The hospital is cold and pasty. Infested with rank air and overly sanitized sheets. My eyes are heavy and twisted, drilling towards the back of my head. The hurricane of my body is paralyzed by the cold bags dripping into my ripped vein. 

I’m saying stupid things. Talking about Jesus and LSD and caves… things I’m unfamiliar with… strangers to my own experience… but they rise vulgarly to the surface. A sweaty hand is patting my pale fist and I am an island… isolated from all but waves of sound that stream in and out of my carousel head. 

“I love you,” I say–to the sweaty hand. 

“I know.” He says.

I’m such a liar.

I like sad music and sad books and sad stories. Maybe just because it makes it feel more universal. Like you’re not the only one whose felt like that. Or maybe in comparison it makes all your less than perfect moments seem not so heavy. “If she can survive that than this isn’t that bad.” You know, that sort of mentality. I think there’s a little more to it though. At least for me. Sad songs can be beautiful and sad stories, poetic. I guess knowing that something good can come out of our little pieces of suffering makes them feel not so ugly and not so worthless and like there’s something strangely worthwhile in soldiering through it.

“Art is the only thing that can go on mattering after it has stopped hurting.” <— My favorite quote.

“Don’t get beautiful for strangers.” He said. Unfortunately, strangers were the only ones she cared to impress. None of the people that she knew seemed to be very worthwhile. So she painted and primped before she walked down quiet streets. There, strange men walking the family dog would cast shadowy glances against her frame. They’d never touch her though. And it wasn’t in their nature to gawk or spit grossly spun syllables. They just looked at her, seemingly secretively. Admired her like some exotic painting on display. This worked for her. She liked imagining herself like art. She liked imagining love like art, like something poetic and complex and flawed and beautiful… And all those other words you never hear strung together anymore.

Note: I had to do a series of “profiles” on strangers. I saw this woman (probably 24) walking in this really quiet corner of Central Park. She was absolutely stunning but completely overdressed. She was just meandering along as if she had nowhere to go but you could tell she was soaking in every subtle (and not so subtle) glance.

I want to disappear down long hallways and paint the city red.

Where old men appear in lanky attire and attempt to steal you with their whirlpools.

All four one foot in?

But we’re walking along a tight rope,

In a circus,

Bereft of clowns.

Where the elephants are cripples

and nothing goes up in smoke.

We have to run away from the apocalyptic
Even if that means running towards an apocalypse
We have to drown it all
In rooms without any air
And drain all the swimming pools
Of their chlorinated corpses

We have to pass through closed doors
And wear coats made of gum drops and processed cheese

We have to draw maps of Ireland
In invisible ink
And send secret messages
Through billboards
On Highways
Between hell and San Jose

We have to take pictures
Of all the strange bodies
Strewn on all the strange subways
With expired throw-away cameras

We have to melt plastic
While wearing newspaper and trashy magazines

You want to know the funny thing? The pathetic thing? I couldn’t bring myself to want you to hurt. And oh how I tried. I tortured myself trying to imagine you with these girls. I needed to convince myself that I should want you to be miserable. I pictured you touching them and kissing them and holding them and looking at them. Looking at them. That’s the one that really got me. Thinking about how you framed your world around their eyes—even if only for a second—when I thought about that I felt like my body was going to cave in, like I was going to crumble to the floor. And in a sense I think I did. I could stay composed when I thought about you fucking them or holding them or kissing them. I could keep it together. It was the eyes that caught me. The eyes that left me in pieces shattered across the floor. And that is why I don’t want to see you. That is why I’ll avoid you at every turn. Because your eyes don’t deserve me anymore.

I think the hardest thing about losing someone is forgetting that you have. It’s that split second when you want to tell them something and then remember that you can’t. Search for their face in some place familiar and then realize that you won’t find them. It’s in that moment, that you have to watch yourself lose someone all over again.

I know you meant it

when you said that the sky

was going to crumble

into our lawn chairs.

But those weren’t very good lawn chairs anyway.

So who really cares.

He asked me for the answer. I told him I didn’t know the question. He told me to make it up; I told him it wasn’t that simple. He told me that it should be…

He drank coffee. Black. Simple. He chose whichever one didn’t sound foreign. I drink hot chocolate. Whipped cream, nutmeg, peppermint, chili powder or whatever else I can spice it up with. I liked things complicated, he liked things simple.

He told me that “all the world is accounted for…” He said there’s nothing left to discover. “All the light bulbs are lit.” He said, scoffing at me. So I flicked the light switch by his bed and I asked, “All the forbidden fruits have been tasted?” He told me to stop alluding to the bible. He said, “don’t pretend you’re religious.” I said, “I’m spiritual.” He laughed and said, “that’s a trend.”

He always bought new gadgets. He’d set them up while I played in the boxes they came in and wrapped myself in the bubble wrap while I rolled on the floor. He rolled his eyes and I laughed as I amused myself.

He liked to take photographs… He took them of me while I was asleep and at moments when I couldn’t catch him early enough to tell him not to. He only took black and white. “Color complicates things. You’re so distracted you can’t see what’s there.” I told him that things didn’t always have to be so simple. But he insisted they did, so he loaded the film in the camera and stole moments of my soul. He took photos of our good days and made them his focal point when he was trying to forget all the ugly things that framed them.

We liked to sit in the library and read the dirty parts of romance novels to each other, lying on the ground and laughing while librarians hushed us and “intellectuals” had their pre-conceived notions validated in regard to the “obnoxious teenager.” We never really cared… We went on reading about “supple breasts” and pretended it was funny… It was funny but there was something more to it, something we refused to admit… The fact that it excited us…

We liked to talk in circles. Repetition can be nice. It never lets you lose sight of where you came from and on those rare occasions it re-ignites a burnt out fire.

We liked to debate big ideas… I pretended I was a beatnik and he pretended he was an intellectual and we’d sit in The Coffee Bean while diagnosing the problems of the world. “Are we only what we love or only what we hate? Does it have to be one or the other?” I could fill an entire book with unanswerable questions… Or at least the ones that were unanswerable in our minds.

He knew the ambiguities of the governments, the geography of our world. I know the cracks in my ceiling, the geography of the potholes on my walk to work. I prefer ideas to facts, abstracts to concretes…

I told him that I always dreamt in color. He said “well, I dream in black and white.” I told him that was boring… He said it was poetic. We always got in tiffs about simple things. It was the big things that floored us… The things that snuck up behind us on idle afternoons while we were eating his mother’s cookies or watching a movie… The sky always seems to fall when you least expect it to, when the rest of the world is still and existence is lazy and humble. These are the days when people get sick, when people die, when people disappear… These are the days that you end up at hospitals and emergency rooms… These are the only times we were both silent. When everybody else was screaming out, we shut up…

We both loved making fools of ourselves. We preferred it to almost anything. We’d go ice blocking, we’d make scenes in restaurants and stage fights in grocery stores. We spent entire afternoons making prank calls and laughing until we hurt. Luminous laughter that was like convulsions in our stomachs and reminded us why we ever connoted the word living with beautiful. Sometimes we forgot.

We didn’t have “good standing.” Not with most people anyway but it didn’t bother us very much… I suppose it should have but we never gave much credit to other people, never gave any credit to their opinions. We didn’t mean it in a pompous way though I’m sure that’s the only way most people could interpret it.

He accepted the world. He said its foolish not to. I think that’s an awful way of looking at things. “You have the life experience of a fifty year old and the blind faith of a four year old.” I don’t think he intended it as a compliment but I’ve relished that comment every day since. I let it dance in my head when people tell me to “grow up,” or “be serious.” I never liked being serious; I was never any good at it. He, on the other hand, was a master at it. He could charm any adult in any room. He asked me to join in. I told him that the stock market was boring. He told me it was fascinating and that if I ever wanted to be a good writer I’d have to understand the world. I told him that knowing the economics of the world is far from understanding it. Then he ignored me and talked to someone else about the corruption of something else and I stopped listening because I was terribly annoyed.

I remember his first kiss. He told me it was perfect. I reminded him that we promised to kiss each other before we kissed anyone else… I told him it hurt… He told me that the pain wasn’t meant for me. I told him that it was irrelevant. And then he said, “It was with a another guy… When Andy found out he called me a fag.”
I told him that in England a fag means a cigarette… And then we laughed. Because it was one of the moments where you either laugh or cry and he never cried. He hated to cry. He thought it was a sign of weakness. I really don’t mind crying… It’s cleansing… Like liquefying all the ugly of your insides and letting it rain out of your soul… He didn’t believe that people had a soul. He said after a person dies they just rot into the ground. I told him that was the ugliest thing I had ever heard. Because it was, and it caught me off guard.

We’d go to art museums. He’d look at Rothko for hours and I would look at all the unknowns in the modern art section… We were both repulsed by each other’s tastes and yet we identified with art in the same way. We both thought we could escape in it, we wanted to be painted into it and live out our lives in acrylic.

He liked to call himself a man. I liked to remind him he was still a boy.

He read while I wrote and then he read what I wrote while I read his face for a reaction; some hint of approval or disapproval. Most of the time he laughed and told me that it wasn’t very good… But there were times when he’d look up and say, “beautiful.” Most times the word, “beautiful,” annoys me. It’s so ambiguous that it doesn’t really mean anything. Most times I say, “Beautiful is watered-down.” But I liked it when he said it. Because I knew what he meant, or at least I thought I did.

I always judge books by their covers. “If they can’t even come up with a good illustration how is the book supposed to be any good?” He told me to stop being “bitchy.” I told him to stop being so endearing.

I told him that my grandfather could always guess when the light at the intersection would turn green… He told me “anyone can do that, they just have to look at the other lights.” I told him that my grandfather could do this with his eyes closed. It was a lie but I desperately needed to prove him wrong.

I am on a plane. Taking in the recycled and lifeless air. I take a deep breath and reach into a paper bag. Given to me as I left the orphanage. I read the notes from all my kids. Tearing at their open hearts and indelible spirits. Then I pull out a note from Agnessi. “Dear Teacher, when you go home, please tell God to come to Afrika.”
And with that I broke. I saw myself shattered on the floor.

Broken bits and pieces of anything… Everything even. My soul is what you use to line your trashcan… I am hiding under my desk… I couldn’t tell you what from… Even if I could I’m not sure I’d want to. The buildings are built up and the world is glittering. Cheep neon lights lining the streets and mass-produced spirituality lining the bookshelves… Books of answers… And I start to wonder when they’ll realize that they’re asking the wrong questions… Money and poverty… I sit in the poverty amidst the millionaires and try to sculpt beauty out of the dust…

I have burnt enough bridges and swam across enough rivers to know what that face means. I have dove head first into your oasis only to realize it was a mirage. I have swallowed your practical purposes, and loved only as much as you thought was advisable. I have avoided love like the plague.