Ellis is my name . . .

My brain is in that place again.

Somewhere in the half-way nowhere between knowing exactly what I want and how to obtain it, and barely understanding how to put motion to my hands. 

There has been an abundance of pressure from myself, and from our current situation. It is beginning to wear me down. Through the armor, and I can feel it making the surface of my skin itchy. Where does that sensation even go when I neglect giving it attention for a few moments? Once I slow my brain down, drift off, or stare at the wall without cause, it will creep back up my sweater sleeve and gnaw at the top of my flesh. 

Perhaps a portion of it is stemming from this seemingly inappropriate inability to articulate how it feels to have lost my grandfather a few months ago. September was it? 

This year has been such an ugly blur. A slow-motion car crash. 

He meant a lot to me. 

Or, he did. It is unclear how to substantiate adult relationships that never seemed to blossom out of infancy. When I was younger, he meant a heap. Following my return to the West, the two of us never really connected. We would send each other text messages every now and then. Mostly me speaking into the void until he would make some comment about a film he had seen recently. 

I think we could have been good friends as adults. 

Unfortunately, our distance – in generation, proximity, and in fluidity of emotions foremost – meant that there was always this leathery barrier between what you could read on his face as the thing he wanted to say, and what would eventually come mumbling out of his mouth. 

If it were not for Tim Horton’s, the Mandarin buffet, or cigarettes, I do not believe the man would have ever opened his mouth. Ever. 

Given the fact that I have had a few months to process it—which I clearly have not succeeded in completely—I am unsure as to whether I feel actual sadness at his passing. Ask him and he would have probably told you that a classically vibrant life had been led, and there was not much of a runway left ahead for him to take off anywhere unbelievable. Does that make the end easier? Even if you are faking it? Acknowledgement of your previous achievements, transgressions, adventures? 

No, what forces a discomfort in my soul – somewhere deeper and slightly to the right of my heart – that I visibly wear on my face, is that he left us alone. 

We are not alone. What I mean to say is that when he departed, he was alone. 

Except, now he refuses to leave me alone. I see him in the mirror when my eyes squint just enough to ripple a wrinkle from the corners. I hear him every time I instinctively laugh from my gut at something amusing. Smell him, every time I pull a cigarette scented sweatshirt over my head.

There was a lot of nothing going on in his world. Additionally, he was surrounded by no one, in an apartment – if you can even call it that – that barely received a drop of sunlight from the day. This visceral gut reaction to the state of my grandfather upon his passing may have to do with the status of partial hero I adorned him with growing up. 

He simply always seemed put together. And, if you have ever met either of my parents, that was a beacon of contradiction to our normal everyday surroundings. There was a heroism in his achievements. Looking back at it now, with some clarity of vision, I knew he was my benchmark. 

From an early age I obsessed over my acquired mindset, and my grandfather was the best of us. The most secure of us. The example of force and focus. As one does, the warrior eyes up his opponent, knowing that besting them is the thing I need to do to rise above my lot in life. Wait. Was my grandfather my arch-nemesis? If I am Blue in the scenario, does that make him Red? Perhaps he was Professor Oak all along, pitting me up against my challenges in the firm belief that those obstacles would fuel me to far surpass them. 

Alas, I have not, as of yet. 

Without flinch or forward, the man expected the absolute best out of people, and hunched in disappointment if he was greeted with anything but.

In an ironic twist of the story, he would most likely loathe what I am doing right now. With this. That thought induces a slight chuckle in my jaw-bones. One could chalk it up to age, or generation, but the man was not shaking with anticipation of your heartfelt emotions. Yet here I sit. Perched atop my tall chair, in front of my computer for the umpteenth day in a row, coffee cup at the side, lit cigarette hanging from my lips. I am more him than he or I would ever cared to admit. 

Despair or glee, I have been stuck for months. Stuck far prior the point in these adventures that see me open up a blank writing page. It has been months. The normal discourse, or pattern, tends to lean towards the lack of clarity or vocabulary to spin some twine. This one, these past few months … it has an unfamiliar sensation. 

…

The world, as it is today, feels like a desolate place. A scorched Earth. And every inch of my skin wishes to be sheltered from that type of fire. We are all going through this wholly unique moment in the public consciousness, and it is playing tricks with my demons that have caused them to mutate into a new breed of tangible hurdle.

A small voice, one that only creeps up once every five years or so, tells me that one day my abstract ability to puff out sentences from what biologists would call “my brain” will go away. Confusingly, not with any reason. There is dementia in my bloodline, yet that nearly inconceivably quiet voice recons that I will cease being able to be this version of myself regardless of convincing evidence. However unlikely it is, it provokes in my body and behind my eyes, a fear unlike many others I have experienced throughout my lifetime. 

Something so familiar keeps me coming back here. It is incessant. It is ethereal. That cannot simply go away. This is a battle I must fight and win when I come face-to-face with that god-awful flashing caret in my text document. What a horrid sight, yet the noise it does not make is blaring. 

On the worst of days, I never see them. 

Then there are the moments I do, and I run away cowering. 

However, if tales are told about my frolicking fable, then it will be the instances in which I managed the vanquishing of those foes that will read like chapter titles, not the bad days.  

…

Growing up with that old man around — either one-hundred percent in jest-mode or stoic and blank – truly impacted my childhood. There lives a fear in me now. One that is born from a millennial hesitation to have offspring. What if my children do not receive the opportunity to feel that same impact? They will never meet their great grandfather. A man I wish I had told more often how much his time and his wisdom meant to me. 

I wish I had told him that he would be missed. That I would miss him … 

At least I am saying it now. God knows he loved to read. Though I am pretty certain my emotional drivel wouldn’t make his shelf of fantastical fallacies set out in space. That man sure liked a good schlocky sci-fi story.

Cheers to the thought that he simply gets to spend all of his spare moments ingesting those fictional worlds he loved so much. 

Sincerely,

Wyatt Ellis Fossett