prompt: green, title: when I am gone in misc. flash fiction

When I’m gone, I don’t want anyone going around lying about me. Not by omission and not by commission, either. I don’t want death turning me into something I’m not, I’d rather not have entropy given that kind of power over my reality. Just because there will inevitably come a day down the line when I will indeed bite down hard on the big dirt biscuit doesn’t mean that I deserve all my flaws and rough-edges washed out by some gauzy Vaseline smeared lens.

When there is green six-feet above me, you will be doing my totality no justice by only stating the good things, let alone by eliding the bad. If there is a soul within me that might survive this shabby homestead I maintain for it, you’ll be doing that soul no favours by pretending it’d been some kind of saint. By pretending I was perfect, you’d just be replicating something other than the person I had been. I do not need it and I sure as hell don’t want it.

If I was occasionally clever or insightful from time to time, as my ego allowed me to believe, the other side of that coin was that I was often lost in thought, focusing on silliness and philosophical pissings when I should’ve been remembering to pay student loans or wake up before eleven AM on any day where I didn’t have to punch a clock. If I was a generally kind or forgiving man, the shadow of that was that I was cripplingly conflict-avoidant and was too afraid of being angry at the times when righteous fury would’ve done the world far better. Being human is a giant mixed sack of good and bad, pettiness and grace, chaos and forgiveness, damnation and the miraculous.

When I trip the light inevitable, whether I’m hit by a bus tomorrow or die of cancer in sixty years or am assassinated by time-travelers last Tuesday, all I ask is to be portrayed in the fullness of all three-dimensions, in full resolution, warts and all. I bite my nails until I bleed, nothing makes me laugh harder than sacrilege, calls from debt collectors give me heaving panic attacks. I will also give you that I’m funny sometimes, I try my best to be decent people every single day and I have been some places and seen some things that have granted me an iota of insight into the meaning of being an involuntary member of this equally astonishing and damned human race. The goods do not cancel out those bads, the bad doesn’t outweigh the good, either. It all just is. I all just am.

We all just… are.

When I’m gone, don’t distill me down to the simplest outlines like an old Atari game, trying to render dragons with four polygons. All the details, even the ugly ones, especially the ugly ones, please. Like ancient movies in HD, every blemish, every pore, every accidental glory. All of it.

It’s all I ask.

Last updated March 24, 2021