Quick PSA: After FIVE ENTIRE YEARS I have decided to edit and finish what I started here. Partially to blame is my own completionist's anxiety at leaving the dern thing undone, and my perfectionist's anxiety at having published glaring inaccuracies/purple prose/frankly offensive exploitation of trauma; but mostly you should thank some persistent reviewers (looking at you, keloly) who refused to let me bury the story and sneak away quietly.

Unfortunately, I can't fix everything that's wrong with this fic and still have it be the same fic. So be warned that there is a lot of melodramatic purple prose (tbf it's an important part of the narrator's characterization) and some overwrought, poorly-handled instances of trauma-as-plot-point. That's basically the entire story. Maybe you relate to that kind of untempered, unself-conscious expression of pain and the lack of tools to properly deal with it. I think that's why I wrote this fic, and why it resonates with some people. So I'm not changing too much, no matter how unrealistic/irresponsible some of it seems looking back.

Concept strongly inspired by SaveTheRave's Part Right, Half Wrong, a Third Crazy.

Title comes from the third stanza of Ginsberg's "Howl." I liked Ginsberg in high school. We've all been there.

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Matthew in Rockland

by Positively

Warnings for language, drug use, rape, prostitution, and general self-destruction. Because the story is narrated by a traumatized victim with poor coping mechanisms, these topics are not always treated responsibly.

Now

We sit silent in the unmoving car. Alfred's fiddling with the keys and staring at the dashboard like it'll tell him what he's supposed to say in this kind of situation. I glance at it, just to make sure. I could use a script myself.

"I'm not expecting you to say anything." Good, because otherwise he'd be sorely disappointed.

He worries at his lip, keeps staring sullenly at the dash instead of meeting my eyes. "I just...wish you'd tell me why you didn't ask for help sooner." I just...wish he'd shut his stupid hypocritical face. "And I think this would all go a lot smoother if you'd talk to me."

I look away from his profile and out the window. A cluster of pink azaleas blooms at the edge of the parking lot, not a cloud in the piercing blue sky above. It's a beautiful day to be free.

"I'm sorry," he chokes out finally, almost halfway sincerely, for what must be the fiftieth time in a week. Not really sure why he keeps saying it, because I've never responded. I try to imagine how on earth I could and come up with nothing.

Sometimes I agree with Alfred and everyone else left in my life—things would proceed more smoothly if I'd just say anyfuckingthing. But honest to god, nothing useful comes to mind. I can't summon the energy to go looking for whatever bullshit he wants to hear, either. Fiddling with the air vents seems like a better use of time.

"I'm sorry, I know you're dealing with a lot. I'm not trying to force you to say anything you're not ready to."

Man, these air vents are interesting.

Finally he seems to understand that I'm serious about the whole not-talking thing, and he starts the car with an expression of poorly-swallowed impatience. I watch the treatment center recede in the rearview mirror, expecting to feel at least a little relieved. But there's nothing but a vague sense of disappointment—the place itself has nothing to do with the pain I felt there. Through intimate experience I have learned that the problem is with me.

And everywhere I go, there I am.

Alfred isn't turning on the music even as we merge onto the highway, like he's planning on starting a conversation with me. Honestly, you'd think he would learn.

His apartment is surprisingly neat when we arrive, though I guess he knew I was coming and would've had time to clean. It's funny that he felt the need to. Who am I to judge, after all? A dried-out washed-up junkie former-hobo honestly does not give a fuck if your couch cushions are straight and your carpet vacuumed.

"So, uh, you'll be staying in here…"

I follow him down a narrow hallway to a little triangle of doorways. Two bedrooms and a bath. Great, we'll be sharing. The room I'll be trying and failing to sleep in has white carpet and light blue wallpaper and beige bedcovers. An east-facing window, so I'll get to see the sunrise every morning. How picturesque. There's also a writing desk and what appears to be a blank notebook. Somebody arranged the pen so it's at that strategic angle, you know the one, where it points to the notebook like it's about to jump up and start writing.

Thoughtful but ultimately pointless. All words have left me, even the written kind. Or maybe I left them. Maybe I am beyond words.

"Since I work the morning shift at a café down the street, I get up at the ass-crack of dawn every morning but Friday. The shift ends at noon. Usually I go out for lunch, I'm not much of a cook…"

He stands awkwardly in the doorway as I set down my suitcase. Most of my earthly possessions have been scattered across creation courtesy of seedy pawn shops, but my arms are wasted and everything is heavy.

"I didn't think you were planning on job-hunting, at least for a few…?"

He trails off, waiting for a response. Honestly, you'd think he would learn.

His expression is some mix of frustration and awe. Frustration because who likes talking to himself with another person in the room? And awe because…I don't know. Maybe he's sickly fascinated with how far I've fallen. How different I got. Everybody loves a mystery, and I'm perfect for it:

1) Why would a young, intelligent, promising student drop out of the Ivy League for a life on the streets?

2) How does someone go from shy pushover wingman to tweaked-out suicidal failure in the four years since you've spoken?

3) What makes your best friend grow quieter and quieter with every passing day?

4) And when he stops talking for good, what does he think about?

Yeah, everybody loves a mystery. It's the question marks that make people want more out of you. They ask and ask until you're all figured out, and then they move on.

But I don't answer anybody's questions anymore.

Dinner is actually pretty impressive: black bean and onion tofu burgers and crinkle-cut fries. He seems to think I'm still a vegetarian, which is sweet but naïve. At some point between the homelessness and the starving to death, you learn to get over any nobility you have or have ever thought you possessed.

It's still a sweet thought. I mean, I don't like onion, but I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm not saying anything at all.

Over dinner, Alfred launches his latest attack on my silence with a barrage of apologies. For the food, for the apartment his parents are paying for, for the neighbors' cigarette smell, for the last four years of my life. All sorts of things that are only marginally his fault.

He's not saying anything of substance—not apologizing for what he's actually sorry for.

He'll be beating around the sorry bush for hours unless I tell him to stop. But I won't give him the relief. See, what he needs is to feel better about what's happened, and the only person who can give that to him is me. If I say, "No, Alfred, it wasn't your fault," he'll take that as exoneration. Oh, he'll think, Well, Matthew doesn't blame me so I guess I can stop feeling bad. If I shout at him—How could you do that to me, you goddamned monster, I want you dead I hate you I hate you I hate—he'll feel bad about it for a while, then decide Well, I guess I got my punishment, so I can stop feeling bad.

So I'm not giving him the closure, the satisfaction. I'm not saying a goddamn word.

"But Matthew, you should have asked for help."

I did. I did I did I did I did. You utter bastard.

"I would have listened."

You didn't you didn't you—

"I'm your best friend."

If he keeps going like this, I swear to god I'll kill him.

Though homicide is looking more attractive with every passing minute, I sit and calmly pick at my fries. I don't need a mirror to know that my face is a perfect poker. I don't even communicate with expression anymore. Does he believe my face when it says I don't feel anything? If I do this long enough, will I?

Our high school yearbook sits on the coffee table in the living room. Distractingly.

Menacingly.

I'm not sure what to do about it. It's watching me, in that way you can sometimes feel a bad idea staring you down. Ridiculous, getting spooked by a book documenting a past that doesn't even exist anymore.

I must glance at it one too many times, because Alfred picks it up and starts paging through. He beckons me closer until I'm practically in his lap. I can see the hairs at his temple stir with my breath and it hurts like hell. "Dude, can you believe this was only four and a half years ago?" The pages flip by, Alfred pointing out people who are married, knocked up, working at Facebook, living at home still. Then, "Look, here's your senior picture."

I remember that day. We got to miss third block to stage formal portraits in the gym. The girls were all lined up in front of the bathrooms, doing their makeup and combing their hair. The photo company had us drape this fake formal wear over our regular school clothes, and in a portrait it's actually pretty convincing. I took a moment to feel jaded at the facade of it all, then covered up my t-shirt with the jacket and bowtie when it was my turn. The picture looks nothing like me, and in fact never looked like me at any point of my life. Who is this roundfaced kid with the sweet shy smile? Certainly not I.

These days my face is razor sharp and I don't think I've smiled in a while. Maybe I'll try it in front of the mirror, to see if it's confident or timid or lost-looking or just plain broken.

Alfred continues to flip through, pointing out himself in the football team's pictures, and mine in the Debate Team, Poetry Club, and the Literary Magazine. Then we reach the Senior Superlatives. Alfred was voted "Friendliest."

I was voted "Most Likely to Succeed."

Apparently the irony doesn't hit him, because he just goes on and on about what a great picture it is and how happy I look while I'm trying to decide whether I should laugh or cry or punch him in the face.

"Hey, your parents threw all your stuff out, didn't they?"

His insensitivity renders me speechless all over again. What a dick.

"When you move out, you can take this with you." He offers me the book like it's a gift and not a tragedy. I take it from him and hide it under the mattress when he's at work the next day.

When you move out. I hadn't really thought that far ahead, to be honest. I've been taking this a day at a time. But now that I think about it, of course I can't live here forever, mooching off the generosity of Alfred's parents in perpetuity. Leaving is always the easy part for me, though. I leave people and places as often as some people get a haircut.

But where can I go but back on the street? I have a total of twenty-five dollars in my bank account, and if my parents wouldn't even come visit me in the hospital after…well, there's no way they'll let me go back and live with them. Not that I'd really want to.

Maybe I can go become a hermit in the mountain, with nothing to do all day but scrape a living and think. Think too much, think big enough, and you'll eventually shrink to nothing. That's what I'm looking for.

A thought so big it shrinks me down to nothing.

I sleep a lot these days. Like, a really ridiculous amount. Every day I have to fight my way through heavy velvet curtains in my brain just to do things like brush my teeth and put food in my mouth. My brain trudges along at half-speed through the molasses of recovery. Some sick part of me can't stop thinking about how much more energy I'd have if I was still doing speed.

Alfred talks sometimes. I can't always listen. Sometimes the buzzing in my brain is too much, and I have to stumble into my beige bed and close my eyes. If I can't sleep, I stare at the wallpaper—it has little ships, I notice upon closer inspection—and imagine being on a boat, just me, all alone and lost in the sea of Alfred's wallpaper.

During his work shift, I sleep. If I wake up early enough, I'll venture out of the apartment and observe the people on our hall:

-the Vargas brothers, who own the coffee shop where Alfred works and gave him his only pair of real leather shoes;

-Elizaveta, a doctor who once had the misfortune of meeting me in the ER;

-a quiet old man whose name I haven't yet learned, who paces the hall at night in a slow shuffle, and who refuses to use the perfectly operational elevator;

-Heracles, the next-door neighbor who smuggles stray cats into his room.

The cats yowl some nights. Oh yes, little kitties, I know how you feel.

I start walking down the street to the coffee house if I wake up before noon. I'll stand in front of the glass windows and stare Alfred down, until he gets a moment and looks up and sees me. He always waves, even though it makes him look like a dumbfuck. He's always been so good at that: playing the charming idiot. The customers love him.

At the end of his shift he comes out the back door and takes me to lunch. Usually McDonald's, which is disgusting but whatever. He gets me the veggie wrap. I don't tell him what kind of drink, so he guesses Coke. It's funny for a few reasons that I don't mention.

I have nightmares about Ivan sometimes.

I don't like to think about it.

"Do you need anything from the grocery store?"

Honestly. Think. Learn.

"Sorry, uh…"

He is standing awkwardly in the doorway. His posture reeks of abashedly unwanted guest, but I think he's got our positions reversed. Embarrassed for him, I pretend to be somewhere else.

"You know, Matthew, this is kinda bullshit. Like, I understand if you're pissed at me and everything, but can't you even talk to help yourself? Do you, like, need shampoo or toothpaste or a razor—"

Nope. Still not allowed razors.

"—or Cheetos or syrup or anything?"

I stare resolutely at the sailboat wallpaper, back turned towards him. Even he'll catch the hint eventually. Because, see, I don't refuse to talk just for the shits and giggles, you know?

I honestly have nothing to say for myself.

"Matthew…"

A sailor went to sea-sea-sea

To see what he could see-see-see

But all that he could see-see-see

"Come on, Matthew."

Was his dumbass former best friend who can't take a hint

He makes a sound of disgust and stomps down the hall to the front door, stomp stomp stomp with those Baby-Killer leather shoes and Big Baby attitude, and slams his way out of the apartment. I take this opportunity to raid the fridge and throw out all the onions.

It's been at least three months since I've spoken a word.

Maybe longer, but I don't really remember what I said or didn't say on that last long drug binge in the city. Maybe I spoke aloud to the dealers, or maybe I just used hand signs. A quick gesture—a smooth wrenching motion for crank, or the sign language for H; a couple of fingers for two grams, which used to last me two weeks. Got to the point where I'd do it continuously, shooting more up as soon as I came down from a high, then later all of it in one plunger. I kept buying more and more. Until I ran out of money.

Good times.

That was all on me. Though my current benefactor played his own role in my descent to rock bottom, I don't really blame him for all that much. I'm the degenerate, right? I don't hate him. I just don't want anything to do with him. Or anyone, really.

I am so bone tired of everything.

What does Alfred think he's doing, anyway? With me, I mean.

Indebtedness is a funny thing, imprecise and arbitrary. For some reason, Alfred thinks he's done something wrong, and this is his bid to fix it. Or he's got this idea about ownership, that the things of his past belong to him, and he's got the right—or the responsibility—to keep them exactly as they were. I can't decide if I resent that attitude, or if I should just be thankful that someone's looking out for me. However selfish and fucked up his reasons.

And anyway, I expect this will just be another exercise in futility on his part. I'm a fuck-up and a drifter. This is an impermanent situation, our cohabitation. I'll stick around until I've saved enough to move, maybe back to the east coast, maybe down south this time. Or maybe try to track down my half-brother in France. Bet he's addicted to even more drugs than I was. Am. I don't even know, I can't tell if the withdrawal is over yet or I'm just going to be exhausted and pissy for the rest of my life.

Anyway. I'd leave right now, but Alfred is kindhearted and innocent, and I don't want to hurt him. He should stay a wide-eyed child for the rest of his life if possible. I can't leave him just yet—I don't want to break his optimism.

There's no love in destruction. Some people act otherwise, but I for one wouldn't enjoy seeing him lose hope. It's precious to me.

More than anything else, we love what we've lost.

Alfred reminds me of when I was young. The same old set to his shoulders, constant-popping bubblegum flavor, football teams. It's all too familiar. And I'm so different. God, it hurts. But I watch and remember, fascinated.

Then

"Alfred, you need to spend less time watching football and more time studying if you want to pass Calculus."

He was sitting on the porch swing with both feet planted on the wooden planks, legs set far apart in that classic boysprawl that had never really suited me. Everything was warm and still, humid in a way that suggested summer even though it was only April. "But I don't want to," he whined. "I can graduate without that extra math credit, you know."

"That isn't the point."

"Ha! The point is that there isn't a point."

The sun had gone down but its light lingered beyond the horizon, casting the backyard in eerie sepia tones. Alfred's eyes glowed weird shades of blue and his hair changed colors by the minute. Gold, auburn, fire. My parents lived on the lake and animal sounds surrounded us; an army of cicadas chirp-buzzed in the background.

"C'mere, Matthew," he said, beckoning. This was going to be a serious conversation: normally, it was Matt or Mattie or Dude or Man or Shakes. He broke out Matthew for the big stuff.

I sat down beside him, nearly in his lap by necessity—he didn't even close his legs to make room for another person on the swing—and prepared for the pseudo-philosophical bullshit he'd taken a liking to now that we were about to Move On.

"Do you ever get the feeling that, like…we're growing up too fast?"

"A thousand years ago we'd be having a mid-life crisis right now."

It was too dark now to see his expression, but I could hear his little scoff of frustration. "No, it's like, we're a lot more sheltered than they were. Adults are so focused on, like, not burdening us with adult things, that they've forgotten: kids grow up because people make them. Nobody's made us grow up, so we haven't yet. We'll kind of get forced into it when we go off to college, you know?"

"Then…what you're actually saying is we grow up too slow."

"No man, we grow up too—abruptly. That's what I was looking for. Like, adults don't let us worry about shit, because we're just fuckin' teenagers, until we get all the way away from them and we have to worry about shit. And leaving them—it used to be a gradual process, but now we just—get—ripped away."

"It doesn't have to be like that. You can stay in touch with people. I plan to."

"Aw, even with me? You'll talk to me even after you start getting taught by former prime ministers and Nobel Prize winners?"

"All the intellectual douchebags in the world couldn't keep me from talking to you, Alfred." His grin was practically audible as he ruffled my hair and slung an arm around me. He always did love my rare moments of vulgarity. "And anyway, I was more concerned about you not staying in touch with me."

"What, at State? Naw, dude, everyone we know is going there. Boooring. I'll be calling you up every weekend, desperate for some interesting information."

"You're always telling me that I'm a fount of uninteresting information."

"I think even Hemingway will be interesting to me after a month at State. But seriously, we're staying in touch."

I was very insecure in our friendship, though I usually hid it well. Alfred had this tendency to make you feel like the most important person in the world when he was paying attention to you. He had that kind of personality: magnetic and consuming. But he also had this thing where he didn't pay attention to you for very long. This capricious, flighty attention thing. And it hurt like hell to be his best friend, because he treated everybody like the most important person in the world at some point in their acquaintance. Was I even his best friend, or did he treat me like that once, like he did everyone else, and then never managed to get rid of me? I still wonder.

Maybe my obsession with the painfully unequal nature of our friendship was all part of the masochism that would eventually lead me down the path I took. The one where everything I want is killing me, and that's half the reason I want it.

But that comes later.

Anyway, to this day I'm not entirely certain what made me respond so childishly to his words "we're staying in touch." I guess it was that insecurity. Maybe it was premonition.

But anyway, whatever the reason, I asked it:

"Do you promise?"

"I promise." He was all serious again, sincere and intense and I believed him.

I promise, he'd said.

Well.

You can imagine how that turned out.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Soon, he started insisting we take a walk around the lake. When I explained to him that we were in the private property sector and that would be trespassing, he demanded midnight canoeing.

The stars were so pretty. We shared my parents' tiny canoe and I couldn't tell whose limbs were whose but it didn't matter. At that point in my life, I had this idea of myself as a rational: jaded, wised-up, pessimistic but not to the point of melodrama. I'd done the whole Tortured Artist thing early on, and now I was going for the classier Detached Intellectual. But I remember letting go that night, just letting myself be a fucking teenager, when everything is so essential and significant and noteworthy and beautiful. It felt like liberation, being able to care again. The shackles of realism had popped off. I rubbed my wrists and felt so, so free.

It sounds stupid, now that I'm actually jaded and wised-up and not just playing at it. But that night I looked up at the stars and thought about infinity and my place in it, and I said some embarrassingly clichéd things about cosmic insignificance to Alfred, but he was just as young and pretentious as me and said, "Yeah," and thought everything was deep and meaningful. And I guess if we thought it meant something, it did.

But meaning is transient, and that night means something different to me now. I want to go back to when the openness of the sky meant opportunity. When it hinted at something besides a wider world to swallow you up.