We operate so unconsciously. When I am unconscious, who will take my body? Is it wrong that I don’t want it to fade into nothing? I want you to have it. I am only a very small part of the space that is reserved for me. If I could shrink inside of it and make room for you I would. There is too much space for one, I think we can fit two. We can share the pillow of grey matter I don’t bother to touch. Maybe it was left unused just for you. Reserved from the beginning for the possibility of tucking in next to you in the folds.
I’m not violent. I’m not violent. I would force you inside of me if I could. I’d love you and convince you to stay there inside of me. But it wouldn’t matter if you left because you were there. There would still be subcutaneously left fingerprints and the sloughed off dead cells you didn’t want anyway. What if I just took those? What if I followed you for the rest of your life and gathered all the dead parts that were once part of a body that contained you? What about after you died? Could I keep your body? If you were cremated the way you wanted to be, would there be non-you inside the ashes?
“Often, the volt is rendered more effective by the incorporation into it of the victim’s exuviac, so that imitative magic, based on (visual) similarities, is allied with the other main kind of magic, based on contact.” (Gell 103)
That’s ok because even if these ashes were not once-you-things, they saw your body at the end. They saw you last of any thing in the world as a shape that was definiably you and not me. And if they saw you they might miss you too and want to be part of you. I’d allow them to be part of you then. Id allow them to be kept with you in the urn we’d both find grotesque. I’d envy these particles of ash. They would be indistinguishable from you. Closer to you then I have ever been. They would be you. We would call them you. They might even forget that they were once anything other than you. The particles of non-you would be forever embarrassed by the once-you particles. Speks folded into speks. I would forget I was once different too. I would drift into you now if I could, and with the ease to do so as ash, with the once-you-ash, Perfect. Maybe we forget all of this and just ask for our once-bodies’-ashes to be kept together in a place {since it could never have been a living body}. Even better we could have our once-bodies brewed as a tea together. Maybe poured into an Irish coffee and drank in the late morning by the ones we love. Maybe they would be so drunk that our once-bodies’-tea would be thrown up again. Or maybe their bodies would reject the tea because it was too hard to conceptually handle. That would be ok too. I wouldn’t want to leave you alone in an urn anyway and you’d never leave me that way either.
