Michael Seidlinger: The Fun We've Had

Adventure.

Each line invisible are events that transpire while she is alive.

The lines visible here are of events that either never happen or happen after demise. These are the lines that take place where there is no longer any life.

If she could imagine the page, she would see that her life wasn’t a waste.

They are able to throw their speech, share and borrow their bodies, and collectively remain significant in each other’s life.

But they never meet until they stop walking.

When she stops walking, it all stops.

And so she walks.

She walked the imagined terrain until the physical limitations of her destroyed body could no longer be denied.

She imagined steps where the sea had parted. In place of the parting it looked now like a frozen canyon.

“Are we having fun?” she shouted and her voice bounced back throughout the canyon until it returned to her:

“Are we having fun?” His voice.

It might have been excitement. It might have been delusion.

Whatever it was, it was how she let go.

She had come to believe what her imagination splayed across the greater expanse of her blindness.

There was no difference now.

“Are we having fun?” she shouted again.

He answered back with the question.

Two more steps passed. She was getting closer.

She could feel the burden being lifted two at a time, each step pulling from her everything that had resided in her to remain.

“Are we having fun?” she shouted.

His voice answered with the same question. She had begun to wonder if he was the one that needed to know.

She continued down the steps.

What initially couldn’t be answered registered as obvious.

She said, “I have fun when I’m with you.”

And then she asked the question again.

By now she was nearly at the bottom of the canyon. She hesitated. She couldn’t see anything at the bottom. She heard nothing back.

The fantasy started to slip away and she could almost see the reality of this descent, the pressure of taking on water, the pressure of deep sea, but then she heard.

She heard him.

And what did he say?

He said, “ .”

He said what she needed to hear in order to let go.

She took the final two steps and as simple as his part ended in this tale, hers ends now.

It ends right here. She swam until the swimming had passed her, much longer than her past could bother. Every buoy peeled, soon she felt the pressure.

And there, after a complete and final acceptance, she sank, pulled under until she became the water and the water became her.

The ocean pulled from her a final choking gasp.

She was passed over to the sea that passes over her in the gentlest waves.

She did what is done.

She let go.

So now you can see why they couldn’t be for long.

They had wanted to be individuals, much like we all seek the highest waves in hopes of surfing them to a distant shoreline, one that doesn’t exist until found. We seek the peaks in hopes of pleasing the fact that we thought we were, for a time, an individual among individuals. Though we may, though we might, the waves are purely that — temporary and fleeting, no matter how high. The current continues, changing all that doesn’t appear to change, the valuable becoming meaningless, the meaningless becoming valuable; the tides make daily proclamations.

The life of the ocean continues its cycle, on schedule for both new-and-old to balance out to become nameless.

The waves are hellos.

The storms are goodbyes.

The stories that stick around are our sincerest apologies.

The coffin floated carried by a beast made beastly by the culture that had turned it into a danger. Where there had been dangers, true dangers, societies founded state capitals; where there had been wars, new torrential storm patterns formed in hopes of outdoing the other.

We wanted to separate ourselves from the sea.

We wanted to be our own oceans, our own bodies of water, capable of being seen from space.

We wanted what was wanted by others, and a little bit more, if only to be the first to want to have swam that far. The farthest shores resemble everything that we fail to find out at sea.

We wanted to stay, holding on, where a single wave might kick the coffin over, forcing us under; we fought a fight not worth fighting for, but we were the harm.

We were the conflict.

We were the beginning and we are now the ending.

He saw a buoy in the textbooks, in the famous telling of his even more famous findings.

She saw a life that needed to be louder than the human senses would allow.

What they saw was only what they wanted to see.

We floated and merely liked floating together. We float together even when we work so hard to ride our own waves.

The current continues to move and we are moved.

It will always move us to feel, and upon feeling less, it features our final gasps. We swim in a similar circle, meeting each turn with a similar but individual strike of luck.

The current matches the stride of time, the orbit of the earth, the existence past existing, but it is never anything but final. The current outlasts the orbit of our lives; it gathers us together and tells us to swim. Keep swimming.

We will be caught.

We will be someone’s catch.

We are cautious but kind.

We are alive and it needn’t be possible for there to be anything but life. For there to be a beginning, we must all have an end, but for there to be a story, someone will have to die.

We go on living, but for one, maybe two characters, who become the clear focus of the story we have told, they end where it fits best to end. And for the telling, it goes on and on like this, stories printed based on the deaths and births of each pair.

The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can swim.

If you have, then let’s go.

Let’s have some fun.

“Are we having fun?”

“I have fun when I’m with you.”

Michael J Seidlinger is the author of a number of novels, including

The Laughter of Strangers

and

My Pet Serial Killer

He serves as the Reviews Editor for Electric Literature as well as Publisher-in-Chief of Civil Coping Mechanisms, an indie press specializing in innovative fiction and poetry. Find him on Facebook, Twitter (@mjseidlinger), and at michaeljseidlinger.com.