Remembering The Mammoth
Chapter One. The day I finally died
The day I finally died was a Sunday and it still irks me. After I spent thirty years or so avoiding the matter, it was a Sunday that finally got me.
I’m not sure why that bothers me – ‘Sunday?’ – but it does. Who wants to pop their clogs on the day of rest?
There was nothing especially stand-out about this Sunday either. As with all the best days, this one started with all that classic ‘sun coming up’ malarkey and it ended, a consummate professional, by putting all that nonsense to bed.
The wind blew across the face of the earth with a regality befitting the Queen of England. Slowly but surely waving its little hands to usher the clouds, like peasants, across the face of the sky.
Somewhere else in the world, people were sleeping as if they had absolutely no idea I was dying. They were dreaming things about their jobs and wives and not-wives and the guy from the gym and maybe about giving a speech or swimming through the air.
The dark blue planet was turning into yellow. People were waking up and making coffee and starting to forget whatever it was their brains had been trying to tell them while they weren’t looking.
And all of this happened and carried on without even a second thought about the fact that I was no longer living.
I hope somebody noticed. I hope at least the driver noticed. Or maybe the mechanic . . . Perhaps an innocent bystander will be scarred by the memory for the rest of his days? I hope so.
I have no real idea though anymore; one of the many things you learn about carrying on so long is that your memory doesn’t really play out the way you remembered it. Which is not to say I can’t remember anything, just that everything I care to try and remember ends up seeming fuzzy and abstract, as if it happened a million years ago, much like the mammoth.