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NATALIE SHAPERO THAT ENDLESS SKYWAY Look, I’m not going to apologize for grasping your hand in greeting and in that moment gaining access to all your memories of your most profound moments of shame. It’s a superpower I have from having died and then having survived my own death—let’s not make a big deal. I do of course receive the intermittent objection that IT’S NOT FAIR, but, look, what is? Is it fair that 77% of the habitat of U.S. coastal redwoods is under private ownership? Is it fair that Woody Guthrie had to find out about the death of his mom by receiving in the mail a check for one dollar and fifty cents, the remaining funds in her hospital canteen account? Is it fair that I, after being left for dead, at last knew how the snow felt, tracked inside and not mopped up, melting, ignored? Is it fair to the snow that it no longer laid claim to the exclusive experience of that feeling, the very last thing the snow once had to itself? You don’t hear the snow complaining. You don’t hear its hexagonal whine. There’s no I WANT TO FEEL NATALIE’S FEELINGS; IT’S ONLY RIGHT IF SHE’S GONNA GET TO FEEL MINE— NO ONE CALLS IT THAT I’m not so petty that I can’t put personal feelings aside and congratulate you on killing me, on killing me so immensely dead, more dead than I’d ever been killed before, and in fact so dead that I overshot death and richocheted right back to life— hey, take a bow. And I’m not so proud that I can’t say sorry—sorry to you that I’m not still dead, that I didn’t die forever like someone sloshing in the cold ocean in her seven pairs of stockings after the wrecking of the Royal Mail Ship Titanic— |