Deadweight

By Dizzy Defect

Edited by Laura Garwood

“Deadweight”

As read by

Why would anyone want to bury their dead in the town that killed them? She hated this town. So did I. She wanted out, but the mental instability this place had inflicted on her through repeated rapes and multiple addictions prevented her dreams of freedom from manifesting. So how could she be “laid to rest” in the place that did all this to her?

That’s why I preferred cremation. We would still have a viewing of the body, of course, but keeping the ashes meant when I got to escape, so did they.

At her viewing, it freaked me out to see fellow “mourners” taking pictures of her cadaver. It reminded me of the 1800s, when people would actually prop up their dead and pose with them in photos because photography was still a rarity and photo ops were scarce. Not like these people shooting bursts with their phones. I was distracted from my grief, wondering what motivated them in their enthused photography. Was it morbidity? Did it perhaps provide some sense of confirmation or closure? Would these photos end up on social media? Did it make the pic snappers feel important to have someone close to them die? A sort of depraved bragging right, to showcase feigned grief that would assure some degree of attention from people who really didn’t matter to begin with?

Still, it wasn’t the time to gauge the actions of others or presume to judge them according to my speculations. Although in my defense, when I relayed the news of her passing, almost everyone I told immediately inquired, “How did she do it?” I would tell them, “I’m not sure,” as a polite way to say, “It’s none of your business, go fuck yourself.”

I looked down at her. I tried to adjust her hair as to better cover the bullet hole in her temple, but the morticians were quite thorough in their liberal application of hair gel. I gazed at her for the longest minute of my life. I timed it. I always do. I needed to take a mental picture of her and sear it into my mind so I wouldn’t forget.

I picked up her strangely weighted body and put it on my back to keep with me after she was cremated. I hoisted her up over my shoulders as I had so many other family members and friends before.

With her, that made thirty-five. Thirty-five dead people that I kept with me, in part because I wanted to and in part because I didn’t know how to get rid of them. I wasn’t sure if these dichotomous reasons had any mutual exclusivity from each other or if they were just there,in a tangled jumble I could no longer decipher. That mess had come to represent how I saw existence and life itself.

Anyhow, no one could see it, but here on my back I had amassed thirty-five bodies that I didn’t know what to do with, the weight fluctuating in severity from moment to moment. In that particular moment I found the weight especially stifling. So much so that I was hunched over and afraid that the fatigue would induce vomiting, but I kept my composure as best I could. Cold sweat ran down my face, and I turned pale as I had every time I put another body on my back.The mound of bodies would have entirely dwarfed my figure if viewed from afar, or maybe from a closer inspection—I hadn’t the slightest idea anymore.

I couldn’t cry. I wasn’t in shock. I wasn’t apathetic. I knew this was an inevitability and had been preparing for years. I had been more surprised at the surprise of others who knew her. People close to her exclaiming, “I never saw this coming!” and “What could we have done?” only to absolve themselves of the responsibility they had shaken off daily, their responsibility toward their fellow human who was severely hurting.

In an irrational attempt to quantify all that was occurring, I began quietly reciting aphorisms to myself that in retrospect, I realize only comforted me when there was no distress to be comforted from. I was, however, again distracted by the vibration of my phone, which I checked, assuming someone needed directions to the funeral parlor. But to my chagrin, I was being informed that while I was taking care of the necessary arrangements, my girlfriend and best friend (at the time) had decided they were an item and made joyous proclamations celebrating their newfound and exciting love on every social platform they could.

I didn’t understand, or rather, I didn’t want to understand that people really would do what they felt like and to hell with the consequences.

Maybe that betrayal, which ransacked my mind, was a godsend because, by thrusting me into such a tailspin, it kept me from focusing on the pain in that place. A pain that I needed but had been robbed of. A depth of grief that killed my mother, as not long after the service, her sadness took physical form and metastasized throughout her body, giving her less than a year to live.

Two dreams have come to me that explain my inability to grieve “properly.” In the first, a bomb went off near me, obliterating half of my body. Yet I felt no pain, and in the dream, when I consulted a physician and asked why I couldn’t feel the hurt from the impact, the good doctor calmly informed me that the explosion had burned out my nerve endings, making me incapable of feeling pain.

In the second dream, I came home but half of my house was gone. Oddly, I didn’t wonder where the missing half had gone but only resolved to accept that this was life. That this was what reality was now. I didn’t question the absence of the familiar but determined to live with what was left.

That evening, I contemplated the other thirty-four and how they’d died. They had all been suicides, each person employing their own individual method of preference—but that was not what I was pondering. What occupied my thinking was what had led to, no, compelled their decisions to commit to such a final and irrevocable conclusion. The conclusion that life wasn’t worth living.

I thought of Dave. During our youth we had been inseparable. He had some bad breaks in life. He resorted to putting all of his stock—emotional, not monetary…well, perhaps monetary as well—into love. After each heartbreak, he’d go hard with H to compensate and feel good when he didn’t believe anything was worth feeling good about. Five times he was resuscitated. And while a part of him loved life and even felt guilty for so often lamenting it, he had become entirely resolute that there wouldn’t be a sixth time of being brought back to the reality he had desperately attempted to augment. He went to a remote location and overdosed for the last time so he could go into oblivion feeling good.

Then there was Bran. He was so socially awkward. Even saying hi to him elicited a nervous, silent shoegaze, He had no ability to reply. But here’s the thing. This kid was an incredible thespian. When he took to the stage, everything he held back in what we consider normal social interaction sprang to life, and not just life but something divine and truly awe-inspiring. He was discouraged from pursuing acting in the name of practicality, and later I found out that he had also been heavily chastised for his sexual preference. The noose was his only respite.

My old youth pastor John, while profoundly charismatic, had developed severe mental illness at a relatively young age. Ninth grade was when the symptoms began to show. He felt guilty for his depression and all the more ashamed that he took medication for it. The combination of a Christian and an Asian upbringing strongly discouraged his use of meds. His church condemned him for a lack of faith, and his parents scolded him for being weak and letting his imagination get the better of him. As intelligent as he was, his confidence had been shattered by those assaults, by those unsophisticated, black-and-white versions of what reality was. And on account of his internal conflict, he couldn’t maintain employment. When his wife delivered the joyful news that she was pregnant with his second daughter, he realized he would only be a burden to his growing family and decided it was best that he get out of their way. His thinking had become so warped that he wrongly felt he was actually committing an act of altruism.

Then my ALL TIME, very best friend on the whole of the planet, my hero, my mentor Mitch, who was drowning in debt, decided to “shuffle off this mortal coil,” so to speak. He held to a view of the metaphysical in which what followed death was so much better than anything this transitory existence could ever have offered, and he held this belief with his entire being.

His favorite analogy was of a child accidentally kicking his favorite ball over the wall into his neighbor’s yard and being utterly devastated by it. But we as adults knew that the ball going over the wall wasn’t the end of the world. That was what he likened death to. He perceived this life lightly, as a waiting period with never-ending elation on the other side of it.

I strongly disagreed with that and believe this life to be of utmost importance. My gripe with his story was that I could go to the neighbor’s and get the ball back, and life would go on. I couldn’t go somewhere to get my dead back.

Next to my sister’s, his weight is the heaviest on my back. I don’t experience any of the joy of friendships and family anymore. Only the weight of their memory and final decision remains. And over time, it’s a hell of a thing. Instead of making me stronger, the weight depletes me, day by day.

I have another dream. This one, reoccurring. I see all these people who mean so much to me. I know they’re dead, but I try to tell each and every one how sorry I am for the times I mistreated or neglected them. I apologize profusely and yell at them how much they mean to me. But even though they are right there in front of me, my shouts and cries only fall on deaf ears. I’m standing face to face with them, but I don’t register to them. To them, it’s as if I were not even there.

The pain from the weight over these past fifteen years has become excruciating. Entirely unbearable. Which leads me here, to this bench I’m sitting on, adjacent to this immensely tall bridge overlooking a cliff. If you could see how ridiculous I look with these thirty-five bodies on top of me, you’d probably laugh.

I’ve been sitting here for some time now. Not sure how long. It doesn’t matter. The wait will soon be over. The weight will soon be over. I can’t take the heaviness anymore. I’ve already thrown the urns off the bridge. So they’re free. Now it’s time for me to join them. They say the fear isn’t of whether you’ll fall, it’s of whether you’ll jump.

I’m not afraid anymore. At a certain point, fear becomes a luxury this pain can’t afford. I’m walking toward the cliff, but in reality, I’m crawling. I’m crawling because the extraordinary weight prevents me from walking upright. Soon I’ll be at peace and no longer have to shoulder the weight my dead have placed on me. Because, in just seconds, I’ll be with them.

I roll myself off.

I’m falling, and it’s exhilarating. I feel the weight disappearing. The weight. Weight…Wait!

This isn’t right! I don’t want this! This is a mistake! I can fix the things that’ve been destroying me.

Holy shit, God, forgive me! God, please save me from this! Oh fuck!

The rocks flying toward me are growing exponentially. Did the others feel this way at this moment in their suicides?

I take it back! No, this isn’t the end! It’s not too late! Somehow, I can fix this. Fuck, fuck,FUCK!

I just saw the future. My dad is carrying me as his deadweight. What have I done?

I’m so sorry.

“Dizzy Defect has created a comprehensive and visionary artistic project that cuts to the core and addresses one of the great mental health crises of our time in a moment where it matters most.”
-Shamako Noble-Emcee, Author, Co-Founder of Hip Hop Congress