Tuesday, June 29, 2010

A Rescue Misson

I sit on my best friend's bed weaving a bracelet, and somehow, all of the frustration surfaces again. Maybe it's seeing his bandana on her bookshelf, and maybe it's because I know how much she loves her husband (yet another mutual family term. Her husband and my brother are one in the same). We speak of our mutual frustrated desperation that we feel for him, and how we see the vast potential for him to topple over the edge.


“Is he still taking all of those at once?” she asks at one point.


“No, my boyfriend says he stopped because his tolerance is so goddamn high that they don't work anymore.”


“Oh. That's... good, I guess.”


“Yeah.”


“But...”


“But we know him," I say almost angrily. "I know him. He isn't even going to really stop because he's never solved the problems that make him want the drugs, so he keeps going back to the drugs, and so he never fixes anything.”


We're talking in the same circles that we've been going in for years now—years of wanting him to stop and wishing whatever caused him to hide inside the chemicals could be fixed. I reflect on the fact that when I'm with her, the problem seems more pressing but also more manageable, as if the solution is just out of our reach. I find myself wracking my brain for something—anything—we can do, and I feel like the sentence in my head has progressed even farther from I want to to I have to.


Maybe it's because the biggest reason she loves him is because I made her love him, with stories of faith and hope and love.


It hurts so much to look for words to describe what I lost when I lost him and to find only those three, the three that he taught me in skipped classes and piano covers and poetry. Hope, Love, and Faith. Sometimes it hurts most when I wonder, When did he lose those? When did he go from teaching them to me to losing them in himself?


And I think the worst part is not having answers, because he doesn't tell me like he did, once upon a time, in a room full of holes in its walls, with people who had holes in their hearts, and lives that had holes in their very fabric. We were all full of holes, once upon a time, and now I'm on the other side of the river that rushed by and scared us nearly to death, with all of my holes healed but one—the one that's there because he still carries every single one of his.


I keep running into the same thought, no matter how I start out thinking, so it must be the only answer: We have to do something.


The question is... what?

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Turning Point

We're laying half-naked on the bed, not really thinking about anything in particular except each other, when he mentions casually, “Your brother and your wife are dating again.”


I don't remember what we were talking about before that, only that this particular sentence makes me snap partially out of the drowsiness I've floated into. The boy isn't actually my brother and she obviously isn't my wife, but the family terms are mutual, and they stand for a damn close relationship between us.


“Really?” I ask. “I thought she and her ex-boyfriend were going to try again. She was all screwed up over him a few weeks ago.”


“No. They fucked the last time he was in town, but he lives out of state. He doesn't have plans to come back. So... she went back to your brother.”


“Oh.” A moment of silence to contemplate this bizarre and somehow irreverent turn of events. Then, “Is my brother still all screwed up?”


“Yeah. We got him to stop doing it back-to-back nights, and his brother and I—” This is another mutual family term. My brother doesn't have an actual brother, only some old, close friends. “—we've been trying to stay with him when he's high so he doesn't do anything more stupid while he's up there... but he's still taking about twenty at a time.” His voice quavers, and I look over at him. “I'm worried about him,” he says, and I can hardly stand the emotion in his voice. It's more than worry. It's fear, a fear so strong that it's got him literally shaking.


“I know,” I say softly, because to say me too would be to trivialize whatever it is that's grabbed hold of him. I lay my head on his chest and I ask even more quietly, “What's scaring you, babe? What is it?”


That he's killing himself! He's killing himself, this shit puts holes in your brain, and he knows it, and he's going to be dead before he's thirty, and he's doing it anyway. He won't stop.” His voice cracks again on that last part, and I'm whispering inconsequential it's-okays against his bare chest, wishing I had something to say. The tears are ready to leak from my own eyes. He's talking about cold medicine, I think, and part of me is stuck in numb disbelief. Fucking cold medication. Sudafed. My brother is de-congesting himself to death. Twenty a night. Jesus fucking Christ.


“We need to do something,” I say, and my voice is shaking through the spaces between my clenched teeth.


“What can we do?”


“I don't know! Something, anything! We aren't the only ones who see this, we aren't the only ones who want him to stop, so maybe there's something to be said for a stereotypical intervention. So he can see who loves him and who he's hurting. To see who wants him to stop.”


“Maybe...”


“We have to do something.” I'm turning into a broken record, but there's not a lot else I can think of to say about my brother anymore.


“Who, then?” he asks, going back to the intervention idea.


I tick off a pitifully short list of names, and suddenly my desperate frustration with it all—with the situation, with my brother, with the fact that there's nothing I can do—explodes. “We have to do something, Nathan! Anything, something, I don't care! We have to try! I can't watch him get lost again and not do anything, again! I can't!”


The tears are pouring down both of our faces now, because somehow seeing the other person cry about it too makes it okay, and we press our eyes to each other's skin, as if the pressure will make the waterworks stop. I recover faster, perhaps because I've done this before over the same boy for the very same reasons, and I'm whispering I knows and quiet Heys against my boyfriend's neck, as if they will make everything better, and suddenly I have to say it, even though I've been fighting with myself about it for the past minute and a half. It's too big not to talk about.


“This is what I've been saying for four years,” I say, and my voice is too agonized to be held in a whisper now. I roll from my side to my back and stare at the textured white ceiling of his bedroom so I don't have to look at his face. “It all kills you, not just his stuff, all of it. Every single thing you take or do or smoke does something like that to some part of your body, do you get it now? And it doesn't matter right now, and I know that, but how do I get you guys to see it like I do? It doesn't matter now, but in fifteen, twenty years, it'll matter to your fucking wife and kids! I'm watching my friends kill themselves in front of my face and there's nothing I can do about it. And so I just keep talking.”


There is a long moment of shell-shocked silence that probably isn't long at all, and when he talks to break it, his voice is as choked with tears as mine was.


“I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to kill myself anymore, I don't want you to have to watch it happen.” He tries to keep going, but he doesn't know how. I turn to look at him again.


“So stop.” I would be surprised if he heard me, my voice is so quiet.


“I don't know how. I... I have an addiction.” It's the first time I've ever heard him say it. He's agreed with me in the past, but he's never said it out loud before, not like that. He's practically sobbing now, the realization having finally hit him full-on.


“I know,” I say, and I feel like I've said that a lot in the past twenty minutes, but I don't know what else there is to say.


“I want to stop. I don't know how.”


“So find someone who does,” I suggest, and he nods. I bring up a friend of his who quit for an extended period of time before, and he agrees that's probably the best person to talk to. We discuss the issue in small circles for a few minutes, until we're both crying again. I don't think either of us could stop if we wanted to. Now he's the one staring at the ceiling. Maybe it's to keep himself from breaking too much more, I think. I move my head from the pillow to his chest so that he doesn't have to worry about me staring at him while he's crying.


“I love you,” he says.


“I love you too.”


“I know, and that's why I want this to stop. I can't keep hurting something that you love. I'm sorry.”


I move back to my spot on the pillow. “Hey. Hey, honey, look at me.” I take his face in my hands so his eyes, flowing rivers onto the tanned planes of his cheeks, are looking straight at my face. “Do you remember what I told you about saying sorry?”


That particular mini-lecture happened about a week ago, when I was with him and his friends. He went to go light up, and he made an embarrassed face at me and apologized. I remember giving him a sort of sarcastic smile and saying, quite honestly, Sorry means you regret what you did. Don't say “I'm sorry” and then go smoke up anyway.


I never thought about it that way, he'd answered. I guess I take it back, then.


“Yes,” he answers in the here-and-now. “I remember, and that's why I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I want to stop.”


“So try,” I say, and I can't decide if I feel like smiling or crying. “Try.”


“I will,” he says, and whatever reply I was going to make is lost under the soft press of his lips, begging me to stay with him, help him, believe in him.


I answer him the only way I can think of: I kiss him back.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

To speak the truth, you need to learn it first. (Or, The Calm Before the Storm)

The light hangs green around our eyes like
some hideous parody of rose-colored glasses.
The trees
bend their backs
in a terrified homage to the storm
that encompasses them and forces their limbs
to stretch.
The sky
taunts us with images of daylight and rising suns
when in truth,
the sun is sinking ever further
towards the dark water of the horizon that we cannot see,
and all of our demons
and all of our fear
and all of our nightmares will come out tonight,
screaming,
shrieking.
Somewhere in there we might realize the truth:
the rotting, swaying zombie traipsing towards us
has our face.

The flowers have no color.
The world is coated in a wash of yellow and green that reeks
of lies and mistrust and deception.
It is a color that can never be equaled.
It is the shade of before-the-tornado and
as-the-fever-kills-us
that haunts us in our very darkest hours
and makes us wake up
screaming
with no memory of what we dreamed,
except that it was terrible.
So
very
terrible.

We cannot see clearly in this washed-out, flipped-around twilight.
All of the lines blur together and
all of the pieces overlap and
every word we hear splits into thirds—
the lie, the truth,
and the reality behind them both.
We wander in confusion,
bumping into things that may
or may not
have sprung from our hearts' greatest holes,
never knowing if that brush along our spines was
a dry, dead finger,
or only a tree branch caught in our shirt.

Perhaps that is the wort of it:
never knowing.
For the tinge in the sky cackles laughter
whenever we try to discover the truth,
filling our ears
and downing our thoughts with one sheer certainty,
one thing that never changes:
nothing is ever honest now.

Change

There are times I hate taking pictures, because I realize sometimes that what I'm taking a picture of can—and probably will be—drastically changed in a very short time period. Relationships are a key example of that, but that isn't the extent of it. I have many pictures of Joe from the one term he was back at school for this very reason, actually—I recognized somehow that there could come a time, sooner rather than later, where he wouldn't be there, and I wanted to document the moment while I could. There are also pictures of the now-graduated class of 2010, and photos from before the Beloved breakfast/lunch table split into two parts. Madi's hair is a different color now. (Love you honey ^^) The sunsets and sunrises I document have already happened, and will never appear in the sky quite that way ever again. The concert shots freeze a moment in time that can never, ever be duplicated, even if I've seen the band six times.


Looking at these old pictures, as I got the chance to do recently to make collages for some of the graduating seniors, always gives me a pang caught somewhere between sadness and something that can only be described as a reminder of my mortality. I, too, will shift and change, just like the situations and places that I photograph. This is not a bad thing. It means that I am fulfilling my part in the Universe, a Universe that is built for adaptation and fluidity, and I am completely at peace with that fact.


All of the pictures in this entry are of something that is not the same as when I took it. Enjoy the display of the wonders of time and change, my friends.














Saturday, June 12, 2010

Deception

I'm wondering if I will every simply cease to be blindsided. I wonder if, someday, finding out someone has lied to me will simply be accepted my a heart and mind too tired to be shocked anymore. Maybe my hands will stop their shaking and my breath will continue on as normal rather than speeding away like a spooked horse. Maybe, one day, when I hear that a loved one has been deceiving me, my mind and body just won't react, because the mechanisms will finally have worn out.


You think I would have learned by now. You think I would simply expect that everyone is lying, and I never truly know the full story, because none of them ever want to tell me.


The worst part is, I don't know whether to blame him for lying, or blame myself for making him not want to tell me.

Blazing



It was rainy and humid the first day of summer vacation, and after too much cake and caffeine at my boyfriend's graduation party, I was more than ready to go chill with whoever and do whatever. The euphoria of the day helped the Excedrin drive back the migraine I had woken up with, and I was simply happy.


We drove to the house to the sound of KoRn blasting through custom car speakers with inadequate bass, and rain spattering across the windshield. We were laughing as we came down the steps and into your friend's back yard. Laughter drifted up from all of you to meet us, and I couldn't help but smile.


Halfway down the steps, I stopped, my laughter cut off like a French revolutionary under the guillotine. I could see it before you looked at me, or spoke, or even moved. It clung to you like the equivalent of a visual odor, if there was ever such a thing. It was like heat waves flowing from you, but only I could see them, and the heat of whatever created them only smacked me in the face. The shock traveled over me like a rush of hot oven air. Then you turned to me and smiled, but your smile was all wrong. I tried to recover, to pick up the rhythm I had lost under the blaze, so I said, “Hey you, how are you?”


And you said, “I'm fucking blazed. How are you?” And your eyes were unfocused, and your aura was a dusty, dull gray, and your smile was skeezy and much to close to some out-of-place sly sort of grin. And I thought, How fitting a word for all of this, because you are burning, my friend, you are burning away like a paper on fire, like that cigarette you're lighting, like a broken candle lit from the middle and then at both of its ends.


So I told you, “I'm sober, thanks for asking,” because that was all I could think of to say, and I dragged a half-assed smile onto my face, and the smoke from your cigarette joined theirs, and the humid air sat down on my shoulders, and the panic rubbed up against me like a cat begging to be stroked. My head pounded much to sharply, then, and the world seemed much to bright, and I could feel myself shaking as the air fled my lungs. I shoved at it all like it was an annoying kind of pet wanting too much attention. But it didn't leave, and the pain in my head tasted sour and sick, and your laugh was all twisted in the wrong direction.


I tried to step away, to coax it all to stop, but it wouldn't, or it couldn't, so I sat back down, and five minutes later, I was almost shouting, begging him to take me home, because the split second of your eyes locked with mine was too damn much of this very wrong thing. All of them (and you) went quiet then, and my headache made it hard to think, so I can't remember if it was surprise or guilt or fear throbbing in that silence, only that it was thick enough to dig into, like my nails leaving half-moon imprints in the flesh of my shaking arms.


I spent the ride home with my head in my boyfriend's lap, trying to think through the acid pain of what in the world had hit me so strongly that all of my defenses had fallen. An hour later, crying on the phone to the only person I could talk to, I stumbled upon it.


It wasn't that you were baked, my friend. It was that, because you were so far gone, you didn't have the sense not to say that so bluntly to my face. If you were sober, you would have known better. You never would have cut me with the knife you knew you had in your hand. You know me better than that. You care for me more than that. You struck out and hurt me because you weren't thinking straight.


But I guess that's why you were high in the first place, wasn't it?


So you didn't have to think.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Summer 101

So, our seniors' last day was today. Their technical graduation ceremony is tomorrow night, but as of tomorrow morning, we—the class of 2011—are the upper-most upperclassmen in the building. And that is intensely weird.


I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this. Part of me is scared, part of me is excited, and part of me is literally screaming in panic, saying, I don't know how to do this! But the good part about it is that I have an entire summer (starting on Friday) to figure out what it means to be a senior in high school. Of course, this brings on an entire second set of panic down—now that I've decided to forget the anxiety and the fear of being with people, I have no idea how to start actually going and chilling just because. It's so far out of my “old” comfort zone that people no longer ask.


I guess the best I can do is roll with the punches.



They don’t teach you how to live in school, how to enjoy life, how to enjoy summer. There’s no class for that. But I’m learning.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

This can be either a bridge or a wall (These walls must fall)

You say, I see no point to poetry because
it wraps itself around your mind and
keeps you from seeing.
It's so damn confusing.

I say,
well of course it's confusing you're
looking at it all wrong you're
not letting yourself understand you
can't see the forest--
all the damn trees are in your way.

And the truth is,
I don't get it either,
but I know it,
know that there is poetry in the space between the notes and
the black behind the white and
in the empty chair that sits there
like a wash of cold air,
waiting
for you to come back and tell me,
I don't understand but
I know and that
is enough.

Please listen.
Please plug your ears and shut off
all of the glowing lights,
all of the lights and sounds and
embrace the silence.
Without silence the noise means nothing.
Without the dark the light's a matter of course
(but you cling to it like a rare gem, don't you?
Of course.)

Well, I shout,
there cannot be logic with no poetry because
it means the logic is useless,
means there's nothing to build on and
there may not be logic in poetry, honey, but
there's no poetry in logic either.

And when my poem is over,
I prove myself right:
not a single word of logic is offered in defense.

Maybe you always knew better.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Summer Feet (A Playlist)


Lucky Today - Cloud Cult
Surfah Girl (Walking on Water) - Paul Wright
Drive - Incubus
Bright Bulbs and Sharp Tools (Demo)- Fair to Midland
Shake Tramp - Marianas Trench
155 - +44
A Chance to Say Goodbye - Children 18:3
My Boy Builds Coffins (Acoustic) - Florence + the Machine
The Only Exception - Paramore
Casimir Pulaski Day - Sufjan Stevens
Flies - Canis Major
Meteor - The Bird and the Bee
Wake the Earth - The Honey Trees

Download.