Free A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson Page A

out the tasks involved in making anything more than cereal, and so I eat cereal for breakfast lunch supper, this whole week so far. I thought about making a sandwich today and just stared into the fridge. Can’t even begin to expect anything of today. It’s making me so fucking antsy to write! Not calming at all! I feel pulled in so many directions and like there’s all this stuff I should be doing—can’t do any of it—give it up.
    And half the time I wake up and almost call her. My mind accepts no order. Chronological least of all. Things don’t happen chronologically to me—they never did. Things never “did,” and then “do,” and then “will.” They would and then they do and then they will and did. They mix themselves around even while happening, and once they become memory it’s even more helpless. As far as I can see, everything in my life happened at once.
    AND > THERE’S > NOTHING > LIKE > THIS,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â MORE
    IT’S     ALWAYS     MUCH
    Â Â Â Â Â THIS.       USUALLY
    Â Â Â LIKE
    When someone tells me a story in which some events happen to them in some kind of time-based order, I assume they’re either lying or insane. If someone wrote my biography (not that they would or should) I’d make them play fifty-two pick-up with the final draft.
    FIRSTLY, (as if anything else ever happened to me) let’s begin with E. Yes, we’ll just leave it at “E,” upper-case E, like an eye-test chart. Which was one of the many things she was, to put it horribly. To put it horribly, there were some parts of her that I always had to squint at and still couldn’t read.

    And if I can just get it all down—big and small—then it’s mine. And it’s over, and I can stop. I can’t bring any of it back. I can’t summon you, but at least I’ll have tried.
    We met in our last year of school. We were both trying to finish. There was no dramatic story about our meeting, we were just in the same class. You just walked around the studios like you were lost but wouldn’t have had it any other way. You would later say that I walked around like a puppy whose leash was “too slow.” Eventually I talked to you, and after a few days of the first talks I was shocked because we actually were talking: we were talking about actual things. We were agreeing and disagreeing, we were arguing and laughing, we were spending eight hours together, we were plotting.
    I fell for you so hard that all I could do was worry about falling for you—about turning you into something you weren’t, some muse or divine icon, so I vowed not to, but then I couldn’t imagine how I might dream up anything better than the full, actual you. You made me think thoughts that dangerous.
    You were someone so dangerously close to the person I’d always (subconsciously) dreamed of meeting that you caused me to (consciously) adjust the idea of that person, to completely discard it, because you’d trumped it. You could tell, couldn’t you?
    You were beautiful, and not in a way where I noticed things about you that were beautiful and could point them out—I could do this, and I did, but it never seemed to have much to do with the true you—you were beautiful in a way that was its whole own thing, you seemed a complete—something—and whatever you were I knew I didn’t want to change one thing about it. I wasn’t exaggerating.
    Sometimes you were peppy and confused and honest and shrugged your shoulders and laughed and said Oh Well to the world. Other times the world weighed down on you tremendously for weeks at a time, and I did all I could to make it easier, but all I could do was not much.
    When you spoke, you said things without the slang you were supposed to use, and in tones of voices I’d never heard, only imagined. Your