On a Certain Customary Exchange

Till death do us part -- perhaps the most viciously delusive phrase in our language.

Look at it. Move your mouth around it -- silently, if you wish, though to speak it aloud is to hear yourself spit and lisp and hiss like a cobra. Till death do us part. Imagine saying it to someone and having her say it you. You will, I assure you, never say anything less flippantly, less facetiously, than this phrase, though your postmodern sensibility enforces in you irony.

Till death do us part -- words of proleptic finality, of the expectation of consummation. Akin to another phrase: And they lived happily ever after. . . Words that are a sort of death, really, bringing death before Death. Words that try to cheat Death of its droit du seigneur, the ellipsis in tow simply a set of pegs for the figures in the story to hang upon, silent and still like marionettes in this nebulous, static ever-after. They depart to become our dearly departed, their reward in truth a sort of exhaustion, a moribundity.

Unlike your friends in the tale, however, your life does not brook such envelopment. Your fate is always to step out of this finality, the ellipsis not a set of pegs, but of stepping stones to a darkly aneschatonic after-the-ever-after into which you are forced by accident or perfidy and where you wait for the messianic dispensation of the wholly drawn arc, made cruelly to hang fire well after hair grays and cuticles bleed from gnawing.

This is the sort of "character" you are. Why, then, do you constantly try to yoke a narrative -- revised how many thousand times now? -- to this billiards game of existence? Why do you insist on being both author and hero, when you can be precisely neither?

These are questions I leave with you tonight.