"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don't try to hold him, that he can't escape from."
-Gail Hightower, A Light in August.
Faulkner.
…
I've spent many nights up in the kitchen, washing the same blue and green triangle plate over and over, feeling the indents from chipping over the years. Many mornings on my knees in the garden before the frost took over, and days in my room staring at the window wondering why.
Why was the timing so horrifyingly perfect? Why, in that split second of channel surfing, did I have to come face-to-face with my nightmare mistakes on a silver screen with all my friends present so they could see it too? Was it tantamount to God that at this point he'd divide my summer into two halves, the latter being one where my realities shifted and suddenly I was no longer a Person with Problems who was at least on the right path but someone whose whole mental state eclipsed into the dark green grasp of an emotional venus fly trap?
I'll never have the answers to these. I shouldn't bother asking.
I found it online about four months later, after all of this was behind me (but not really) and watched the clip by myself. They added a rapidly spinning tire swing as the camera widened out from the tree we crashed into.
…
Though I could not see his face, I could imagine his face when I ripped myself away from Craig. Based on all the faces I've seen him make, I can make a mental collage of furrowed eyebrows, wet and wide eyes, expanded nostrils, and his mouth either frowning or bitten down on. But they all convey the same things: hurt. Concern.
I should have been responsible and ended things after that. Should have told him, truly, not to bother with me. Please find someone normal to date. I feel selfish for wanting to cling to him more. I could have done the kind thing and let him.
gave him
talked to him
give him a choice
But if the roles were reversed, I would have done the same as him and stayed. Because I loved him so much, I would have stayed.
But there's only so much a person can give before they are spent - burned up - turned up by their roots.
After seeing the crash again, I was there once more. Struggling to breathe, bleeding to death. How could he know if he were to put his arms around me I'd once more feel crushed, wanting and waiting to die? I wanted to believe him when he said he didn't blame me. I asked him to forgive me for pushing him away. He said there was nothing to forgive. That it wasn't even a big deal. I let him touch me plenty.
I was chipping away at him without meaning to.
…
We were in Wendy and Stan's bathroom for an hour. I spent the first five minutes upchucking that night's sushi (at least the eel returned to the ocean in some form). I sat on the toilet, hand over my mouth, tasting my sickness over and over. Craig perched on the side of the tub. I stared at his knees.
I didn't want to move. He didn't make me. He kept repeating that I would be OKAY. For several minutes we were together in this tiny room meant for expelling waste and becoming clean, skirting on the edge of space, and if any any time we opened the door we'd look out into blackness.
Looking at Craig's bruised, bony knees, I wondered for the 500th time if, in Clyde's last moments, he thought I would die too. Would he have taken comfort in knowing that someone was going with him?
No. I remember his face. It haunts me all the time.
I've wondered if he had any sense that he was dying. If he knew we had opened Earth's door, our bodies about to land onto stars, but he would be the one to fall.
My mother played Billie Holiday for her mother as she drifted into death-sleep. All Clyde got was our intertwined heavy breathing. Oil spilling into grass. Static. Then nothing.
I'll never know what he thought or didn't think.
"I think I'm still 16." I was about to be sick again.
Hesitation. Craig shifted his legs so that one ankle was over the other. He was leaning over me. "You're not. You're 26. And 26-year-old Kyle is perfectly capable of…"
Fireworks went off outside. The whistling and bursting whittled me back down to reality. I am in my best friends' house in Boulder, in a bathroom with a digital clock and a checkerboard shower curtain, cat paws reaching under the door, and my friends - my family - all sitting out in the living room murmuring.
"I'm sorry," I finally whispered.
"You don't have to be sorry."
Maybe I don't need to be sorry, but I am. I don't need to say I'm sorry, but I do. I am full of sorrow. Verbalizing it is the only way I can let anyone know that I'm paying the mental tax for existing on this earth. I'm sorry I'm here.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked.
"A lot of things."
"Do you want to tell me any?"
"You don't want to hear it, trust me." My throat burned. I was so close to telling him that sometimes the DARK THOUGHTS come and I consider how instead of I could have died, I should have. Just to say it out loud, to leave my lips and watch it be stupid out in the air.
I couldn't. I held it in.
That night, I turned over and over, wanting to sleep yet not wanting nightmares. And when I slept, I dreamt of not only Clyde but my grandmother as well. The most vivid memories I have of her are when her memories were leaving. Cancer ate her brain like a snake puncturing into a struggling bird, feathers twitching and feet clenched. Slow and mortifying. We wrote in a composition notebook as much as she could tell us of family history and her childhood memories. For instance, she was born right after Americans liberated the camp my great-grandmother was in. A few more days and she may have died, secret pregnancy intact. My great-grandfather's body was never found. After giving birth, she immigrated to New York and remarried a retired sailor from Jersey, and raised my grandmother up in Newark. According to grandmother, her mother tried her hardest to leave the past in the past, to move on and give her children a normal life, but the nightmares were persistent and none of her friends or anyone in the extremely Catholic suburb could say anything to make it better.
Despite this, my grandmother insisted that she had a great childhood. There were lots of kids on her street and she played with them all the time. She loved her teachers. She loved math and science. She played softball in middle school, high school, and college. One summer, while working at a roadside ice cream stand, she met my grandfather who was on a road trip and asking directions to the nearest grocery store. Flustered, my grandma, who lived in the county her whole life, suddenly didn't know where anything was and sent him in a circle back to the ice cream stand. Instead of being upset, he thought it was cute. They married six months later.
I had one photo of my grandfather that I stole from the house. Savta stayed propped up in the living so her bedroom became an untouched time capsule: hats pinned with fake flowers hanging on the walls, a monstrous dark oak bed frame and vanity set she commissioned a carpenter for in the late 70s. I stole the photo from it's wedged place in the vanity mirror above a trio of Coty perfume bottles. It was his college graduation photo. He's not smiling, but the corners of his mouth are lifted and his eyelids are slightly drooped as if someone woke him up from an unfulfilling slumber. Knowing what I know now, he was probably dead inside from final exams. I used to hold this picture up to my face in the mirror. As years went by, my face morphed into his. It shocked me every time, much like how I get shocked now when I speak and hear my father's voice.
One afternoon, Ike, bored with his bucket of G.I. Joes and a creepy smiling telephone with a clown nose, walked up the stairs to an extra untouched bedroom and a storage room. I followed him, trying to be as quiet as possible. There was nothing in the bedroom except for a neatly made up twin bed and an empty wardrobe. We went across the hall to storage.
Boxes. Boxes of ancient cookbooks, legal documents, photos of people I didn't know who were smiling on sidewalks, dangling their feet off the wings of small planes, holding hands in front of an elephant at the zoo, blowing candles on a lopsided cake. More boxes of paintings and postcards, musty sweaters that looked like the thread would instantly unravel if I touched them.
Pink fluff clouded out of the insulation and around the wooden rafters. I looked over at Ike, who was holding a large colonial doll the size of himself. The thing had to be at least 50 years old. She was missing an eye and there were marker lines all over her face.
Ike, put that shit down, it's creepy.
I went to open another box. My mother's voice rang up through the ceiling to get downstairs now.
When we returned downstairs, my mother was sitting on the couch with a cup of tea and whisper-scolded us we can't be up there.
My grandmother piped up: we could hear your little feet upstairs. She only had strength now to hold half-filled sip cups for toddlers with both hands. The veins in her knuckles were thick and wormy, like tree roots.
…
I woke to the sound of rain.
The room was gray. My mouth still tasted acidic, and I was stiff as a cadaver. Craig slept on his back, one arm down and one arm flung up, knuckles up against his temple as if he'd just fainted. His mouth was open and head tilted back over the blue silk pillow. Kelso purred on his stomach.
"Treason," I muttered, but the cat only thudded her tail on the sheets.
I listened to the wall clock, ticking in sync with the rain. I scratched at Kelso's furry little orange head, feeling like a new person, as if everything I threw up the night before included my bones, my muscles and veins and brain until they turned inside out and made flesh over a new skeleton.
I wanted to go home.
I love Stan and Wendy but didn't want to sleep in their guest room anymore with disembodied plastic hands etched with tribal tattoos and an ungodly high stack of sketchbooks in each corner. Though my bed surrounded by bird bones and an underside doom of taxidermy animals isn't any less creepy, that's where I needed to be.
But the purring lulled me back to sleep, and I felt my hand go limp.
"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don't try to hold him, that he can't escape from."
-Gail Hightower, A Light in August.
Faulkner.
…
I've spent many nights up in the kitchen, washing the same blue and green triangle plate over and over, feeling the indents from chipping over the years. Many mornings on my knees in the garden before the frost took over, and days in my room staring at the window wondering why.
Why was the timing so horrifyingly perfect? Why, in that split second of channel surfing, did I have to come face-to-face with my nightmare mistakes on a silver screen with all my friends present so they could see it too? Was it tantamount to God that at this point he'd divide my summer into two halves, the latter being one where my realities shifted and suddenly I was no longer a Person with Problems who was at least on the right path but someone whose whole mental state eclipsed into the dark green grasp of an emotional venus fly trap?
I'll never have the answers to these. I shouldn't bother asking.
I found it online about four months later, after all of this was behind me (but not really) and watched the clip by myself. They added a rapidly spinning tire swing as the camera widened out from the tree we crashed into.
…
Though I could not see his face, I could imagine his face when I ripped myself away from Craig. Based on all the faces I've seen him make, I can make a mental collage of furrowed eyebrows, wet and wide eyes, expanded nostrils, and his mouth either frowning or bitten down on. But they all convey the same things: hurt. Concern.
I should have been responsible and ended things after that. Should have told him, truly, not to bother with me. Please find someone normal to date. I feel selfish for wanting to cling to him more. I could have done the kind thing and let him
gave him
talked to him
give him a choice
But if the roles were reversed, I would have done the same as him and stayed. Because I loved him so much, I would have stayed.
There's only so much a person can give before they are spent - burned up - turned up by their roots.
After seeing the crash again, I was there once more. Struggling to breathe, bleeding to death. How could he know if he were to put his arms around me I'd once more feel crushed, wanting and waiting to die? I wanted to believe him when he said he didn't blame me. I asked him to forgive me for pushing him away. He said there was nothing to forgive. That it wasn't even a big deal. I let him touch me plenty.
I was chipping away at him without meaning to.
…
We were in Wendy and Stan's bathroom for an hour. I spent the first five minutes upchucking that night's sushi (at least the eel returned to the ocean in some form). I sat on the toilet, hand over my mouth, tasting my sickness over and over. Craig perched on the side of the tub. I stared at his knees.
I didn't want to move. He didn't make me. He kept repeating that I would be OKAY. For several minutes we were together in this tiny room meant for expelling waste and becoming clean, skirting on the edge of space, and if any any time we opened the door we'd look out into blackness.
Looking at Craig's bruised, bony knees, I wondered for the 500th time if, in Clyde's last moments, he thought I would die too. Would he have taken comfort in knowing that someone was going with him?
No. I remember his face. It haunts me all the time.
I've wondered if he had any sense that he was dying. If he knew we had opened Earth's door, our bodies about to land onto stars, but he would be the one to fall.
My mother played Billie Holiday for her mother as she drifted into death-sleep. All Clyde got was our intertwined heavy breathing. Oil spilling into grass. Static. Then nothing.
I'll never know what he thought or didn't think.
"I think I'm still 16." I was about to be sick again.
Hesitation. Craig shifted his legs so that one ankle was over the other. He was leaning over me. "You're not. You're 26. And 26-year-old Kyle is perfectly capable of…"
Fireworks went off outside. The whistling and bursting whittled me back down to reality. I am in my best friends' house in Boulder, in a bathroom with a digital clock and a checkerboard shower curtain, cat paws reaching under the door, and my friends - my family - all sitting out in the living room murmuring.
"I'm sorry," I finally whispered.
"You don't have to be sorry."
Maybe I don't need to be sorry, but I am. I don't need to say I'm sorry, but I do. I am full of sorrow. Verbalizing it is the only way I can let anyone know that I'm paying the mental tax for existing on this earth. I'm sorry I'm here.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked.
"A lot of things."
"Do you want to tell me any?
"
"You don't want to hear it, trust me." My throat burned. I was so close to telling him that sometimes the DARK THOUGHTS come and I consider how instead of I could have died, I should have. Just to say it out loud, to leave my lips and watch it be stupid out in the air.
I couldn't. I held it in.
That night, I turned over and over, wanting to sleep yet not wanting nightmares. And when I slept, I dreamt of not only Clyde but my grandmother as well. The most vivid memories I have of her are when her memories were leaving.
Cancer ate her brain like a snake puncturing into a struggling bird, feathers twitching and feet clenched. Slow and mortifying. We wrote in a composition notebook as much as she could tell us of family history and her childhood memories. She was born right after Americans liberated the camp my great-grandmother was in. A few more days and she may have died, secret pregnancy intact. My great-grandfather's body was never found. After giving birth, she immigrated to New York and remarried a retired sailor from Jersey, and raised my grandmother up in Newark. According to grandmother, her mother tried her hardest to leave the past in the past, to move on and give her children a normal life, but the nightmares were persistent and none of her friends or anyone in the extremely Catholic suburb could say anything to make it better.
Despite this, my grandmother insisted that she had a great childhood. There were lots of kids on her street and she played with them all the time. She loved her teachers. She loved math and science. She played softball in middle school, high school, and college. One summer, while working at a roadside ice cream stand, she met my grandfather who was on a road trip and asking directions to the nearest grocery store. Flustered, my grandma, who lived in the county her whole life, suddenly didn't know where anything was and sent him in a circle back to the ice cream stand. Instead of being upset, he thought it was cute. They married six months later.
I had one photo of my grandfather that I stole from the house. Savta stayed propped up in the living so her bedroom became an untouched time capsule: hats pinned with fake flowers hanging on the walls, a monstrous dark oak bed frame and vanity set she commissioned a carpenter for in the late 70s. I stole the photo from it's wedged place in the vanity mirror above a trio of Coty perfume bottles. It was his college graduation photo. He's not smiling, but the corners of his mouth are lifted and his eyelids are slightly drooped as if someone woke him up from an unfulfilling slumber. Knowing what I know now, he was probably dead inside from final exams. I used to hold this picture up to my face in the mirror. As years went by, my face morphed into his. It shocked me every time, much like how I get shocked now when I speak and hear my father's voice.
One afternoon, Ike, bored with his bucket of G.I. Joes and a creepy smiling telephone with a clown nose, walked up the stairs to an extra untouched bedroom and a storage room. I followed him, trying to be as quiet as possible. There was nothing in the bedroom except for a neatly made up twin bed and an empty wardrobe. We went across the hall to storage.
Boxes. Boxes of ancient cookbooks, legal documents, photos of people I didn't know who were smiling on sidewalks, dangling their feet off the wings of small planes, holding hands in front of an elephant at the zoo, blowing candles on a lopsided cake. More boxes of paintings and postcards, musty sweaters that looked like the thread would instantly unravel if I touched them.
Pink fluff clouded out of the insulation and around the wooden rafters. I looked over at Ike, who was holding a large colonial doll the size of himself. The thing had to be at least 50 years old. She was missing an eye and there were marker lines all over her face.
Ike, put that shit down, it's creepy.
I went to open another box. My mother's voice rang up through the ceiling to get downstairs now.
When we returned downstairs, my mother was sitting on the couch with a cup of tea and whisper-scolded us we can't be up there.
My grandmother piped up: we could hear your little feet upstairs. She only had strength now to hold half-filled sip cups for toddlers with both hands. The veins in her knuckles were thick and wormy, like tree roots.
…
I woke to the sound of rain.
The room was gray. My mouth still tasted acidic, and I was stiff as a cadaver. Craig slept on his back, one arm down and one arm flung up, knuckles up against his temple as if he'd just fainted. His mouth was open and head tilted back over the blue silk pillow. Kelso purred on his stomach.
"Treason," I muttered, but the cat only thudded his tail on the sheets.
I listened to the wall clock, ticking in sync with the rain. I scratched at Kelso's furry little orange head, feeling like a new person, as if everything I threw up the night before included my bones, my muscles and veins and brain until they turned inside out and made flesh over a new skeleton.
I wanted to go home.
I love Stan and Wendy but didn't want to sleep in their guest room anymore with disembodied plastic hands etched with tribal tattoos and an ungodly high stack of sketchbooks in each corner. Though my bed surrounded by bird bones and an underside doom of taxidermy animals isn't any less creepy, that's where I needed to be.
Purring lulled me back to sleep, and I felt my hand go limp.
