just recently contacted me about something pretty personal that he had written and had no real outlet to share. I was more then willing to oblige as what follows is a raw and very intimate piece that I am more then happy to hold a home to. We have all been in this place, at least if we have really lived. I commend his courage and I share it with pride. I have always respected Kevin's writing and his style, we go pretty far back and the man belongs to a beyond special place in my heart, complications involved and aside. So with no more introduction necessary I offer you a piece of a friend who has a piece of me:
Even with 50 milligrams of diazepam and half bottle of scotch flowing through me I couldn't fall asleep. I just was just lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. At the neon bulb I never turn on, blurred by my intoxication. I sat up, slumped over, and spent a few minutes staring at the back of my arm. It was sprinkled with self inflicted cigarette burns, a soft slash marking the place where I had slid a carving knife through my flesh and then knocked on my neighbor Allyson's door at three in the morning, blood dripping off my elbow. I was crying, but not from anything having to do with my arm.
"Ali, I'm kind of bleeding a lot." She looked at the blood running down my arm.
"Ohmygodmyohmygodmyohmygod" was all she could say. She ran back into her room for a towel to clean me up before leading me to my room.
"I'm fine now," I kept blubbering. "Don't worry, I'm fine."
"I'm not leaving until you fall asleep," she told me. "Hang on, I'm going to get a pillow."
When she came back she found me with another knife, repeatedly slashing deeper through the same wound. I looked up at her. "Really, Ali, I'm alright."
"Jesus!" She took the blade away and cleaned my arm again. "Get undressed. Get under the covers."
It wasn't a suicide attempt. Had it been, I simply would have turned my arm over before cutting into it. When I woke up it was daylight and she was gone. I looked at my arm. It wasn't even that bad of a cut. It only bled so much because my blood-alcohol level was up up around 47 percent or so. I just wanted to see myself bleed, to feel myself hurt in a way that had nothing to do with emotion; I wanted someone else to see my blood and recognize the seriousness of my mental state, drunken though it may have been. I wanted to feel alive, not deliver my myself unto death.
When Katie left, after I broke up with her, we were still on good terms. We still are today. There was no anger or remorse to temper my sadness, and my guilt only compounded my grief. But when first she vanished from my life there was an extreme sense of freedom to offset any other emotion meandering around my mind. No longer was I subject to the will of another. I had only to answer to myself. Wanna go get shit-faced drunk at one O-clock on a Monday afternoon? Go for it! Wanna blow lines until well passed sun-up on a Thursday? Why not? There's no one to be upset when you stumble into your room and completely miss the toilet with a stream of dark yellow ultra-dehydrated tequila urine. So do as you like.
Of course the sadness was there, lingering beneath my sense of emancipation. Two and a half years of waking up with the same beautiful girl beside me, two and half years of hearing "I love you" every day from someone whom I truly loved in return. It's a difficult thing to quit cold turkey. But the liberty! To be able to walk into the bar and flirt, really flirt, with any girl who happened to be around.... Not that I was all that successful. Hitting on chicks, it turns out, is not like riding a bike. Plus the fact that I was so desperate to fuck anyone new, anyone I hadn't been with before, turned out to be something of a hindrance. Few women find alcohol fueled desperation becoming.
And so, day by day, the fresh-meat salivation of newly found independence was usurped by the cloying carrion-stench of loneliness.
I began to spend more of my free time lying fetal on my bed with the shades drawn and the lights off, fixating on memories of Katie. The day after I broke up with her, but two weeks before her flight, (it was a very bizarre period during which we still lived together but the end of our relationship was pre-determined down to the exact hour) she was lying with her head on my chest, blond hair spread across my abdomen like spun silk. "I feel like this ruins everything," she said. There were tears in her eyes. "Why?" she kept asking, "I just don't understand why."
I had answers, and at the time I believed them. Her NGO job in Guatemala was over. She wasn't doing anything and she wasn't happy. She was running out of money. And then there was the one answer I really believed, the one I still believe, the one I told her over and over, the one she repeatedly denied: I thought she deserved someone better than a drunk bartender with no education, no marketable skills, and absolutely no plans for the future.
I had other answers too. Ones I didn't share. For years before we met we had several mutual friends, and for months I had heard her referred to as 'Horace's promiscuous room mate'. I had no real concept of the extant of her previous licentiousness, and often attempted to convince myself that it was merely normal college sexuality, but I was tortured by thoughts of her past lovers. Men with bigger dicks than mine violating her every colligate orifice. Threesomes, foursomes, orgies, public fucking, blowing strangers in barroom bathrooms. At my weakest moments I was certain that she had experienced all this and more. I couldn't help comparing what I assumed of her previous life to my relatively ,I felt, limited experience. It infuriated me. Now I'm not sure why.
She had a habit, while drunk, of occasionally telling stories that called her own morality into question: "I was at this party, and I was making out with this chick because, you know, it was a party." It was not the narration that bothered me, but my drunk friends and aquantences sitting around her listening. To me it seemed like the kind of thing slutty girls do to get attention when they know they have nothing legitimately interesting to offer. I would loll in my own intoxication and observe, brooding. Fucking whore, I would think. You goddamn worthless fucking whore. In retrospect I realize it only bothered me because I knew she had so much to offer that didn't hinge on her past sexual experience. But every time it happened I wanted to break up with her then and there. Instead I would leave the room, or the party, or the bar. Go home alone and lie awake, certain that in my absence she had left with one of the rabble. Was in bed with some asshole, on top of him, grinding against him, kissing him.
Though as far as I know that never happened.
Of course the reality of her life before our relationship probably amounted to little more than banal human experience, but in my mind I embellished what little information I had and built from it a portrait of her not just unpleasant, but unendurable. I told myself that I wanted her gone. Now she is. And lieing on my damp pillow, arms around my knees, tears in my eyes and snot on my face, I realize that I lied to myself. The flood of good memories so dwarfs the smattering of bad that there can be no other explanation.
And there are so many good memories. I still lie awake sometimes and think of her standing in our room, a towel wrapped around her chest, her skin still damp and cool from the shower. I pulled her close to where I sat on the edge of the bed, gently pulled the towel from her body and let it drop to the floor. I kissed her stomach. Let my tongue linger briefly in her navel. Kissed her thigh. Brushed my lips across her chest just beneath her breasts. She smiled and pushed me away.
"I Just got all clean!" She said, smile still splashed across her lips.
"I know," I answered. "And it makes me want to make you so dirty." She paused, watching me grin up at her.
"Oh fuck, that's hot," she answered. And she let me pull her into bed. We fell in upon ourselves, into each others eyes and mouths, each pulling the other closer as if trying to fuse into a single organism as I was drawn inexorably toward her center by a force indistinguishable from need. From hunger or thirst. From survival.
I remember her weaving down the sidewalk, on the way home from No Se, walking behind her and giggling as she tried to put one foot in front of the other while repeatedly bouncing off of houses and cars, until, afraid she would fall, I hurried up beside her and looped an arm around her waist. She let her head drop onto my shoulder as I talked to her to keep her conscious. "Did you have fun?" "Heumphh," she said. She was (and is, I suspect) a klutzy drunk, always adorned with fresh bruises in the morning.
I remember walking with her through the streets of Boston's north quarter. We had just spent all day wandering through thrift stores and then taken the train up for an Italian dinner and too much wine. On the way back to the T-stop a kid in a Red Sox jersey passed us walking the opposite way. "Hey!" I said. "We had sex in a park last night!" He looked back and smiled. "That's cool!" He said, and kept walking.
And so much more. I remember swimming in Lake Washington when we lived in Seattle. Sailing with her family on the Chesapeake Bay. Walking along Puget Sound in Discovery Park and shouting to her "Look Katy-did! A water dog!" when a quizzical sea lion popped its head up 20 feet off shore. I remember making love on a big flat rock on a small island in a river in Costa Rica. All of it. Everything. On and on and on, an endless supply of happy reminiscences.
Only now, in her absence, can I freely compare the good with the bad. Can I admit to myself that which I could never admit before, either to her or to myself. Only now am I truly cognizant of the deeper reasons that I broke up with Katie. It was simple cowardice and lust. I was too chicken shit to commit to a real relationship and I wanted to fuck other girls.
So I'm left in a cold and empty bed with nothing. Nothing but too much drink, too many drugs, and a scarred arm to remind me of my own stupidity. Bare shelves where make-up used to be. A few chick movies still floating around in my collection of shitty market boot-legs. Nothing except darkness and a perpetual question floating around the room to settle still born in my mind: have I made a horrible mistake? Have I taken the best thing to ever enter my life and thrown it away?
What have I done?
Feel free to share or comment on your thoughts of this piece. I hope that all of you find this blog to be a place that you are able to send any submissions at any time and I can only help to offer a space that we can all share our lives and thoughts with each other. xoxo. Poppy.
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