Cold sweats, crumpled sheets, tossed pillows. Sudden fits of stargazing through the blinds. Stargazing at her, trapped, unknowing, or knowing.
Trying to fall asleep.
Finding some meaning in the tomorrows. Suffocating the sobbing. Suffocating the tired. Suffocating the person, or trying to. Tearing into the shadows under the eyes, under the bed. Tearing into sticky words, into lies. Tearing into life, into goodbyes. Tearing into bronze, into beginnings.
Trying to fall asleep.
Trying to find the right words, finding all of them as they always were. The right words, in the falling, in the buzzing, in the crease of a smile, in that sweet haunting voice.
And Mind the Crack of Light within the Soul as You Say
“I’ll see you on Sunday.”
Mornings are for Beginnings