P14 – Vom Gewebe der Zeit oder die Angst davor zu begreifen, dass es im Leben um nichts geht

DEATH

I think of all the questions I should have asked you,
questions that inevitably come to me only now,
now that you are dead—only now that you no longer exist
do I know what it means for you to have ceased to be. So often I tried to imagine this.
No matter how tightly I pressed my eyelids shut,
trying to push away the is, to conjure around me
the reality of your absence—I never seemed to succeed.
I never felt what it was like for you not to be. Now that you are not, I know exactly how that feels. And no matter how hard I squeeze my eyes shut now,
I can no longer remember what it was like not to know this.

What I want to say is that I miss you with every cigarette I smoke. That’s why I’ve stopped smoking, you know? Hoping I wouldn’t miss you so much then…

Many thanks to Fee Aviv Dubois and Alexander Scheer for the interpretation of Lacrimosa, to Kristin Suckow for the workshop and Clara Palmowski for writing the Totenlied.