Canned Fruits In The Garage Is Just A Metaphor
By Michael Koh
Your wife screams. No one can hear her. Well, except you, although you are on the floor. A pool of blood surrounds you where you fell, a thin trail leaving evidence of a self-inflicted gunshot wound through the temple.
You were set on it; it was not a depressed spur-of-the moment incident. You had been planning it for months, maybe years. Small chapters of the suicide playing in random order, even up to the moment when the bullet left the chamber. Even you could not have imagined — or predicted — the way you lay on the floor, although you probably would have preferred it to be crisp and methodical.
She still screams, it is rage she feels. Maybe more the shock and disgust of the blood that she sees in television from criminals and from men and women who are sick and under operation. This is not you. The surreality of your blood is shocking and even degrading, at least to her. Her rage, however, will diminish and instead turn to anguish, but only because she is forgetting your love, rather, how you loved.
The moments that occurred immediately before you pulling the covers over yourself are unclear. You did, however leave a note, two words in fact, of which will not be mentioned here to preserve your privacy. Death should be a private moment.
What happens next is most unusual. As men in uniform gather around to observe the scene, a ring that you had worn disappears, never to be seen again. Somehow, it is accepted without question, perhaps because everyone understands you will not marry again.
You said you live and die by the pen. This is not what happened. Your garage was filled with decades old furniture and cans of fruit past it’s expiration. Although, it was poetic to have died with the past, as if to say, you will never come back, just like those canned fruit lining the shelves of the garage.
Before your death, you had sent an email to your daughter, asking her to be well. She was not in the country; it must be nice traveling, you probably thought. Maybe traveling would have helped you live just a little bit longer. What will your daughter do? Will she take it upon herself and blame your death on her absence? You two were close; how could this have happened, she would ask herself. No answers will materialize. After all, you hold the answers, and you will never open your mouth again.
You once said you’re selfish. And you are. The selfishness of your suicide is evident. You no longer wanted to exist in this material world. You wanted to take your own life, not by other means, nor other people. This is my life, you used to say, when questioned on your actions.
You thought yourself regular. Ordinary house, ordinary car, ordinary lawn, ordinary clothes…. The only thing that was extraordinary was your final heartbeat, because it stopped midway, just like life intended.