When I Die, Bury Me with My Eyes Open

I.

We all enter the world by leaving somewhere else behind. My mother tells me even before I could crawl, I was trying to walk. My coach once told me I moved like a deer - quick and without stopping. I have never not been running to somewhere else.

Have you ever seen a deer, dead, split down the center of the road? Cars move by without stopping. This is not unusual where I am from. I see this as a child, face pressed to the glass.  Nothing scared me then. I had touched the split wing of a dead bird; I ferried centipedes from one side of the yard to another.

But the deer.

The flies had burrowed into the open, gaping wound of a side. They were the darkest black I had ever seen and moved in mass, in and out of the holes broken from the skin. The maggots, the moving color of bone. We lived in a place where the summers were mild but long and the deer lived on that road for a week without anything or anyone to wash it away. 

I have avoided making eye contact with dead deer since; I turn my eyes away, ashamed of the natural end of things.

I am not brave anymore. I shy from bugs and turn away at the sight of broken birds. I am also not close to home anymore. I live now where rivers meet oceans, where my neighborhood roads become flood zones; I have run so far that there is nowhere else to go. I do not know if there is a correlation, but I know both things are true.

Perhaps in this way, I have broken off a fragment of who I was, sacrificing it for the person I became. Perhaps, if I had known this would happen, I wouldn’t have drifted so far from where deer danced in my backyard. Perhaps, I would have stayed closer to home.

Sometimes here, there is rain, and even when it is violent, it is baptismal. Sometimes, I can be still. It may kill me one day, but sometimes, I sit outside and look directly into the eye of the storm.

II.

I first came into this world on a headfirst dive out of the last. There’s little about physics that makes sense to me except for this: no actions disappear, but rather change in form. My own father was 18 when he decided he’d had enough of his last world. He tore out of Huntsville at the first chance he got—pried open its maw from inside, propped open the jaw like Atlas.

I like to think that’s where I am now, decades upon decades later, dripping wet with its spit.

Passing through somewhere outside of Shreveport, I spot a dead hog on the side of the road. Blink and you would’ve missed it, but there it is—thick neck stiff and broken, his head now permanently whipped back towards the way he came from. And for a second, blinking, I think of my dead dog. One of them, anyway.

Charlie was the family escape artist, gnawing apart wooden fence posts and bolting towards the neighbors’ cats. Charlie performed his final act when Dad evacuated for Isaac, his usual prop replaced with the fence of the house they were in while ours sat in 18 inches of water. Charlie sprinted past the house with my dad on his tail, who thought he knew the act beat by beat. And he did, they both did, really. The dog just didn’t know what a highway was, couldn’t account for its presence in the show. And you couldn’t blame him—he was no Houdini, only fur and kinetic force, then ribs splayed out in morning traffic.

Dad says the cars just kept coming, or that they couldn’t stop.

Charlie is buried in Dad’s old backyard, body laid on his side, eyes now decayed that once pointed towards the Earth. I wonder if that place, the place the hog’s head is now bent towards, points in that same direction somehow, compass-like, knowing. I wonder if that’s where I look now, turning behind to see the cars behind me, questioning their motives.

I wonder what would happen if I looked that hog in its dead eyes, if it would answer me here. I wonder if I hit that hog, somewhere, once, long ago. Wonder if I did it on purpose. Wonder if I couldn’t stop.