This is my last post

“dot hates you”

For a long time, I’ve been wondering what my last post will be. The way I see it, there are only two ways it happens. The first is that I voluntarily quit, as in, I’m sick of trying to earn a living as a writer, so that’s it, I’m done. I’d still write though, it’s just that I probably wouldn’t show it to the internet anymore. The second way is quit involuntarily, as in, I post something one week, and then before I can post something else, I randomly die. It’s the latter that I’ve been thinking about for quite a while.

I’ve always thought that I would die just all of a sudden, something like the way my father did. He came home from work one day, said he was going to lay down, and a short time later, had a stroke followed by back-to-back heart attacks, blood everywhere, a few hours later they pull the plug on him at the hospital, and just like that, he was gone. Maybe I’ll lose my life to impulse, you know, This is the coolest bridge I’ve ever seen, later y’all. Maybe it will be health issues related to the reckless way I tend to live. Or maybe I’ll get really lucky, go to sleep one night, and have a beautiful dream that lasts forever.

So on the assumption that I would die unexpectedly one day, I started to wonder, what would my last post be? Would it be a juvenile comedy piece on the frustrations of being a writer? Would it be a true story from my youth with important social commentary embedded? Would it be something I wrote in a dark place when I had nowhere else to turn? Would it be a song that everyone missed because I stupidly posted three of them at once when I had maybe ten people reading? And that’s when I decided that I should write my last post now, before I die, or before I quit.

And right away, I knew what I wanted it to be about. I wanted it to be my farewell to life, but in a way that might benefit others. The things I’d learned, the things I wished I could do over, the things I wouldn’t change at all. So I started working on it, and honestly, it felt like it would never end, it was a horrible thing to try and write. You’ve got friends and family members that you told to fuck off forever. Tales of unrequited love. Dead people you miss. Trauma from youth. Mistakes you made in your career. There was just too much to say. And then the damnedest thing happened: I realized that I’d already written my farewell years ago!

See, one day I imagined having a son. I imagined that I would die before I could teach him everything I wanted him to know, and so I sat down and wrote out the most important of these things, and as it turned out, it was written in the form of a poem. I then imagined giving it to his mother for safeguarding with a simple instruction: Give this to our son on the day he turns twenty-one. That’s it. That’s my last post.

to my son on his twenty first birthday

you will never know me,
but know this:
be careful with your first kiss
but careless enough to know, 
what it is like to be an immortal
and what it is like to go.
be careful with your first heart,
especially when things are new;
and if you think there's a chance you don't,
then do not say you do.

remember that women are notorious for loving poets
and for leaving them when they fall in love with night;
so unless you are adept at making love to an empty room,
i do not recommend that you write.

remember that too much light can permanently affect the eyes,    
even under the guise of ultraviolet protection:
if ever you catch a glimpse of what is possible in this life,
it will be difficult to look
in any other direction.

i will never know you,
but be sure of this:
a young lifetime ago
your mother was deeply kissed;
and now there are these things we have in common,
that you must fight like hell to resist.