i'm jillian. i love sappy songs, mini-pigs, bike rides, good friends, music, and laughter and i really hate goodbyes. i biked across the country once and it was wheely fun. oh, and i love puns
[ID: ‘Coda Toward the New New Covenant: Death Sentence (for Father Joseph Kane)’ by Mary Karr
“We lean close when the dying speak though instinct says recoil from the decaying form, but silence radiates off them and blooms our loud selves out, out, out of the way, and we long to know what from each essential self will exhale over us, and if we every single one of us (it would only work if we all agreed) listened to our own deaths growing inside us geologically slow inching forward as the skull will someday edge through skin, then we would each speak only the truest lines: I’ve always loved you.”
Walking toward the ravine while he napped on the rest stop picnic table, she thought
about what her mother said about capacity. How we all have this great capacity for
acceptance. She stood now at the edge of the drop-off and practiced accepting. She
accepted the plant and root, the wheat and water, the wounded rocky land, the zipped-
lipped stones, the delicate sighs of cars just far enough away to be pleasant. Then she
practiced being accepted. (This was harder.) She still felt her heart was a small flat-faced
owl drugged by the daytime. She wanted to make an echo, but was unsure of what would
return to her, if she could suck in the same sound she spit out. She settled on a laugh. And
when it came back to her it was like clapping and cheering—a whole crowd of singing
hers spurring on her strange human attempt to not suffer.
I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.
