CW for depression and suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. The language is a lot less caustic. We all grow up eventually.
I'd say "enjoy" but you're free to do what you want.
*****
The two people at work were talking because one of them has a dying father. His father is 86 and recently had a stroke. His son, the one on my left as the two people talked, expressed sadness but also joy at having spent 60 years with his dad on relatively good terms. That there was little they hadn't done or said to each other that they hadn't wanted to. That 60 years is a long time and that he can't live by spending the next year looking back on it with pain and regret over missteps. The other man agreed. When he explained that he had a sibling die when he was a teen, he said he spent a very long time dwelling on things he should have said to her, done with her, the kind of regrets we have whenever there's loss, whether tragic like death or more rote like friendships or relationships growing in distance. He said that one day he woke up and realized that all that the living in the past had done was make things worse for him, and that he needed to be in the present, and be aware of things, and focus on what he could control, not the things that already happened and he no longer could.
About two minutes later, he spent several minutes regaling a tale of winning a pool and shuffleboard tournament in college when he went, how he and his buddies would get drunk at age 19 because the legal age limit was 18 back then, and how fun that time of his life was, and how he won a surprising amount of money on schooling overconfident pool players or foosball players or shuffleboard players or whatever. The other man, then, talked about the time he and his buddies went out hunting decades ago and had the classic 'one that got away' story about a massive buck.
I don't think the irony ever got to any of them, and maybe in a sense there's something different between recollecting good memories and recollecting painful ones. Or maybe there isn't, as the good ones become painful eventually because they are over and can't be revisited and the details start to escape and the context goes missing and the person you were when they took place is dead and gone so you even wonder if said memory would be fun to you if it happened again today.
In less than 3 weeks I am expecting a text from a person who was very bad to me and who I cut out of my life years ago and rarely ever look back on. It was a good suggestion a close friend had made and it saved me a lot of anxiety and stress and cynicism and meanness. The text will say 'happy birthday. i miss you.' I will receive that text sometime in the evening, when I will be listening to sad music and eying the bottle of Xanax and the bottle of whiskey and something sharp because that is how I have spent my birthday in years past. I will consider breaking 4 years clean of self harm, 7 months clear of getting sick by getting puke drunk on alcohol and Xanax, which I vowed to never do again, because nothing ever good came of it, but when you isolate yourself on a Friday or Saturday night and start ruminating I guess it becomes a source of healing, if only until you go overboard.
In January an ex who I was on good terms with deleted all her social media accounts and moved to Denver. I texted her recently asking how she was settling in and she never responded. She said she was going to enjoy the mountain air and the skiing and the weed when we talked awhile ago. I hope she is. I hope she found peace there. I hope she doesn't have to fuck 2-3 different people a day like she did back here just to try to chase away the depression. I mean, she's free to do that if she wants, fuck 12 people for all I care. But she said she did a lot of stupid things and it didn't help. Mostly I just hope she's happy and ok.
Some friends I occasionally hung out with and played video games with moved to Seattle in January as well. Maybe there's something to new year resolutions after all. They said they were going to enjoy the coffee and the culture and the weed when we talked awhile ago. I hope they are. I hope they found peace there. I hope they don't each have to work 50+ hours a week anymore like they did here, but I also know Seattle is more expensive than Michigan and I fear the worst.
An uncle who lived near my grandparents moved to Texas in January, which I guess makes this a weird 'everything comes in three' coincidence, unless you count the group of two as two separate and then this is four people, so it's not a coincidence. He didn't tell anyone he was going. just called when he got there to say he was living with a married couple he knew in a house down there. Grandma was very upset. I don't know him too well, and he makes more money than me by a good amount, but I was in awe that he did something that I have wanted to do for years, just up and left, and that was that, and really everyone else will adjust and move forward even if they never fully get over it because humans do that, and then they die, and that's most of the experience. I don't know what happened to his house, or his stuff, and I let similar or not-so-similar excuses scare me and jobs scare me and money scare me and then I don't do it but I wake up still here the next morning scared of always being here, so the fear is transcendent and region-less and I gain nothing by succumbing to it. Mostly I just hope he's happy down there. He's always been single and a bit distant and I think sort of jealous of other family member's success and relationships, even if he'd never say it. He likes basketball a lot, and the NBA teams down there are certainly better right now.
Last spring and summer someone I was seeing romantically took a second job and we didn't see each other for awhile afterwards because they were very, very busy working long hours at minimum wage at both places. After three weeks of not seeing each other, I messaged her on Snapchat asking when we would hang out again, and she responded "never," and then posted a story a few days later about how she was in love with a roommate she had moved in with. She posted a new story to Snapchat for the first time since the holidays yesterday. She made some very beautiful and colorful art, tie dyes on paper and t-shirts and shoes and pinks and purples and greens and the kind of stuff teens and young adults would really like, that you'd adorn yourself or your walls with to fight off the endless gray Michigan winter. She is trying to sell it to make extra money. I hope that will mean she no longer has to work so many hours. I was sad when she broke up with me but I got over it quick and she seems happy in the new place she lives at and I guess that's the most important thing. Her beagle is very cute, brown floppy ears and tenor bark and all.
On a whim one weekend recently I was looking at old info on Pitchfork Fest I went to several years ago in Chicago, to refresh my memory on who all I had seen perform. I ended up on a Reddit thread where people ranked all the performances in order of how much they liked them. I was reading through the page when I saw a username that seemed vaguely familiar to me, and then they mentioned they had lost their phone at a club on Saturday night when they drunkenly had fallen over, and that if anyone at Club Debonair at the time had picked up a phone, to let her know on Reddit. I remembered that moment, because I helped her up when she fell on the floor, because we were staying in the same room at the hostel, and we saw a bunch of bands together, and we got caught in a severe thunderstorm with 50 mph winds and pouring rain that turned the grassy venue into mud that stuck to our shoes so violently it almost ripped them off our feet, and we got separated from another hostelite we were with when we ran for shelter, and then caught up to him again over tacos later before we all got plastered at the hostel and went clubbing at Debonair, and then stayed up until sunrise, while two people in the hostel, in classic fashion, debated the merits of their political opinions based entirely on their skin color and identity, and it became a battle between a brown Australian man and a white American woman over who had it worse, and they argued over 40 dollar bottles of liquor and the Australian was touring the US as part of a band and owned many guitars, and the woman had been to Europe multiple times, so maybe there's no point.
Anyways, the Reddit username looked familiar because it was the same one she has on Snapchat, where we are friends. We have not sent each other a snap in a very long time. The Sunday of the final day of Pitchfork, we said our goodbyes since she wasn't attending that day, as she had to get back to St Louis for school purposes. She hugged me and said "if you're ever around we should kick it." I never saw her again.
Years ago when I was in Austin walking around downtown, someone yelled out "hey you" and at the time I didn't think anything of it because nobody ever talked to me and I never talked to anyone. But they said it again, closer, and I turned around, and someone was there, and they grabbed my glasses right off my face, and they said they liked me, and they were very drunk, and they went into the bar I was in front of and asked me to join them, and I said I couldn't, so I awkwardly stood outside, unable to see anything with my vision so bad, until they returned my glasses and said they were really fucked up and wished I would get fucked up with them.
I learned it was Austin my uncle moved to. He's not the type but I suppose a city has more than its manufactured image to it.
Recently I saw a metered parking lot nestled up against an old brick building. On the brick building someone had graffiti-d the words "this is heaven" in white, elegantly curved font, and I always wondered if they meant the parking lot, or the building, or the town, or if it was more metaphorical. A couple weeks later, someone wrote very sloppily in a different color and style and thickness under the previous graffiti "then why isn't the parking free". I think about this from time to time because the parking is expensive and if there is a heaven it seems to me it is very far from here, so the question was valid and that I never saw a response whenever I drove by disappoints me. I hope the person really did find their heaven. Even if it is here.
In the last year I have read a lot of short stories that won entries into literary magazines or contests, or ended up being published as part of a collection. I spent some time researching the authors of 50 of them. Of those 50 authors, 100% had graduated from college; 35 of them had a bachelors, almost all in English or fine arts, and 15 had an MFA. I don't know where my high school diploma is.
I read a short story the other day my favorite author in the world recommended. I didn't think much of the short story. It was written by a New Yorker in New York and you could tell immediately by the entire aesthetic and tone and all, planted firmly in Brooklyn in a sheik apartment, and I suppose the life of someone there just doesn't register with someone who wakes up in spring and occasionally smells cow manure or whose only experience with a taxi growing up was a trip to Toronto with family in the summer of 1999. The story attempted to paint a sympathetic picture of grief, a mother who died, two daughters who didn't see eye to eye with their dad. But it all felt detached, and the tears were real but when the older sister told the younger sister to lower her expectations for their dad it felt strange given he hadn't done anything wrong, really, and they were all sad at this point. I suppose I've shed enough angst over the years over my family and I not seeing eye to eye, how much I wish to leave them behind not out of hate or anger but out of desire to be free from connections and concern and questions about everything and anything, about how almost 30 they still want to know every friend I see, every place I go, there is no escape, and maybe me thinking the 16 year old in the short story was too young to draw that strong of a conclusion about her dad being a fuck up was irresponsible, but maybe it's not a matter of being a fuck up. My parents aren't fuck ups, I am, and I suppose that's mostly my fault, but if I wrote down half the anger and imagined conversations I've had with them over the years in my head it'd make the short story seem pensive, so maybe it's all relative, like the population of New York to Kalamazoo to Montague. The story ended somber, but expected, and I felt like I had read that same short story 100 times before, on trendy online websites or lit mags or some other source that would extravagantly celebrate this up and coming young writer and their ability to portray humanity in a humble, universal lens.
The author had an MFA from the University of Michigan, and received two substantial grants from Brooklyn based writing programs, which explained everything and anything I ever wanted to know about the world. She was also born in Michigan, but she lives there, in Brooklyn, and has for the past 20 years outside of her college stint. I guess she made the leap of faith that I never did. I closed the browser tab and made sure to never read the author again.
Someone recently asked me what the saddest thing I ever read was. I told them I wasn't sure, and I'd have to think about it, but it didn't take me long to come up with an answer. I couldn't share it with them though and maybe I never will. I might have been inclined to cite Everything I Never Told You, or that popular Reddit story about the girlfriend who died in a car crash not long after her sister did. We tend to frame this through the lens of works that don't actually affect us or happen in our proximity, crying over fictional characters or movies or albums from high school or whatever, since so few people read regularly. But I think in my case, the saddest thing I ever read was a bit closer to me.
A couple years ago an old friend of mine posted a link to their Instagram on Facebook. It was a friend I once cared deeply about and talked to almost every day but no longer know, because they moved out west in February awhile back and that was that. They were mostly just promoting their profile, not out of a sense of business duty or anything, as it was entirely a personal account, but just to get a few more followers, a few more likes, a little more affirmation, because their husband had walked out on them suddenly a couple weeks earlier and their status said they needed all the support they could get. "6 people liked this."
I was browsing through the Instagram she posted and there was a lot of beauty there. There were pictures of friends and family and kids and parties and bars and clubs and sports and sunsets and sunrises and alcohol and concerts and paintings and drugs and jet skis and hiking and even a mountain lion. On a post made on December 12th, 2011, there was a picture of a young woman holding a guitar. She was a lefty - or I guess the photo could have been flipped, but I like to think the former - and she stood in front of a beaten up couch whose color was so faded and grungy I couldn't make out if it was puke yellow or puke green or some newly invented puke hue warped by a bad camera phone and the rendering that occurs when you upload photos to a website. Next to the couch was a small coffee table with a bunch of those American red Solo cups people fill with alcohol and chasers and drink from in college. My friend had written a caption:
"Dear (redacted), I will miss you, forever and ever. You taught me so much about life, were my shoulder to cry on, were my 4am drunk texts, were my emergency shopping spree, were my creative inspiration. You had the prettiest voice I ever heard, and I wish you could have found the success with it you always wanted and deserved. I bought a bottle of knob creek in your honor the other day, and me and (redacted) and (redacted) are going to drink together and share memories of you, and maybe one day we'll all see you again and you can sing and I can try to join in and we'll laugh and everything will be wonderful. Until then, I will think of you every day."
I never knew the person in the photo, but knowing my friend (or at least, used to knowing my friend), she had to be an exceptional human to get them to say those kinds of things, as she wasn't the kind to glorify or overly-eulogize something that wasn't. It was easy to find info on the deceased; she performed locally around the Tucson area at bars and stuff, played guitar, sang, seemed to be pretty popular within the community. I don't know how she died. Maybe that's for the best.
I've read that post countless times. Every single time it makes me sad. Sometimes for days at a time. She was too young. I suppose we all are. But I could see her passing caused my friend incredible pain, and that too stings. Perhaps it's also for the best I will never be that important to anyone really. At least I don't think.
That friend posted on Facebook on December 12th that after 6 years they still missed that person I know only as the possibly lefty guitar player and singer. It reminded me of it all, and I read the original post, and I cried in that moment, because in that moment I projected all my wants and desires onto that one, beautiful existence, that life of art and music and socialization and experiences and noises and psychoactives and romance and emotional connection and get-togethers and affirmation and all, and realized that this person having it ripped away from them was unfair, and that I have so little of it, as much as I want to have more, and that I should have been the one dead, and there would be no sad Instagram post for people to have to read and cry, because nobody would care. "0 people liked this."
While on Facebook that same day I looked at my photos from my trip to SE Asia in 2016 and reminded myself of my opportunities and experiences and that dying young as a lefty guitar player isn't the best, probably, they would trade places I am sure, photos of palm trees and food and temples and cityscapes years later, photos with a friend and with someone I just met and at a sidewalk restaurant some girl told me would look good on Tinder, and I would have died, and maybe we both would have permanently gotten what we wanted, instead of the temporary deception that we had. And then I felt bad for being jealous, and then I felt bad for feeling bad, and then I thought about getting drunk and playing guitar in my basement and pretending I had fans, like that matters, but I went to bed stressed about holiday family gatherings instead.
In 6th grade my grandma bought me a kid's guitar for my birthday. I didn't really want it. I noodled around a bit and learned to pluck out Hot Cross Buns and a few other things but that was all. If I could go back in time I'd slap myself and tell me to learn it then and there and tell the baritone I was playing to fuck off and if my mom didn't like that choice she could fuck off as well, because in about 7 years you'll wish you could play it, and in about 7 more you'll finally get around to it, but it's easier to find one more thing you're bad at and can't do when you're 12 and have an entire life in front of you than it is when you're 28 and finally get around to buying one but have nothing but disappointment in front instead.
I found some kratom in my closet with some poppers and a bunch of other drugs from years past, so one day in... yeah, January, I decided to take some for the first time in a year or two. I didn't have any empty capsules so I did the old toss and wash and actually got a high a few hours later and felt ok. So I did it a week later, pouring a lot more in my mouth, and overdid it, and I puked into my bedroom trashcan and woke up the next day feeling hungover. I keep the bag on my desk now. There's enough left for one last high. There's a metaphor somewhere in there, about one last time, about going back to the bad mistakes you once made, about repeating trauma. I spilled some of the liquid from the poppers on my skin that first night, which I read was bad, and for a moment I started to feel like I would pass out from the medical fear as it can often do, but I laid down and was better.
Next to the kratom was my old high school yearbook. I wiped off a layer of dust while I waited for the drugs to kick in and opened it up. Two people signed it. I ate lunch alone in the cafeteria the day they did. One person wrote a long paragraph with a reference in there to a joke I told while we were at work that made them laugh so hard they cried, and she loved me and I never told her we should try it and the context in the yearbook is gone to me, I no longer remember the joke, and just yesterday I couldn't remember if she now lived in Raleigh or Charlotte, North Carolina, so I looked her up on Facebook and saw how different she looked and yet how for 12 straight years I've never seen a photo in which she isn't smiling. I have good memories of her. They're painful now. I wonder if the pool and shuffleboard ones the guy at work recalled are too. We used to hang out a lot, back in high school, and then she went to... ok, Raleigh, and the other two members of my crew left as well and one friend went to Tuscon and posted sad Instagram captions about lefty guitar players, and the third went to Nashville and almost died when he climbed into a electrical substation and shocked himself so severely the surgeon said he had no idea how he survived.
In a novel I read recently a character who was a cocaine user referenced the "bell ringer" effect that happens when you inject. It's a subjective effect that describes a ringing in the ears and a distortion of audio. Many users don't know what causes this, but assume it's something to do with injecting the drug instead of smoking or snorting it. They're right, I think, insomuch as it's the injecting, but it's not the cocaine itself, because I get the same symptoms when I go to the doctor and get a shot; the ringing, the sense that audio right next to me is far off, and I have to lie down, because I am about to faint, because that's what it is, the stress and anxiety of a needle and an injection and a chemical going into your body and the queasy uneasiness. I wanted to call the author and tell them that, because the symptoms scared the character into not injecting for awhile, and really it was probably fine, and maybe they'd get used to it, but I never have, so maybe it's just best to lie down when shooting up, but the character just spent like $2000 on cocaine and no sense having it go to waste.
I had to lie down when I read that passage in the book. The description of it all almost made me faint. My ears rang.
The other day I realized how ironic it was that my parents took me to therapy in high school in part because I seemed so emotionless back then, that I never outwardly displayed anything but flatness, when for years I've been on edge, wilting under critique, melancholy and depressed at music or sunsets or Instagram or Facebook posts, having to constantly explain to myself that the worst possibility is always imagined and nothing more. I've kicked a lot of trash cans in the last month or so (literally), and I've never thrown a punch or kicked anyone, so in some sense I am glad that is as violent as I get, but in another sense, the fact that I am doing everything I can not to scream in the bathroom at work says enough. So many things can make me react emotionally, but I don't say it or explain it because I can't, and don't know how, and I can't make the words work like I want, and I'd crack under the pressure and worry about over sharing or burdening someone or having them realized how fucked up I am. I do a god job guarding it, not lashing out, not using it to be caustic or manipulative, and if I hide too much of it to do so I am fine with that. We all have our problems anyways. The other day on Twitter a lot of people complained about men who share too much in relationships, and like all things, there are cases that's true, where men expect affirmation from their partner without offering anything in return (ok, there's a lot of that), but I think about how many women and non-binary folk are coerced into horrible situations because they can't share anything without push back or punishment, they can't be vulnerable without being seen as weak or easy victims, or men kill themselves because they can't share anything or be seen as vulnerable or open up, or they hit their girlfriend and say, unfairly and predatorily, it's because they can't share themselves emotionally, and I wonder if the conversation we are having is still the wrong one. I've never seen my dad cry before. And I've never seen my mom have a panic attack. But I know they both have. They just work very, very hard to hide it. I guess I do too. In 3rd grade I was at a friends house with about 4 other people and we rough housed and I got punched in the stomach and while I wasn't bawling I put my head down and cried quietly for a few moments as the pain throbbed. My friends mom told my mom I was a tough man. That was the only time she had ever seen me cry.
I spent the most recent weekend looking at old videos from live converts I've been to over the last few years. A lot of videos exist. The first show I went to in years was on May 8, 2015, when I finally scared my social anxiety away enough to drive to Detroit and see Lady Lamb perform. I don't know what I feared more. A new setting. Not knowing where to go. Attending alone. Looking stupid. But I did it and then that started several years of going to a half dozen or so a year. There's a video of several of the songs she performed that night, with my gangly, scrawny frame showing up several times in a video the uploader gave the wrong song title to. The most recent show I went to was my favorite band in the world, Elvis Depressedly, seeing them for a third time, this time with a very good person, and I sang and we hugged and we smoked and I listened to music way too loud on the drive back from Detroit while they tried to sleep in the passenger seat. No videos from that concert exist.
Looking at old recordings reminded me of a song someone shared with me years ago, in 2007, when I was at college. I had never heard of the band before, and thought their name was silly. I listened to that song religiously for a month or two, sitting in my dorm room contemplating death, Youtube video on repeat, and I remember the video was just a simple recording looking out someone's kitchen window, as the rain fell outside, their tiny yard framed by a white picket fence that had seen better days. And then I never listened to them again, and they faded away from my memory, until a car ride weeks ago involving someone who had seen them live brought them up, and I tried to remember what it was that song was that I was trying to explain, but I couldn't get it right, and I couldn't recall a title or a lyric or anything, only that fence and the rain. And then a week or two ago when looking for easy guitar songs to play I came across the title, and I knew right then it was that song, it was the one I tried to remember, and every time I try to play it I fumble a chord and miss a fret and I threw my pick at the wall in frustration on Monday night and I haven't touched my guitar in the couple days since.
I stayed up earlier this week one night and talked into my phone for over an hour and a half until it was past 1:30 AM. I talked about everything and nothing, about things that were bothering me and had bothered me and then I listened to it tonight in and out of the sleep I had put off for days and none of it made any goddamn sense, as I expected, but I suppose it was good to say things nobody has ever heard and probably never will. At a young age, for instance, I decided that self-love seemed really fucking weird. Why would you love yourself? You're supposed to love other people. Like a family member. Or a spouse. Not yourself. Who would do that? Certainly not me. Have you hung out with me? Have you seen me? Would you love this? I went outside after listening and smoked several cigarettes which I had been doing again for the first time in awhile. I used to joke that it was very easy for me to quit drugs like it was very easy for me to quit anything I ever tried or felt attached to, like the guitar, but maybe I spoke too soon. I didn't practice tonight.
That moment I realized I would never love myself was around 3rd or 4th grade, and I think by 5th grade I knew I was sad but that it didn't matter and would never get better. One night in bed I cried aloud for a long time and my sister heard me and walked down the hall and got my mom from the living room and my parents paused the movie they were watching while my mom escorted my sister back to her room and then came into mine, and she asked me why I was crying, and I said it was because there were so many fun and amazing moments that had happened in my life that were over, and I would never have again, and one day when I was old would forget. She didn't say anything. Maybe she didn't know what to say. After all the audio had played of me describing that memory I went in my phone and deleted a bunch of old pictures where I looked happy and was enjoying myself. They didn't exist anywhere else. Resignation to the constant mood and melancholy and sadness comes after a whole fucking lifetime of this, I suppose, it's been two decades now of tears and 15 years of battling suicide so maybe it's my identity. It's 20 years later from that night crying in bed and I'm still living in the past like my 5th grade old self did in a room whose only defining features were a door that wouldn't shut, a window that never stopped creaking, and a closet my dad used instead of me because my parent's bedroom didn't have the space.
I'm not sure where I stand now. For 8+ years I couldn't name a single person here on a first name basis, outside of family or co-workers, I had nobody, and knew nobody, and just sort of existed without human connection or outside of a constantly tired, fatigued, depressed state in my room, rusted scissors tucked away for me to reach for when I wanted to hurt myself, replaced with a razorblade, replaced with benzos and liquor. And then I finally stopped it all and put myself out there, and I met some people, and they were good, and some were temporary but some were not so temporary until they were and I have good memories. And some were in Grand Rapids - well most - but it worked. Until it didn't. Because in January they all left, literally, to far corners, and that was that, and now my small social circle has been shotgunned again, and eventually the memories will hurt. Maybe that's the world's way of saying I should leave this place, what with so few goodbyes to say. They did what I know I should have done a long time ago. I guess that makes me the last remaining fool. I like to pretend they're all happier now. It makes me think I could be the same.
There’s a song that says “The only thing permanent about true love is the pain you feel when it goes.” Maybe my perspective is skewed because I've never experienced loss in that way, but if everything else is impermanent, good and bad, then maybe our attachments to comfort and anxiety and fear shouldn't be so transfixed. Maybe things shouldn't matter as much. But then you read something terrible happening and you convince yourself your defense is good and necessary. Or maybe that’s all over thinking it. I still don’t know if the song is correct. Maybe I never will. Maybe I make too much of my childhood anxiety. Maybe I don’t make enough.
I suppose if you can move on mentally you can find a way to move on physically, too. I wasn't supposed to be here, in this town, forever, but then again millennials move less than any previous generation before them. So I guess I haven't done either of those. Maybe that’s the only permanent thing. The idea of knowing what we should do and not doing it. Maybe that was the point of the New York/Brooklyn short story. Everybody knew what they wanted, what they needed, but they didn't know how to get it or how to tell anyone. Or if they did, they made the decision not to, because the conflict that it would create was insurmountable, even though crying into your soup every other night seems way more insurmountable than telling your dad you don't like his behavior or your sister she needs professional help or the hot guy smoking at the party that you want to kiss him. Maybe you don't need an MFA to realize that. But the main character and the smoking guy did end up kissing, and then they broke up several months later, and the main character ended up remembering him while eating at some food truck, because of course - so again, maybe there's no point.
My mother asked me not too long ago if I was ever going to move to a big city like I have always said I wanted to. I told her the same thing I told her when I was 20, and 22, and 24, and 26, and 28. I guess you could be a cynic and convince yourself that the joy of someplace foreign is temporary too. Even the quaint new coffee shops or restaurants or bars or neighborhoods become scenery eventually. Maybe satisfaction is not knowing how to be satisfied and never having to worry about not achieving it. Maybe the Amish are right. Maybe the Buddhists are. Maybe the hedonists are. Maybe nobody is.
She asked me next when I wanted to celebrate my birthday with the family, and I said I didn't want to, and she got upset, and I said we can do it on a different date, a different weekend, and she said she would just start celebrating her birthday whenever she wanted then, and in that moment I hated everything, and told her it's my birthday to do what I want with, and her input doesn't matter. She said fine but she didn't like it. I think her feelings were hurt.
She doesn't know but when the day gets closer I will simply tell her I don't want to celebrate with family at all, to put on a fake smile in front of my parents and sister and act like turning one year away from a 30th b-day in which I promised I would kill myself since I was 18 is really swell. That for years I spent birthdays dreading further existence, fighting the urge to do something more drastic than drawing blood and stumbling into bed dizzy and weak, dwelling on nothing but regrets and missed opportunities and experiences and personal failings and my isolation. And that I couldn't imagine turning 30 so strongly that it made me constantly see it as my final day on earth. The first person I ever had a relationship with, the Snapchat user from 2017 who makes tie dye art told me she absolutely wouldn't let me do that when I originally confessed it to her, as she ran her hands gently along the bevy of hypertrophic scars on my arms, us lying in my bed naked on a cool late May day, fan overhead gently spinning, perfume smell on my pillow for the rest of the weekend. She said she wouldn't let me because she liked me way too much. I never actually told her when the date was. She never asked. What happened next I explained in my previous post. That was the last day we ever really talked.
An album from a band I really like comes out the day before I officially turn 29, and it'd be very easy to just take a dozen or two dozen Xanax and pass out all weekend and see what happens when I wake up Monday. I wrote up a draft of a text to an acquaintance who is not really a friend so maybe it'd have been easier, asking them if I gave them my car keys if they could hold them for that weekend, and not give them to me until Monday no matter what, but I deleted it and didn't want to explain that it's all because it'd be very easy to drive back to the parking garage that I went to in 2008 and climb on that wall on the top floor again and slide off, and this time I could listen to music while it happened since I have a phone that can play it, or a car audio system that can as well, and it would be fitting, almost exactly a decade later, to finally finish what I started, like I went back to kratom, or cigarettes. Maybe I shouldn't have taken my dozens and dozens of bottles of Effexor, Zyprexa, Lexapro, the ones that had sat on my desk for months, and thrown them away. But they made me so tired I'd rather live with whatever comes without them.
I fully expect to be all better when my birthday is over and look at this and laugh and tell anyone who cares enough to be worried that it's ok, I've been here before, and I can climb out, and the fact that I haven't self harmed yet or gotten black out drunk means I can handle things a bit better than before. I texted someone today and mentioned I had a lot on my mind and they asked if there was anything they could do to help, because they are a nicer person than I will ever be, but I said I'd be better when we hang out next, or maybe it'll be when my birthday passes, or when Spring finally arrives, or when I go on a trip overseas with my travel friend, or card games with others at the boba tea place, between the five of those at least one will happen, at least one will work, and I honest to God believe that, I think, maybe. Or maybe none will happen, and winter will be perpetual, and time will stop, and I will be so isolated I never see anyone again. My closest friend told me she always gets bummed when I get in touch with her more throughout the day, because it means I am sad, and after almost a decade of friendship she wishes I didn't have to deal with this. That when I go through stretches when I don't talk to her she is sad that we're not talking but knows it's because I am busy on weekends out living. Time heals all wounds except the ones that kill us, and I suppose there are too many good things and weekends I could still see if I really wanted to, rather than give up now, because 2017 did have them and I guess so did 2016 and 2015 even and there's nothing to say 2018 can't either. I don't know whose sake this paragraph is for.
I made one more evening drive downtown since the snow melted due to an unseasonably warm week of weather. There were people walking about all over. I saw three people in shorts, all white people who looked liked the kind of person I was in high school, all walking with different people, none of whom were in shorts, and I laughed, but then I remembered I once made 5 dollars sticking about 30 cinnamon Listerine pocket strips in my mouth at once, so I guess we had more in common than I liked to think; that I was in my car driving aimlessly to stem off feeling cold inside and they were using verbal communication to stem off having cold thighs. After a few right turns, I decelerated and looked out my passenger side window, where the metered parking lot and the old brick building stood. The graffiti had been covered up. Heaven was gone. In heaven's place sat a billboard, advertising cheap flights to NYC, with a picture of some young couple standing in front of some sheik apartment that I knew all at once was Brooklyn. I guess I know where it went.
I found some kratom in my closet with some poppers and a bunch of other drugs from years past, so one day in... yeah, January, I decided to take some for the first time in a year or two. I didn't have any empty capsules so I did the old toss and wash and actually got a high a few hours later and felt ok. So I did it a week later, pouring a lot more in my mouth, and overdid it, and I puked into my bedroom trashcan and woke up the next day feeling hungover. I keep the bag on my desk now. There's enough left for one last high. There's a metaphor somewhere in there, about one last time, about going back to the bad mistakes you once made, about repeating trauma. I spilled some of the liquid from the poppers on my skin that first night, which I read was bad, and for a moment I started to feel like I would pass out from the medical fear as it can often do, but I laid down and was better.
Next to the kratom was my old high school yearbook. I wiped off a layer of dust while I waited for the drugs to kick in and opened it up. Two people signed it. I ate lunch alone in the cafeteria the day they did. One person wrote a long paragraph with a reference in there to a joke I told while we were at work that made them laugh so hard they cried, and she loved me and I never told her we should try it and the context in the yearbook is gone to me, I no longer remember the joke, and just yesterday I couldn't remember if she now lived in Raleigh or Charlotte, North Carolina, so I looked her up on Facebook and saw how different she looked and yet how for 12 straight years I've never seen a photo in which she isn't smiling. I have good memories of her. They're painful now. I wonder if the pool and shuffleboard ones the guy at work recalled are too. We used to hang out a lot, back in high school, and then she went to... ok, Raleigh, and the other two members of my crew left as well and one friend went to Tuscon and posted sad Instagram captions about lefty guitar players, and the third went to Nashville and almost died when he climbed into a electrical substation and shocked himself so severely the surgeon said he had no idea how he survived.
In a novel I read recently a character who was a cocaine user referenced the "bell ringer" effect that happens when you inject. It's a subjective effect that describes a ringing in the ears and a distortion of audio. Many users don't know what causes this, but assume it's something to do with injecting the drug instead of smoking or snorting it. They're right, I think, insomuch as it's the injecting, but it's not the cocaine itself, because I get the same symptoms when I go to the doctor and get a shot; the ringing, the sense that audio right next to me is far off, and I have to lie down, because I am about to faint, because that's what it is, the stress and anxiety of a needle and an injection and a chemical going into your body and the queasy uneasiness. I wanted to call the author and tell them that, because the symptoms scared the character into not injecting for awhile, and really it was probably fine, and maybe they'd get used to it, but I never have, so maybe it's just best to lie down when shooting up, but the character just spent like $2000 on cocaine and no sense having it go to waste.
I had to lie down when I read that passage in the book. The description of it all almost made me faint. My ears rang.
The other day I realized how ironic it was that my parents took me to therapy in high school in part because I seemed so emotionless back then, that I never outwardly displayed anything but flatness, when for years I've been on edge, wilting under critique, melancholy and depressed at music or sunsets or Instagram or Facebook posts, having to constantly explain to myself that the worst possibility is always imagined and nothing more. I've kicked a lot of trash cans in the last month or so (literally), and I've never thrown a punch or kicked anyone, so in some sense I am glad that is as violent as I get, but in another sense, the fact that I am doing everything I can not to scream in the bathroom at work says enough. So many things can make me react emotionally, but I don't say it or explain it because I can't, and don't know how, and I can't make the words work like I want, and I'd crack under the pressure and worry about over sharing or burdening someone or having them realized how fucked up I am. I do a god job guarding it, not lashing out, not using it to be caustic or manipulative, and if I hide too much of it to do so I am fine with that. We all have our problems anyways. The other day on Twitter a lot of people complained about men who share too much in relationships, and like all things, there are cases that's true, where men expect affirmation from their partner without offering anything in return (ok, there's a lot of that), but I think about how many women and non-binary folk are coerced into horrible situations because they can't share anything without push back or punishment, they can't be vulnerable without being seen as weak or easy victims, or men kill themselves because they can't share anything or be seen as vulnerable or open up, or they hit their girlfriend and say, unfairly and predatorily, it's because they can't share themselves emotionally, and I wonder if the conversation we are having is still the wrong one. I've never seen my dad cry before. And I've never seen my mom have a panic attack. But I know they both have. They just work very, very hard to hide it. I guess I do too. In 3rd grade I was at a friends house with about 4 other people and we rough housed and I got punched in the stomach and while I wasn't bawling I put my head down and cried quietly for a few moments as the pain throbbed. My friends mom told my mom I was a tough man. That was the only time she had ever seen me cry.
I spent the most recent weekend looking at old videos from live converts I've been to over the last few years. A lot of videos exist. The first show I went to in years was on May 8, 2015, when I finally scared my social anxiety away enough to drive to Detroit and see Lady Lamb perform. I don't know what I feared more. A new setting. Not knowing where to go. Attending alone. Looking stupid. But I did it and then that started several years of going to a half dozen or so a year. There's a video of several of the songs she performed that night, with my gangly, scrawny frame showing up several times in a video the uploader gave the wrong song title to. The most recent show I went to was my favorite band in the world, Elvis Depressedly, seeing them for a third time, this time with a very good person, and I sang and we hugged and we smoked and I listened to music way too loud on the drive back from Detroit while they tried to sleep in the passenger seat. No videos from that concert exist.
Looking at old recordings reminded me of a song someone shared with me years ago, in 2007, when I was at college. I had never heard of the band before, and thought their name was silly. I listened to that song religiously for a month or two, sitting in my dorm room contemplating death, Youtube video on repeat, and I remember the video was just a simple recording looking out someone's kitchen window, as the rain fell outside, their tiny yard framed by a white picket fence that had seen better days. And then I never listened to them again, and they faded away from my memory, until a car ride weeks ago involving someone who had seen them live brought them up, and I tried to remember what it was that song was that I was trying to explain, but I couldn't get it right, and I couldn't recall a title or a lyric or anything, only that fence and the rain. And then a week or two ago when looking for easy guitar songs to play I came across the title, and I knew right then it was that song, it was the one I tried to remember, and every time I try to play it I fumble a chord and miss a fret and I threw my pick at the wall in frustration on Monday night and I haven't touched my guitar in the couple days since.
I stayed up earlier this week one night and talked into my phone for over an hour and a half until it was past 1:30 AM. I talked about everything and nothing, about things that were bothering me and had bothered me and then I listened to it tonight in and out of the sleep I had put off for days and none of it made any goddamn sense, as I expected, but I suppose it was good to say things nobody has ever heard and probably never will. At a young age, for instance, I decided that self-love seemed really fucking weird. Why would you love yourself? You're supposed to love other people. Like a family member. Or a spouse. Not yourself. Who would do that? Certainly not me. Have you hung out with me? Have you seen me? Would you love this? I went outside after listening and smoked several cigarettes which I had been doing again for the first time in awhile. I used to joke that it was very easy for me to quit drugs like it was very easy for me to quit anything I ever tried or felt attached to, like the guitar, but maybe I spoke too soon. I didn't practice tonight.
That moment I realized I would never love myself was around 3rd or 4th grade, and I think by 5th grade I knew I was sad but that it didn't matter and would never get better. One night in bed I cried aloud for a long time and my sister heard me and walked down the hall and got my mom from the living room and my parents paused the movie they were watching while my mom escorted my sister back to her room and then came into mine, and she asked me why I was crying, and I said it was because there were so many fun and amazing moments that had happened in my life that were over, and I would never have again, and one day when I was old would forget. She didn't say anything. Maybe she didn't know what to say. After all the audio had played of me describing that memory I went in my phone and deleted a bunch of old pictures where I looked happy and was enjoying myself. They didn't exist anywhere else. Resignation to the constant mood and melancholy and sadness comes after a whole fucking lifetime of this, I suppose, it's been two decades now of tears and 15 years of battling suicide so maybe it's my identity. It's 20 years later from that night crying in bed and I'm still living in the past like my 5th grade old self did in a room whose only defining features were a door that wouldn't shut, a window that never stopped creaking, and a closet my dad used instead of me because my parent's bedroom didn't have the space.
I'm not sure where I stand now. For 8+ years I couldn't name a single person here on a first name basis, outside of family or co-workers, I had nobody, and knew nobody, and just sort of existed without human connection or outside of a constantly tired, fatigued, depressed state in my room, rusted scissors tucked away for me to reach for when I wanted to hurt myself, replaced with a razorblade, replaced with benzos and liquor. And then I finally stopped it all and put myself out there, and I met some people, and they were good, and some were temporary but some were not so temporary until they were and I have good memories. And some were in Grand Rapids - well most - but it worked. Until it didn't. Because in January they all left, literally, to far corners, and that was that, and now my small social circle has been shotgunned again, and eventually the memories will hurt. Maybe that's the world's way of saying I should leave this place, what with so few goodbyes to say. They did what I know I should have done a long time ago. I guess that makes me the last remaining fool. I like to pretend they're all happier now. It makes me think I could be the same.
There’s a song that says “The only thing permanent about true love is the pain you feel when it goes.” Maybe my perspective is skewed because I've never experienced loss in that way, but if everything else is impermanent, good and bad, then maybe our attachments to comfort and anxiety and fear shouldn't be so transfixed. Maybe things shouldn't matter as much. But then you read something terrible happening and you convince yourself your defense is good and necessary. Or maybe that’s all over thinking it. I still don’t know if the song is correct. Maybe I never will. Maybe I make too much of my childhood anxiety. Maybe I don’t make enough.
I suppose if you can move on mentally you can find a way to move on physically, too. I wasn't supposed to be here, in this town, forever, but then again millennials move less than any previous generation before them. So I guess I haven't done either of those. Maybe that’s the only permanent thing. The idea of knowing what we should do and not doing it. Maybe that was the point of the New York/Brooklyn short story. Everybody knew what they wanted, what they needed, but they didn't know how to get it or how to tell anyone. Or if they did, they made the decision not to, because the conflict that it would create was insurmountable, even though crying into your soup every other night seems way more insurmountable than telling your dad you don't like his behavior or your sister she needs professional help or the hot guy smoking at the party that you want to kiss him. Maybe you don't need an MFA to realize that. But the main character and the smoking guy did end up kissing, and then they broke up several months later, and the main character ended up remembering him while eating at some food truck, because of course - so again, maybe there's no point.
My mother asked me not too long ago if I was ever going to move to a big city like I have always said I wanted to. I told her the same thing I told her when I was 20, and 22, and 24, and 26, and 28. I guess you could be a cynic and convince yourself that the joy of someplace foreign is temporary too. Even the quaint new coffee shops or restaurants or bars or neighborhoods become scenery eventually. Maybe satisfaction is not knowing how to be satisfied and never having to worry about not achieving it. Maybe the Amish are right. Maybe the Buddhists are. Maybe the hedonists are. Maybe nobody is.
She asked me next when I wanted to celebrate my birthday with the family, and I said I didn't want to, and she got upset, and I said we can do it on a different date, a different weekend, and she said she would just start celebrating her birthday whenever she wanted then, and in that moment I hated everything, and told her it's my birthday to do what I want with, and her input doesn't matter. She said fine but she didn't like it. I think her feelings were hurt.
She doesn't know but when the day gets closer I will simply tell her I don't want to celebrate with family at all, to put on a fake smile in front of my parents and sister and act like turning one year away from a 30th b-day in which I promised I would kill myself since I was 18 is really swell. That for years I spent birthdays dreading further existence, fighting the urge to do something more drastic than drawing blood and stumbling into bed dizzy and weak, dwelling on nothing but regrets and missed opportunities and experiences and personal failings and my isolation. And that I couldn't imagine turning 30 so strongly that it made me constantly see it as my final day on earth. The first person I ever had a relationship with, the Snapchat user from 2017 who makes tie dye art told me she absolutely wouldn't let me do that when I originally confessed it to her, as she ran her hands gently along the bevy of hypertrophic scars on my arms, us lying in my bed naked on a cool late May day, fan overhead gently spinning, perfume smell on my pillow for the rest of the weekend. She said she wouldn't let me because she liked me way too much. I never actually told her when the date was. She never asked. What happened next I explained in my previous post. That was the last day we ever really talked.
An album from a band I really like comes out the day before I officially turn 29, and it'd be very easy to just take a dozen or two dozen Xanax and pass out all weekend and see what happens when I wake up Monday. I wrote up a draft of a text to an acquaintance who is not really a friend so maybe it'd have been easier, asking them if I gave them my car keys if they could hold them for that weekend, and not give them to me until Monday no matter what, but I deleted it and didn't want to explain that it's all because it'd be very easy to drive back to the parking garage that I went to in 2008 and climb on that wall on the top floor again and slide off, and this time I could listen to music while it happened since I have a phone that can play it, or a car audio system that can as well, and it would be fitting, almost exactly a decade later, to finally finish what I started, like I went back to kratom, or cigarettes. Maybe I shouldn't have taken my dozens and dozens of bottles of Effexor, Zyprexa, Lexapro, the ones that had sat on my desk for months, and thrown them away. But they made me so tired I'd rather live with whatever comes without them.
I fully expect to be all better when my birthday is over and look at this and laugh and tell anyone who cares enough to be worried that it's ok, I've been here before, and I can climb out, and the fact that I haven't self harmed yet or gotten black out drunk means I can handle things a bit better than before. I texted someone today and mentioned I had a lot on my mind and they asked if there was anything they could do to help, because they are a nicer person than I will ever be, but I said I'd be better when we hang out next, or maybe it'll be when my birthday passes, or when Spring finally arrives, or when I go on a trip overseas with my travel friend, or card games with others at the boba tea place, between the five of those at least one will happen, at least one will work, and I honest to God believe that, I think, maybe. Or maybe none will happen, and winter will be perpetual, and time will stop, and I will be so isolated I never see anyone again. My closest friend told me she always gets bummed when I get in touch with her more throughout the day, because it means I am sad, and after almost a decade of friendship she wishes I didn't have to deal with this. That when I go through stretches when I don't talk to her she is sad that we're not talking but knows it's because I am busy on weekends out living. Time heals all wounds except the ones that kill us, and I suppose there are too many good things and weekends I could still see if I really wanted to, rather than give up now, because 2017 did have them and I guess so did 2016 and 2015 even and there's nothing to say 2018 can't either. I don't know whose sake this paragraph is for.
I made one more evening drive downtown since the snow melted due to an unseasonably warm week of weather. There were people walking about all over. I saw three people in shorts, all white people who looked liked the kind of person I was in high school, all walking with different people, none of whom were in shorts, and I laughed, but then I remembered I once made 5 dollars sticking about 30 cinnamon Listerine pocket strips in my mouth at once, so I guess we had more in common than I liked to think; that I was in my car driving aimlessly to stem off feeling cold inside and they were using verbal communication to stem off having cold thighs. After a few right turns, I decelerated and looked out my passenger side window, where the metered parking lot and the old brick building stood. The graffiti had been covered up. Heaven was gone. In heaven's place sat a billboard, advertising cheap flights to NYC, with a picture of some young couple standing in front of some sheik apartment that I knew all at once was Brooklyn. I guess I know where it went.
No comments:
Post a Comment