Anti-Suicide Note

When I look at you, I don’t know what’s happening. We met once before. We met twice before. I was your mother when the Joss smell perfumed the funeral parlor on the second floor. That was the first. I can’t speak. I feel too much. When I say that I tap deep, deep into the well that runs straight down my veins. The uttered word, just -eel, electric, taps those wells. A true deepwater horizon.

And then there was you. We met in the ward. I introduced my cousin, A, when we were just kids, to that life, the bathroom mirrors you’d known so long.

Two weeks, two weeks you changed my life!

And for that matter A as well. My plan was always to part on good terms, a long lost friend, like my father when at any Starbucks in NoVA.

It didn’t turn out like that at all. I didn’t lose you, E, A, Z, D. I threw you away as last drafts in a life’s novel. Fausto Majistral was merely a fiction. Life has no first drafts. It’s a constant flowing-a stream, a well of conscious effort and life.

Is chronology important?

I’d like to start from the latest. D, I’m sorry. I sparked with you, when we met. On the bus stop at Johns Hopkins, the corner near Chipotle and Quiznos. You paid for my bus fare and my food twice. The first time, at Bourbon Street; The way you looked. I wasn’t impressed, somewhat fuzzed on the upper lip, not taller, not prettier, none of the traits that I sought in lovers just for my own ego’s sake.

We danced. We danced, and I rolled for the first time. It felt like nothing and everything. That’s how my favorite drugs are, the ones I tell myself I can’t take again. Cocaine made me feel like my parents loved me the way I wanted I wanted to love myself. Ecstasy was empathy.

That first night, I barely remember, except in some flashes. XXX Vitamin Water. Frightening my father.

Your naked body. Keeping you up all night. You were so much more, naked and warm next to me, than anyone I’d met. It wasn’t the drugs. We met again.

You’d suffered a loss. The way you threw yourself at memory. Every day busy, busy. I felt you. I felt you on me. I felt you soldier me on to orgasm. I felt you come close to me, slowly. An animal that I was, not like a monkey but like a lion and willing prey, prostrate. Sue could probably hear us from the other room, the walls were paper thin.

Sue was there the first time too, with E. The incense avens. A flower of cosmos. There are no coincidences, not even in a thousand years. My dream lover. The torment, the beautiful tempest. Your mother died of leukemia and so did the glass beads, you said. I couldn’t imagine you any way other, not the California you. What I saw was the black-and-white. You taught me Go like your grandfather did you. As a conqueror’s game. Love as entrapment. Love as loss. You said I was your mother. Your mother was dead. So, I’d die. Torment you again.

Why?

Why not?

We were fated. The last scion of a thousand year old family and the great grandson of a betrayer. It was no fluke. We both played clarinet. Kisses, a hobby, for you the only.

I still walk in your shoes. The ones rain-stained, the feminine eyes whiting out. I wasn’t ready. Maybe you were. But loss, loss.

Z. I didn’t love you there, in greenwall purgatory. You were my friend, my constant companion. Lockups are the homes of star-crossed loves. I had your email. We sucked the Chamomile out of teabags together. It was, you said, Klonopin. Asked me why? Why am I straight?

Why were you there? You put the devil in me.

I needed to find you. To become you, all of you. Not myself. Atman made of a thousand broken pieces. An IQ puzzle that God couldn’t solve.

I searched for you. I faked and lied for you. Just the loss of that piece of paper. A fake Linkedin profile, lying to M. I wished he was you. So I could hold you. You’re alive. And I’m dead to you too.

I gave B my email and phone number. That was two months ago. It was a promise. I’ll be sober too. Just come back.

A. The root. First kiss. It started there. Great first impression, worse second one, and by the last, it’s deader than a doornail. Striated fifteen year old arms. A piece of string. The first kiss that your little sister saw. Children won’t ignore the indiscretions that large. British accent, light skin, black eyes, brown hair.

Tragedy. That wilderness that I taught you. That Z taught me years later. That E hated. D, she didn’t care.

Not a matter of blame. It never was. Misery loves company. Opposites attract. The lying, the cheating. The traits I love; history, mystery. Z the blueblood Chicagoan. E a thousand years old. D, I may never meet again, never know her clockwork tragedy.

Some people cope. Some do; Unmedicated bipolar, addictive personalities, burning self-hatred, molestation, tragedy. This is what I never had. What I always wanted.

I’m fond of the curse “May you live in Interesting Times”

It’s what I gave myself. To inculcate, to absorb, to somehow heal. I wanted you to stop cutting A, it’s why I gave you the pills. They were love. It’s why I loved you so much E. Two years, two years. Feet so numb you could walk in December snow barefoot for hours without so much as a flinch. Z, you had so much, so much…

I’m happy your alive. I’m happy we’re all alive. It’s cold water, in a glass. Ice. The beads of sweat running down your lover’s backbone that you follow with your fingers. The pop of a first kiss. I love kissing. I’d kiss anyone on the mouth.

My little cousin Nahu is on Skype. He types in hearts.

Apologies were never enough. A drop in a bucket. But guilt is partial drowning. Ulrike Meinhoff’s Plan B.

Ming told me about the 62nd timer. He was Caligula. Caligula loved.

The body is nothing. It lives, it breathes. I want a cat. I want two. Ming’s cat told me that she was the queen. That she was the Sphynx of a small domain near Union Square.

I was drunk at the reading. Cate told me I could be a writer (the subtext, if I survived). Seven beers in, when I went up to the stand, it poured out. I read to you, A. I read to you, Dhaka, Ouroboros. I didn’t even give your poem a title. I just said “this one is weird”. My voice cracked. An unlit cigarette in my hand.

Luis came up after and told me that it was beautiful. Maybe I was drunk. Maybe it was true. It’s the well, the deep well. I don’t believe in much. In coincidence. It’s not fate. It’s physics. Elephants all the way down.

I tried to kiss Ming drunk. She recoiled.Why not? Who was I? Booze?

There’s nothing, nothing. There’s something. Hark, in the wilderness. Four walls of green. I could be here forever. No emotions here at all, even the painting across from me is yellow and green. The slightest hint of angry orchid, overwhelmed and tempered by the long grass. English Pastoral. A secret garden. Morgan Freeman tends to it at night.

Ming cried when I told her what happened. Nahu is right. Love isn’t a drug to be chased. It’s not a high. It’s a state of mind. It’s a state of being. She said that she couldn’t be close to me if this happened. I don’t want this. Not anymore. This is a reverse suicide note. A life note. Catharsis. Z‘s alive, he’s well. E alive, she’s well. A as well. D‘s still there. So am I. Despite the rat poison and the luminal that never came. It’s not God. God is a test. It’s physics. It’s game theory. It’s the mathematics of an irrational/rational Universe.

Carl Sagan smoked a lot of pot.

This was 50 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest. I have a whole life. 80 years. Maybe 40-60 years waking, depending on how much adderall they give me (I’m gonna be a math major, so i’m gonna wheedle as many as I can out….To Be Continued