The Year I Didn't Kill Myself
|
I wanted to live. I wanted to swirl
like a river-eddy, undulant and capillary, shining as gasoline-film on the skin of a still pond. I wanted to fluoresce, to electrify, to lick acidic soil from the creases of my palms. There is something terrifying about surviving, and yet so grand, like an apple tree twisted by the wind. That year, I knew the risk and begged for more, pumped hot breath into the world like a shining, monstrous mellophone marched across a field of hardened clay. I wanted to live like I wanted to whistle with my fingers in my mouth, all aspiration and cold spit. The foghorns blew in mourning. The carob trees dropped seed-pods in grotesque, blackened curls. That year, I wanted to live like I wanted to die: tangled in green weeds, the sky above me swooping its magnificent blue wefts. The river was a wet-nurse for my hunger. The waterfalls were always swelled with rain. When the new psychiatrist asks me What was your childhood like I don’t know how to tell him it was an open pit yawning in front of me, a marble rolled across a slanted floor, industrial carpeting prostrate beneath, spilled legs sprawled across the basement. I don’t say that is the worst thing you could ask someone like me, a man who only forms stories from swamps, my narratives all soggy and unbordered and falling from the sky in flakes like snow. I give him scrap-scrawled napkins, hazy images, untelling everything, everything—salmonberries crushed on pavement, warm rain rolling through my fingertips like names. He ups my meds; I log off the video call. In the end, I am alone in this new room. which is much less sexy than it sounds, a whole lot more depressing. Outside, the frozen spruce trees slump down in that cold, mammalian sag. Listen: I’ve shared walls with more bodies than a graveyard. I know the rising tempo of a metal bed -frame screwed together with a flimsy Allen wrench, then the long crescendo of an orgasm through dry -wall. Though it’s freezing outside, sometimes they leave the window open so I even hear them moaning as I’m taking out the trash. And the sky is dark with its one lover, rotational inertia. And the moon becomes another deep -sea fish. It’s true: a body never looks for lone -liness—sometimes it forms a heavy crust of snow. Above us, radiation from the sun excites high atmospheric gases so much that they glow. In the morning, I can’t remember if the sounds I heard were real or if I dreamed them. I think if you asked me I’d say I don’t really want to know. |
