I, Death

Saturday August 18, 2012 - 7:28 PM

Couldn’t sleep last night, or the night before that — the morbid memory was stuck in my head all night and I still can’t get the image of Donnie out of my head. Every time I close my eyes he's sitting in the dirt, his face leaking eye pus and gore, looking up at me, pleading. Just wanting me to help.

In my dreams I keep seeing Donnie sitting there. Only instead of just some gore and pus running down his cheek from his eye, both of his eyes are hanging out on these long, crazy, fleshy strings, swaying back and forth, but still looking at me.

Jesus.

I spent a good part of the past month digging through Shakespeare, trying to read more of his stuff, you know, to see if there was something else like Hamlet that I could identify with. My aunt has this old, beat-up Complete Works of Shakespeare sitting on a book shelf in the den. I buried myself in it for days on end, reading from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, stopping only to eat when my aunt or uncle called me. I mean, I was fucking grounded, so there wasn’t much else to do anyway. Focusing on imagined worlds was a far better option than thinking about what had just happened to Jagdish.

Okay, fuck, I'm not ready to talk about that. Have to ease into that once I feel ready.

So last night when I couldn't sleep, since I'd finished reading Shakespeare, I started reading Sophocles: Oedipus Rex. I remember Miss Hamilton talking about how Hamlet included streams of plot from Oedipus, or something like that. I can kind of see a bit of that now that I've read it. But it's fucking freaky stuff. A guy who is left to die as a baby, ends up killing his father a couple of decades later without realizing it, then ends up marrying his mother. Geez.

Makes me wonder if maybe my Mom isn’t dead after all — and, what if I end up getting it on with this older woman, and later find out that I’m sleeping with my Mom?

Fuck, what was it with these ancient writers? They came up with some wicked stuff.

I stopped reading when I got to the scene where, in his grief and rage, Oedipus plucks out his eyes. I couldn’t get past it — that’s when the images of Donnie started haunting me again.

Fucking Shakespeare.

Fucking Sophocles.

– 1 Comment –

Kim said...

They were masters of their times.

And their stories remain and sometimes haunt us to this day.

If Oedipus was bad - don't read Antigone.