Becoming the Story by L. E. Henderson

had done
that, I never would have finished college. Why study? I would never
have finished writing a single novel. I probably would have annoyed
the hell out of everyone saying things like, “Please, do not mourn
for me when I am gone. I want my funeral to be a happy funeral,
with clowns and mariachi bands and puppies with little party hats.
And of course, it would all be lies. If I am going to go to the
trouble of dying, somebody had better cry about it. In fact,
wailing and the rending of sack-cloth clothing would not be
excessive. And yes, you heard me right. Sack cloth.
    I hate good-byes anyway. I even hated it
when my college classes would end, because I would get attached to
my professors and their weird sense of humor or their bad
comb-overs or how they would start talking about their vacations to
Europe instead of the DNA double helix or the Emancipation
Proclamation.
    All endings suck, except the ones that end
pain, and even those are not ideal. Like with me now. No more
toothaches. No more worrying about what anyone thinks. No more gum
on the bottom of my shoes, no more waiting in longs lines or
cleaning up hairballs left by my cat.
    But here I am. And I still want to finish my
banana story.
    This may sound weird, but I used to mourn my
own death sometimes, at night. I would think about how sad it would
be for people to lose me or for me to lose myself, and tears would
spring to my eyes.
    So for to any of you who are mourning me, I
am kind of mourning with you now. Like I said, I hate endings. But
I am still glad I got to be alive, even for a little while. I am
glad I got to eat ice cream and pet my cat and fall insanely in
love and watch bad movies and swim in the Gulf of Mexico.
    But to do all that, I had to be bound up
with this rattly caged wagon called “time.” I spent too much of my
life grappling with the uncomfortable knowledge that life was
always in motion and looking for something that does not really
exist called “stability.”
    Finally, I am free of time. At least, my
psyche is. And I think that was true before I was born, for the
billions of years following the Big Bang when there was no me. In
fact, the universe did not seem to be in any big hurry for me to be
born; I am a little insulted, to tell the truth.
    So maybe I am not so much leaving as going
back, reuniting with the cosmos. Fortunately, I am a fan of the
cosmos. I think the cosmos is kind of like this toy I had when I
was a little kid called a “Lite Brite.”
    It was a light box that had a flat black
surface with holes in it and it came with these little colorful
beads. Actually they were called pegs but I always thought of them
as beads, and I am the dead one here, so I get to choose what to
call them.
    Anyway when you put the beads on the surface
and plugged in the screen, the beads would light up. You could make
patterns or images with the beads, and there was no limit to the
designs you could make.
    I was never any good at making the
impressive images on the box like bunnies and castles. But I think
that maybe the cosmos is like that: kind of like a Lite Brite
trying to discover itself.
    The patterns it makes might be pretty, but
if it wants to make new ones, it has to break the old ones down and
start again. But the beads are the same beads; in that sense,
nothing ever really goes away.
    I admit, it is not much consolation. I was
always so upset when in kindergarten another kid would knock down
my “palace” of wooden blocks. If someone had told me “Stop crying!
The blocks are still there,” I would still have cried.
    But back to the Lite Brite: I like to
imagine that one day, after an infinity of infinities have passed,
maybe the universe or multi-verse will want to try my pattern
again. It will say, “That was a weird experiment but kind of
interesting. Maybe I should give it one more try.” And I will find
myself alive again and eating chocolate and reading Ray
Bradbury.
    But maybe just having been here, this one
time,