Danny

I take naps in the afternoon. I quit drinking, unsuccessfully. I write. I quit drinking, successfully. I look at Tumblr. I think about new things to write. I think about how I should be writing more. I don't sleep at night. I take sleeping pills and I feel hung over the next morning. I stop taking sleeping pills. I have a lot of meetings.

I go over things in my head. I wonder where I went wrong. I worry about you. I write you an email that's too long and I say I know you'll never read it. I am still disappointed when you don't write me back. That makes me worry about me.

I have conversations with you in my head all the time. I try to stop, I can't. I go for dinner with friends. I don't talk about you anymore because nothing I say makes you feel farther away. I still cry but not as often. I'm pretty skinny again. I cut my hair. I am steady wondering about you, remember that?

I give your books away to my best friend and she takes them to Scotland. "Please. Take them. I don't want them." She leaves your bookmark on my dining room table. I don't have the heart to throw it out. I make plans for the future. I picture myself in a new life. In that new life, when this is just a memory, I don't think of you that much.

I want to say I am better for loving you, but I'm not yet. I'm just different. 

I know that even if everything else in your life was corrupted, you loved me with more hope than you knew existed inside you.

As someone who loved you the same, I'm sorry it turned out like this. 

“It’s hard to move forward when you don’t know what way you’re facing.” 

...

Writing came to me like a gift, like something I didn’t deserve. It was like shaking hands with the love of your life on a hot summer night, on a street corner in Montreal, the day after you were supposed to be gone already. He wore a blue shirt and I wore a pink dress.

Like him, writing hit me like a freight train. Like him, writing found me when I wasn’t looking for it but needed it most.

In the just over the year I had with the man I met on a street corner, the so far and maybe ultimate love of my life, there was a lot of rap music. There was dancing, talking, reading, watching, travelling, a voice I felt like I’d always known, his hand on the small of my back and sleeping well for the first time in my life. There was a lot of happy. 

There was not a lot of writing.

“Can you imagine if we’d never met?” I asked him.

“I don’t like to think about that,” he said.

We broke up a month ago. Things I didn’t like to think about are now the reality I live in. Here I am, waking up every night at 4 am, jolted by an alarm I didn’t want to set. I feel like everyone else lives on Planet Earth. I live Planet How The Fuck Did This Happen? Planet Make This Go Away.

But mostly, I live on Planet He’s Gone. 

Lying awake, I have come closest to the understanding that God, or whoever, doesn’t fuck around. He gives but He also takes and doesn’t need to give anything back. I have been forced to accept that time and loss are enemies and best friends. I need time to move past this, but the more time that passes the more what I’ve lost is really gone. 

Last night my friend Molly looked at me in Café Diplomatico, an Italian joint on College Street that’s very popular and not very good. “I wrote an article that comes out tonight,” she said. “It’s called Don’t Cheat On Your Loneliness. I saw that written in a bathroom stall. Isn’t that perfect?”

Last night, in a taxi I didn’t need to take, I thought, “Fuck. All I do lately is cheat on my loneliness.” And why shouldn’t I? How do I be true to something I hate so much?

“Write, I guess,” I heard a small voice say. But I don’t want to write. I want this to be over.

Last night, at 4 am, awake again, I listened to that small voice because it’s really hard to ignore when my house is so quiet.

“Write,” she said. 

She told me that through writing, one day, things will change. That one day, everything I write won’t be for or about him. With fingers pressed up against that keyboard, the lingering sense of him will have faded. That by writing; not by texting other men, not by seeing psychics, not by visiting rock stars in North Carolina, I will have not cheated on my loneliness.

I fell asleep.

I woke up again hours later. Today is the first day since we’ve broken up that I’ve sat back at this computer.

Of all the things that feel true lately, and there are many, the following remain the most shining and resolute. I need to be faithful to this heartbreak. Only by stretching myself in the direction of loneliness will I come back again.  By writing alone, listening to a rap song he would fucking love, I will see what happened between he and I not as a tragedy but as my becoming. One day, I won’t miss him like this. One day, I will hope everyone gets to fall in love like we did.  One day, I will understand why this happened.

Until then, I’ll write. 

That last time I visited him. The last time we made love. The last time I felt that the happiness we had was not destined to self-destruct.

Go over it, over, over. No, again. Again. Again.

One more time it's going to make sense. 

In that moment, I heard my heart break, like a flower stem snapping, a clean, small sound.

I wish I could go back to believing, knowing beyond any doubt, that this dangerous and fragile thing between us could have lasted forever. That it wasn't dangerous. That it wasn't fragile.

That it was good and mine forever.

"It produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth and empathy toward others, and distortions in sensory and time perception."

Isn't that what falling in love feels like, too?

...

When I was with him I wrote all the time. Now, I stare at this screen and I don't know what to say.

...

I dreamt of my grandfather last night in his most lifeless state. We sat at a holiday table and his face was swollen. I met my mom in the kitchen. 

"We have to take him to the hospital. What's wrong with his face?"

Later, in waking life, I visited my grandmother with him.

"Larry, kiss me." Then, she said, "Come near to me, Larry." Finally, "Do you think I'm dying, Larry?"

That afternoon, in the cold wintry light I watched as he said, "You're doing fine, little girl."

Don't Think About It Too Much

Sex shapes the body, juice shapes the mind.

I curse myself because I can’t sleep, just when I’m with him. The temperature has changed, the cold snap moves between us, hanging gauzy in the air.

“I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” he said.

“Me, too.”

Rap music played.

He kisses me and I nod out and when I wake up all I want is more.

Take A Fall For Me

And the saddest part is that the overriding part of him will like being alone. While he's relieved, I'll spend months reminding myself it's over.

Black Sheep

It was the Halloween before I left home.

Matt and I were dressed up to go out to a party in the west end held by a couple of my cool friends in a cool band. I was dressed as Liza Minelli in Cabaret, too dressed up, more dressed up than anyone else was going to be. Cabaret was my favourite movie. When I was bored, I’d imagine myself as Sally, skinny eyebrows and bowler hats.  That night, I spent an hour pinning all my hair under a short black wig. I didn’t stop until all my blonde was hidden. At that point in my life, I took a special pride in doing what I’d set out to.

An hour after I arrived, five minutes before we left, Matt looked at me. 

“Oh, you cut your hair, eh?”

There was a drawn out pause.

“It looks good,” he said.

“This is a wig.”

“Is it?” His face didn’t move. There was no inflection in his voice. 

“Yes,” I said.

Do you really think I cut my hair? Why would I do that? I’ve always loved my hair, I wanted to say. 

Though, in retrospect, this was the indicator that something was really wrong, this moment didn’t scare me. There was only one thing that scared me about Matt. The one thing that made us truly different; he did not care if he lived or died. 

The speed doctors had prescribed him from when he was seven years old, for his ADHD, made him never hungry and never tired. He never seemed to need anything that kept normal people alive. Instead, his death instincts grew stronger. He never slept because his heartbeat kept him awake. He went a week without showering and brushing his hair or his teeth. Dirty laundry was always all over his room no matter how much I tried to do the wash. 

When the Adderol was good, when it was working for him, he’d write rap songs for seventeen hours a day, always pacing back and forth, his voice echoing through our house. 

A.D.H.D was a diagnosis my father never accepted, “Please. It’s more like I.D.G.A.F.”

At this point, I would laugh when my father said this and agree. “Yeah. Matt has I Don’t Give A Fuck.”

That Halloween, Matt was the highest I’d ever seen him. I had started reading about psychotic episodes. I was always a touch psychic with my brother. We were more twins than siblings; I felt what was happening to him as strongly as I felt what was happening to me. Had he broken his leg, my leg would’ve hurt, too.

“You know why I do drugs?” Matt asked that night.

“No. I don’t want to.” 

“It’s the only time the visions stop.” And then he laughed. “That’s the opposite of most people.”

By this point, I had tried multiple interventions with Matt. So had my mother, and in his own way, by screaming and hissing, so had my father. I knew Matt wasn’t going to stop doing drugs. 

“You can tell Mom I’m getting better if you want.” He and I were sitting in the bathroom of the house party. I was on the counter, my feet kicked up against the tub, counting the runs in my black tights.

Matt was hunched over that counter, procuring cocaine. 

“You are getting a little better,” I lied.

When you love a drug addict, you don’t enable them, but, when you really love a drug addict, you can't leave.

“Why did Dad talk to you about his visions and not me? They didn’t happen to you. They happened to me.”

Are you sure? I wondered.

“He’s fucked up,” I said.

“You’re his favourite.”

I wanted to take off my wig. It was starting to itch.

Three weeks later, we admitted Matt. He was diagnosed bipolar. My mother was left was three questions. Why was he a drug addict? Had he done the damage himself, with the drugs? Or was he born sick?

My father and I knew the answer to the first one. Only, we had one more. Had we driven him crazy by telling him what he saw wasn’t real?