Hurt-Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song; Mourning.

This was posted on Facebook earlier today. I love the song, consider Johnny Cash a hero. Today, though, this song had some secret map of me, snuck past whatever sentries I had watching my emotions, to tear me apart.


I hadn't thought of them today, my ghosts, my dead. I don't think of them often, and it sometimes makes me wonder if there isn't something lacking in me that doesn't let feel for people once they're gone.


I can say conclusively that isn't so. I've just been afraid to look at the spaces where they all used to be, the blank. For someone terrified of being abandoned death is too much to comprehend. Easier to believe you don't have feeling at all about it, rather than to look directly into absence, a permanent vacancy, the "what ifs" that are now "never knows", and "never wills", and to hear that childish thought of yours echoing in the void: They Left Me.


Someone walks away from you and you can chase them. If you stop getting along you can both change if you want. If there's life there's hope.


If someone puts themselves in a box...


All those selfish, self-absorbed juvenile thoughts are horrible, because you know it's not your fault, but you feel and think these things, and have to use your rational mind to stop them when your rational mind is in flight: What did I do to drive you away? I know I should have been a better friend. I didn't mean to. Come back.


I was talking with someone I've known for a long time, though the real friendship is new, about the death of someone we knew 20 years ago. I hadn't known in all this time that he'd closed his own story. He was ill, and infirm, and it was never going to get anything but worse, but I hadn't known.


She pointed out the place where he drowned himself right in the river. "We're surrounded by dead people", she said. We are. I've been thinking of all of them in the last couple of hours. I'm remembering them all, remembering them alive, remembering the things that made them matter enough to mourn.


I didn't know until now that I hadn't yet, because I couldn't admit they were really gone; some part needed to believe that they were coming back, so insulated me from feeling their loss.


Johnny Cash died not long after this video was made, and his voice warbling in age, and infirmity hints at that. This beautiful, perfect, painful, song rendered by a true artist on his way from this coil, opened that which kept me from feeling these losses, and put me screaming on the floor. Even now, trying to pin this feeling to a frame of words, to give it shape I can comprehend, my cheeks are tear chapped, and my nose blocked. And I dare not play the song again.