Out Loud

One day, you might tire of saving my life.  But you have not yet.  And I know I thank you every time, and I apologize for putting it all on you.  But seriously, I’ve been doing this to you since 2004, since things got rough.  What if we hadn’t had those summers, those winter breaks, where we smoked cigarettes in Simsbury late at night?  What then?  Shall I say it?  That those nights, of nicotine and swingsets, and flashlights and my mediocre poetry, and my envy at your talent, and your stories of your college life are one of those things that I file away?  One of those things that when I try to explain how much they mean to me to someone else, I reveal myself as strange?

I know you know those nights; we’ve both written about them, you to me and me to you.  Blood from stone – that was the title of a piece you wrote to me.  The opening line of one of my poems to you was about cigarettes and celestial motion, and also, I think, about nausea.

The cops would come by, and ask us if we were there of our own volition.  It did not occur to me until later why they asked that question.  I think it was the summer before I went to France, that place where things went wrong for me, that we first told one another that we loved each other.  Friends, of course, but love, nonetheless.

We were there of our own volition, reading on a playground, or looking at the stars.  How did we choose the playground?  How did it become our place to share?  You read my work and I read yours.  Your voice calling a friend of mine Quijote.  Mine talking about Rhode Island or Japan.

I went to Paris in August, after that summer of playground readings and light pollution from Hartford that turned a cloudy sky pink.  In the spring, I would calculate the time of day and call you.  Mostly, from a phone booth across the street from my apartment.  Mostly, to tell you that I was in a bad spot.  That I had cut myself.  That my lover here had said some terrible things.  That I almost tossed myself out my apartment window.

A letter you sent to me that year came in an envelope upon which you drew smoking gnomes.  For a while, we wrote to one another.  The first thing I ever mailed to you was a postcard from Barcelona, this in 2002, this before you would learn the depths of my grief that I would, for a time, only share with you.

Another what if:  what if I had never proposed coffee after we got off work at 9?  What if we hadn’t talked about Murakami and Borges until 1 am that morning?  Would we have found ourselves staring skyward later that summer, talking about my impending year in the Francophone world?  Would things be different if you yourself were not a writer, too?

I sent you an older version of my manuscript from Boston.  You were in Japan, and told me you were hungry for something in English.  I believe you when you say that you read it all at once.  And I can’t tell you how much that makes me love you.  You said:  You’ve created something very dark here.

The fall that I ended things with that lover, the one from France, the one who was the source of that manic misery, the woman who loved me with such ferocity that it was both sacred and terrible, you were the counsel that I needed.  I spoke to you from the screened-in porch of my senior housing where my friends and I would drink, and you told me:  You are going to feel guilty about this for a while.

That was in 2004.  And now, here, two weeks ago, I sent you a piece, written about a recent weekend in which I sat stunned on my couch, staring at my kitchen knives, scared to shit that I was going to pull a “lights out,” and just unseam myself like a goddamned fish.  I wanted to make a mess of things.

You were one of the only people I could tell.  So I did.  And you came out of the ether of your writerly world, that world where I dream of going.  You said things that only you would say.  Such as:

I care about you, both as an artist in the world, but especially as my nomad-hearted friend.

You sent me two books, which I have just received after a weekend in Chicago, a city which you were going to visit while I was a graduate student.  But there was a fucken blizzard that weekend, so we were left to imagining the weekend we would have spent together, the wine we would have drunk, the pieces we would have read.

So with one exception, it’s been us carving out a refuge in suburbia on trips home, over coffee and printed sheets, that we read or share or write upon.  Sometimes, Starbucks in my town.  Sometimes, midnight at the playground, the cops telling us that they won’t be back, so have a good night.  Sometimes, pictures together (me wearing your pink gloves once), sometimes book recommendations, sometimes, I am well.

Always:  it is me coming to find you at your parents’ red house.  You on the passenger side.  You, that tiny rock that I sometimes know as my only ground.

(To J.S.)