amandapalmer has died
by jakeStephens

Where’s the next bus stop was the last thing she said.  I knew she didn’t know where we were going.  I knew she didn’t see how far we’d gone.  I live in the black spaces between breaths and she was another seed planted, radioactively decaying.  I like that idea, half-life.  How long will you continue to decay, losing half your life, losing half your life?  How much longer do you have?  One more post? Two?  What’s your status now, amandapalmer, shall I update it?

Thistles are a beautiful flower, all pink and green, like your eye shadow, I said when she got in the car, smelling of narcoleptic Los Angeles air, and I like your eye shadow it matches your dress.  Twitchiking, her compound word, so proudly she sang it, rolled through me, conjuring.  Twitch go the limbs, electricity in the body, quivers and decays, then hike goes the skirt, then down into dirt.  Another black space in the black space between breaths, warm in a cloud of her last breath.

Yes, I’d love to give you the ride and won’t this be fun and I’m a little shy and please just shoot my feet and yes let’s have a coffee and no I don’t mind and my aren’t you lovely?  Like a thistle, bristling, colorful.  I know where the thistles grow.  Would you like to see them, smell them, taste them, vibrant, soft, verdant, like ants or a beetle on your tongue?  Perhaps another time?  Perhaps.  Perhaps soon.  I’ll update my status.  I’ll follow you anywhere, not that you’re going.

After each uncomfortable smile, each shifting sentence, now nervous she laughed.  I’m laughing, she laughed, won’t laugh. Not anymore.  No need, not nervous.  Dirt gets under your fingernails even when you use a shovel or a trowel, it’s the gardener’s way.  I dig it out with my teeth, tasting the deep flavors of earth and life, brown and red.  Black spaces and deep earth.  I savored the idea, wondering if she will remember her name after the first shovel-shivering blow.  A home run, shuddering like black licorice tastes.  Will she cry, how much longer the half-life?  Amanda, Amanda, it echoes and lingers, then slowly diminishes, a dissonant chord.

Waves to the beaches must forever return.  Here’s where we turn.  Yes, I’ll drop you near the 405.  I know just the place and isn’t she lovely, isn’t she wonderful?  What ways walk back when walking back there are no ways to get back? 

She’s smiling when I kiss her.  She’s shining with love in the moonlight.  My love overspilling her, but she’s cold, so very cold now.  I’m just a gardener, I’m just sowing seeds.  Every seed planted is a funeral, so I will say a few words.  Respects must be paid and I have no debts.  The last time, my first time. The next time, the first time.  And this time is the only time I’ve loved you, Amanda. 

Fewer words hatching, slowly waking reptiles or insects in the dark, as we rode in the sun, her eyes reflecting the fear of her last status post, pools of eyesbright under ivy arched thistledown, little questions she wrote, not knowing the answers I know.  Fewer still when the moment was moments away, when my teeth chattered and battered at cage doors and sang in dark spaces, calling her name and my name.   Lips, hissing steam valves, eyes full of midnight; dirt and dark spaces.  She tap-tapped-tapping out the words to the song called “what are you doing?”

Dying I am dying, I suggest to myself, a whispered adulation slips from the dark.  Blunt shovels won’t do, no Amanda, not for you.  Sharper words and sharper deeds, are indeed a few of my favorite things.

Where’s the next bus stop she asks after updating.  I say here and it goes in one ear, but not out the other.  So keen and so shining, like her eyes, dropping tears, and I’m wet with it.  Red with it.  Then mouths moving, no words, then tongues touching, slick with the copper taste of darkness and fear, then our teeth clicking a morse code message, terse and dead.  Then she’s warm in my lap, a spreading pool in my lap, a half-life, smaller and smaller, constricting to a pinprick, sharp like my instrument, an infinite point.

Two hundred miles of her skin next to my skin.  Two hundred miles as she dried on my hands.  Then two more miles we danced through the trees, where the earth blooms with thistles and smells of my need.  Two more hours of her love on my hands and waves in my ears, returning, returning.  We danced in the darkness, her cheek to the earth.

And I’m lying awake, kissing her dark eyes, tapping an update with an unknown half-life: “this isn’t amanda.  amandapalmer has died.”

 06.26.2009