Not an anniversary, pt. 2
There are emotions that you can convey in a text without using words. Sadness, fear, desire, longing, even love, they can fit between the lines quite comfortably when you write about whoever, whatever, evokes them. You can circumambulate people with words, even touch them, and the words can leave these emotions breathe in the interstices.
Except when it comes to rage.
He used to smoke and read in the early mornings, before he started working, surrounded by piles of books in the living room. A man who knew so much, yet noticed so little.
He was a generous man who threw rounds and invited everyone. A charming man. An impressive man, an admired man. A man of travel and music. A loud man, especially when under the influence, which he was on a daily basis, for a long time. A man who spent money without keeping track, and lots of. A violent man at times, yet apparently much less in this marriage than in the previous one, as those who knew testified. A man of outward action, with a sense of loneliness that he could never admit to, much less convey, until it ate him up, in the end. A man who made everyone tiptoe around him, even when he wasn’t around.
A man who took thousands of pictures, and of whom there are so few; his shadow next to her image, or an image of some other woman, that’s the best you can get. A man of more contradictions than the number of drinks he had in his life, pardon my bitterness. A man who could get worked up about drunk driving even though this essentially had been him, over decades, every day, miraculously without much harm save for a few bruises and the occasional tin damage.
He passed away six years after her, that’s 31 years ago now. Before, and even after, he wrecked the lives of everyone close to him, especially, and fatally, hers. There is no sweet-talking this. There, that’s the rage. It’s a cold rage, after so much time, though it can be heated up again, no problem. It needs few words, but it doesn’t fit inside the crevices of the unspoken. And this is why he gets more words than she did, and it’s the only reason why, really.
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