"Don't you know, at some point, we know these fucken things? Don't you know, the world ... says its fucken name to us?" - Calamity Jane
The characters of Deadwood are living in me. Great art always resonates. I am all of the people; they are all of me. Jane is my favourite, even if Al Swearengen narrates my thoughts. I've only two episodes to watch until the end of season three .. then it was axed, cut short in the prime of its life without resolution. Sound familiar?
I imagine you watching Deadwood. I imagine you imagining yourself living back in those easier times, with just the gold mines and the filth, lawlessness and smallpox. A time when a man knew he was a man. I imagine you watching it and wishing yourself away like always.
This is a telegraph.
I've been crook. Finally the antibiotics have started to work. Last week I lay on my bed too weak to turn over. God can't forsake you if you forsake him first. I cried about you like I always do. The tears have turned red and they burn. The Widow Garrett said that she's not sure if she's living her life or if its living her.
Max has drawn close to me like he always does when I need it most. He's developing into quite a young man. He told me he thinks about you every day. I'm deeply saddened but relieved you didn't allow yourself to get closer to the children in your life. It has spared them much pain. (But still, he thinks of you every day. What would you have made of that?)
When I was a little girl I'd look out my bedroom window at night and imagine all the people, right then in the world. All of the things they were doing. It panicked me. Still does.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to attach meaning to things.
The opening soundtrack to Deadwood is on constant loop in my head. The actors have appeared elsewhere ... an angry bank customer is Merle from Walking Dead. My beloved Calamity Jane is the lawyer in Sons of Anarchy. Hotelier AB is the Police Chief from True Blood.
Sometimes you get real people playing characters who were real people, all explaining to us who we are.
It's exactly six months today since you left. It's even a Tuesday. Yesterday Rocco bought a packet of balloons and asked if he could use Uncle Cams gas to make the balloons go up high in the sky. I said no. I didn't tell him it was a different kind of gas, for it was time neither for a macabre science lesson for one so young or an emotional display (from me) in the middle of a supermarket. To his little head, gas is gas. I envy both his simplicity of thinking and the matter-of-fact way he mentions your name.
What's so important about six months? Not a goddamn thing. Tomorrow it will be six months and one day and the pain will still be as great. I thought I knew pain before. I keep hearing the sound of life laughing at me.
Cocksucker.
Tonight will be a bloody lunar eclipse. Good.
I've decided that you wouldn't have gone away if you'd had children. I always waited for the day to see you hold a baby in your arms so I could whisper, "See? I told you you could feel more." That's entirely a projection of my own making that nobody will ever know for sure but the thought comforts me nonetheless.
I cannot shake the feeling that your death has made a mockery of my life. We shared similar sentiments of the world and the people in it.
This is a telegraph.
The cowboy boots in Deadwood are pretty serious and mean business. Back in the day when men needed only one pair at a time. I'll soon put my cowboy boots on again if I'm to make it out of this mess. I haven't worn a pair in more than a year. They always help me on to the next chapter, even if it's a chapter I don't particularly feel like galloping off into. Too busy re-living old hurts and all.
If you whisper to me in the dead of the dreamless night, I will hear you. And even though you still won't be present in life the next day, and the day after that, it'll make you not being here in Deadwood with me a whole lot more bearable.
Max has drawn close to me like he always does when I need it most. He's developing into quite a young man. He told me he thinks about you every day. I'm deeply saddened but relieved you didn't allow yourself to get closer to the children in your life. It has spared them much pain. (But still, he thinks of you every day. What would you have made of that?)
When I was a little girl I'd look out my bedroom window at night and imagine all the people, right then in the world. All of the things they were doing. It panicked me. Still does.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to attach meaning to things.
The opening soundtrack to Deadwood is on constant loop in my head. The actors have appeared elsewhere ... an angry bank customer is Merle from Walking Dead. My beloved Calamity Jane is the lawyer in Sons of Anarchy. Hotelier AB is the Police Chief from True Blood.
Sometimes you get real people playing characters who were real people, all explaining to us who we are.
It's exactly six months today since you left. It's even a Tuesday. Yesterday Rocco bought a packet of balloons and asked if he could use Uncle Cams gas to make the balloons go up high in the sky. I said no. I didn't tell him it was a different kind of gas, for it was time neither for a macabre science lesson for one so young or an emotional display (from me) in the middle of a supermarket. To his little head, gas is gas. I envy both his simplicity of thinking and the matter-of-fact way he mentions your name.
What's so important about six months? Not a goddamn thing. Tomorrow it will be six months and one day and the pain will still be as great. I thought I knew pain before. I keep hearing the sound of life laughing at me.
Cocksucker.
Tonight will be a bloody lunar eclipse. Good.
I've decided that you wouldn't have gone away if you'd had children. I always waited for the day to see you hold a baby in your arms so I could whisper, "See? I told you you could feel more." That's entirely a projection of my own making that nobody will ever know for sure but the thought comforts me nonetheless.
I cannot shake the feeling that your death has made a mockery of my life. We shared similar sentiments of the world and the people in it.
This is a telegraph.
The cowboy boots in Deadwood are pretty serious and mean business. Back in the day when men needed only one pair at a time. I'll soon put my cowboy boots on again if I'm to make it out of this mess. I haven't worn a pair in more than a year. They always help me on to the next chapter, even if it's a chapter I don't particularly feel like galloping off into. Too busy re-living old hurts and all.
If you whisper to me in the dead of the dreamless night, I will hear you. And even though you still won't be present in life the next day, and the day after that, it'll make you not being here in Deadwood with me a whole lot more bearable.
"Every day takes figurin' out all over again ... how to live." - Calamity Jane
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Write to be understood, speak to be heard. - Lawrence Powell