This Is Not a Eulogy
Sophia Ramirez
You don’t look a day over dead. A face cut like a rock: smooth, sturdy, chiseled in all the right places. Expensive-seeming, too, though the font tattooed over your forehead is a little tacky. And is that cologne? The kind of musty, earthy scent other men wish they had the maturity to pull off. Dark, mysterious. Women look twice when they pass by—who is that? Here lies wouldn’t-you-like-to-know. Beloved husband, son, father, friend: the whole nine yards, six feet down.
Man, you did it. This whole thing. It was quite a ride. When you were my age, you probably cracked beers between your teeth, dominated at darts, showed up late to parties—so, right on time. Time was always right when you showed up. You were just a half-smile and a hey away from Hollywood, huh? I’d love to talk to you about it, but I understand. You’re busy. This flesh won’t decompose itself.
But I bet you cut a real nice figure, once. I bet you owned cufflinks. And I heard your suit was even tailored for you on your big day. Oh, yes—I heard the shirt was two sizes too small. They cut it down the back and sewed it to your sides.
And look at you now: you’re making it big with the maggots. You’re rolling and you’re writhing like it’s a New York night club. You’re partying hard on holy ground—sacred is the new sexy.
The flies are loving these flowers, by the way. They’re flying through the holes of them, shitting on the shriveled petals. They buzz too loud and another brown leaf shakes off.
I’ve just got to ask. Does she know you left her out of your epigraph? The worms, you see, they whisper things. Lover, lover, lover. Here lies a liar. Another secret rotting in the grave. They shake their worm heads at me. You hate to see it.
I’m sorry. Noseless, eyeless, concernless—you don’t care about any of this. Go ahead and laugh, through the sinewy gaps in your cheek tissue. I know, I know: who am I to talk to you? Look at me, a half-formed thing. There’s only two kinds of people on this earth: dead and dying. Guess which one I am. Guess which one gives a damn.
If you did care to look, though, you’d see right through to my skeleton—after all, it’s the same as yours. Regrets smell just as rotten outside of a coffin, also vices, also too-lates, also the guilt the guilt the guilt. The cruel words keep coming out—don’t you hate it when they do that? Dandelion seeds scatter in the wind, and you’ll never find all the weeds that take root, believe me. I, too, have ruined someone’s life in a million tiny ways.
What can I say. It’s just the living and the losing, baby. We all fall out of style, and even the worms get sick of us one day.
I just hope you weren’t all that lucid, in your final days up here—they weren’t pretty. Your son slapped his son across the face, after you croaked at the kid to turn off the TV with your glass eyes and shrunken hands and lips that suckered into themselves, and he just stared ahead and cranked that volume up. You’d curse the boy for his rudeness, but life’s a funny circle: he is named after you.
Don’t worry about him too much. We’re all going down, down, down. It’s classic, it’s choreography, everyone knows the moves. The baby comes out clean and returns dirty as sin.
Sophia Ramirez is a sophomore at Yale University.
ABOUT THE ART | At the Edge of the World by Abigail Dixon, 2023. Abigail Dixon is a student at Yale University.
