#2-10 (thaw. the last one, until)
1.
It's something I'm sure I've known before in my life but maybe it's been so long ago that I can't remember the exact time and place. Spiraling backwards into long-ago early days it would seem there were many such moments, alone in the woods surrounding our little house (before they reclaimed it), our family's acute lack of technology (until we were forced into it), being far away enough from the highway but I wonder if I look for too much through the lens of my own nostalgia. I do, I know I do, and I wish there was a word in English that described the unexpected feeling a person gets once they realize they really and finally are surrounded in indisputable silence, no background noise of any type, not even the sound of birds singing or cars or trucks driving around nearby, the small shock, the lack of precedence. Maybe it's such a rare thing that a word for it should never be coined, maybe it would just be a waste.
This kind of silence is a reflecting pool, echoing what we feel already in the recesses of our soul, or heart, or any term we like to use in reference to that cobwebbed attic of emotion and spirituality that resides so deep inside each of us. I can see it at once being a refreshing and light-hearted moment for some and nothing other than wave after wave of suffering for others, depending on who and what they've recently been going through up to that point. But not very long ago, as I sat, the breath and the thump of my heart being the only things that I knew that actually were and the absence of anything else invading my mind, there was nothing. I neither liked or disliked the nothing, I simply lived within; my nights were a curled-up ball under a sleeping bag in an empty walk-in closet with the door closed. My days were meals of fresh fruit and lentil soup, using the bathroom whenever, looking out to the forest and the lake and a solemn grace of another Winter, in equal parts just as far away from Heaven as it was from Hell.
After awhile and suddenly: my enjoyment of Limbo waned and I grew restless. Every sound I made, such as walking on the floor it felt louder, obnoxious like testing the tornado sirens during the first week of every month, jeering at me the inevitability of the quiet never possibly lasting forever. And I needed to look for something else; whatever it was that might distract me from myself. I was peering into boxes and empty medicine cabinets. At first I couldn't find anything but I kept on, because I knew that there had to be. In restless solitude I began imagining myself as embarking on a kind of quest and Fate would give me something that would tell me, or instruct me, what new direction I needed to go. An almost-empty pack of discarded Marlboro Light 100s in the cabinet of a small rolling cart, empty save for one. Our eyes met; it looked up at me expectantly. My heart sank in its lock.
I lit up using the wood that was already burning in an ancient cast-iron stove. I inhaled the smoke and gently fell back on my haunches and onto the floor; exhaling and watching its curls dance in the beams of sun coming in through a window. And then the cherry burning at the other end, a blank expression on my face.
One half of the cigarette had been spared by the fire, untouched, the other half smoldering and providing all the smoke I was currently breathing in. When I was younger someone - time now refuses me recollection of exactly whom - had told me that if I lit a cigarette and it burned in that way, someone out there was thinking about me at that very moment. As a young and completely stupid hopeless romantic I instantly appropriated the idea as my own. I understood the simple and sweet moment of bonding there was between two people lighting up, dying slowly together. I liked the idea of other people thinking about me and it never quite went away; every time my cigarettes had ended up burning this way ever since I'm always reminded of that little nugget of superstition.
Little ever really changes. It doesn't matter how many times I'll be disappointed, there will still be a little bit of faith left inside of me, always. Regardless of how old and tired I'll get, I'll always get back up. Albeit slower than what I used to move and perhaps ever more reluctantly with arthritic joints, my gradually deflating spirit, but when all is said and done that's the only option I'll ever have. As all the edges fray, the failures compound, to just keep going. To fight. The horizontal cherry started to burn out of control and I dispensed the whole cigarette in a cup of tepid water left aside from the day before.
The thing hissed at me in anger, and died.
2.
Hanging out on an afternoon at the insurance office with my coat on, shivering so bad that my teeth chattered, was when I knew I must have caught something. It had been going around and there were too many people coming in and coughing without putting a hand over their mouth or anything, making their payments. I cursed the lack of manners and couth of the humanity around these parts and thought very long and hard about getting out of my chair to the fridge and perhaps get a can of Diet Coke, something that was cold, that might counter the fever and lower my body temperature enough to where I might feel okay about going to a store to get maybe aspirin or some other kind of fever reducer, anything. But ten paces there and back to the chair just felt so far away, forever away.
My pupils dilated, the eyes fell out of focus staring out the window into the parking lot and the cars and the trucks. The hum of the one fluorescent light above. A quick moment and I wished I were a kid again so that someone could help me out. Or in a committed and loving relationship, whatever that means. I didn't want to have to be tough because I always have to be tough. I always have to be the one who picks himself up by the bootstraps, as the old adage goes and what the hell are bootstraps really anyway, but there they are. And here am I. And maybe that's my own choosing, ultimately.
Click-click-click-click, my mouth.
Jim walks in, back from the lunch with his wife where he had to tell her how much it was going to cost to get the Grand Prix fixed and talk about whether or not it might be time to buy a new car. It's the fuel injectors. The parts alone were going to be something like two hundred-and-fifty dollars and he wasn't sure he could do it himself, and that doesn't even factor in the cost of labor involved. Between the both of them: her the manager of a local bank and him being a self-made man, I have to wonder why she's driving a '96 with over a hundred thousand miles to its name and he a '98 Ford F-150 with almost the same kind of mileage. There's probably something else going on that I don't know about because as time goes by there's always something that I'm never privy to until much, much later. Usually when it's no longer a factor or I don't see those people involved anymore and I'll hear it from somebody else and I'm always the last to know, somehow.
"how'd it go," is what I say.
"She doesn't know what she wants to do," he said. "We're going to talk about it later on tonight."
"ah."
"Why are you sitting around with your coat on?"
"i'm apparently runnin' a temperature."
He starts going through the pile of mail that the mail-lady left on my desk, about an hour before. It's mostly commission checks, junk mail targeted to independent insurance agents. I wasn't making eye contact; I was still staring out the window.
"And fuckin' gas is over three dollars now again," he said.
"yeah, they're callin' for it bein' four," I said. "before too long."
He opens an envelope containing a check and looks at it with suspicion in his eyes. "That's weird. I didn't think it would be as much as it is for last month," he said. "Four dollars. Hmmph. I wouldn't be surprised. Really wouldn't."
"same here. i mean, i wonder just what's going to happen when gas becomes so expensive that people are goin' to be forced to not go anywhere unless they just absolutely have to. because if it's going to be four, then what's stopping 'em from charging five bucks 'fore too long, you know. then what. joyridin' around is almost the thing our entire society is based upon, going wherever we want, when ya think about it. and when that's taken away it'll probably alter the way we live our lives, even how we all see ourselves. it could be a lot more drastic of a thing than i think we may realize."
"You don't sound good," he said. "Maybe you oughta go lie down for a little while."
"it'll be fucked up, man."
"Hello? Jason?"
"pretty soon we'll all be ridin' around on horseback. fightin' people for potatoes."
I was hearing and comprehending what he was telling me. Jim's words sounded like a muted trombone, dancing against my ears. It's just that at that moment I was far more interested by imagining the people around here in a battle royale for the last case of Easy Mac that made it into town before America ceased to function as it has since before anyone living now can remember. No one around here would really know how to live off the land and I don't think they'd be at all inclined to even want to, but we all are armed to the teeth and after years of being out here I'm convinced there isn't enough interpersonal camaraderie to go around that would keep any semblance of order if the times were to get tough. Once the shelves of Price Chopper and Wal-Mart Supercenter were stripped bare of food - in the span of a week at best - all bets would be off.
In my altered state I decided the odds of such a situation actually happening to be about one in five, maybe. A quick snap of my neck to Jim and I assured him that I was fine, I was going to be fine. And then I got up and fumbled for my keys and left for the Dollar Store.
*****
The store was empty of anyone, even in the middle of the day, save for a bored-looking girl at the cash register who said hello on cue as the little bells hanging over the door signaled my arrival. Every time I go to the Dollar Store in town they always have that little yellow sign: WET FLOOR - PISO MOJADO right there in front but the floor never appears to be wet. Every time I notice that big yellow sign that reminds all those who walk in that the cash registers never hold more than two hundred dollars in cash at any moment and I always think it's funny that any potential thieves would ever think that there could possibly be more money than that for the taking, at the Dollar Store, here.
At this point it's obvious I'm only occasionally visiting reality, popping in to say hello back to the cashier girl and then leaving again. She seems oblivious to the fact that I am wandering through her store looking at random things without any appearances of me actually buying them. I go to the foods and stare at cans of potted meat and Vienna sausages and sardines with Louisiana hot sauce. I go over to the household products and try to imagine what it would feel like to eat Ajax and wash it down with Murphy's Oil Soap, solvents disintegrating upon contact my throat and esophagus on its way to my stomach in what might be one of the worst ways to commit suicide. I see condoms and think about buying them just for right before some future intimate moment when I could confess to the girlfriend where my Trojans came from, because it would at once be totally hilarious and let her know that I'm sensitive to any of her concerns and smart with my money, too (bonus), but then I wondered if a three-pack of condoms for only two dollars would really work as advertised, even if they are name brand. I look at the clothes and I decide that I wouldn't look good in any of them.
Everything is cold to the touch and I decide that I love the Dollar Store. They leave the heater off in the dead of winter in order to pass on the savings to the consumer. Conceivably they have everything I could ever need. There might be some people who think they're too good to shop here, but fuck them and their iPhones, going to Trader Joe's, all of them. I lost the ability to quit shivering and I can no longer remember a time when I wasn't; I feel fat cells burning and melting in my legs, the tops of my arms, up and down my back.
I approach the girl and the cash register with my only purchases: a bottle of ibuprofen and a 20 ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. I can see my breath and her own and they soon join together to form greater clouds of vapor and then, within moments, a fog that envelopes us both. She has big brown eyes and a round face and there's a quality about it all that I would have found unbelievably sexy had I actually been attracted to her. I curse silently that I should have this moment with her; something about it feels wrong and at that moment, just about unbearable, but I have to stand in place because the linoleum floor is covered with a layer of ice and I'm afraid of tripping up and falling over. Money changes hands with a sliding debit card and a stylus that helps me tell the touchscreen interface my PIN and also no, I never need any cash back. The receipt prints and it's over. I'm finished. She told me to have a good day and I said you too.
Among the few remaining things I enjoy about living in the Valley of Vitality is the lack of necessary social graces, never having much use for them anyway. This town is sweat pants, and Wal-Mart, and chewing tobacco and if I want, after I open the bottle of ibuprofen and dose myself with one thousand milligrams, being sure to wash it down with diet soda, I can fall asleep in the pickup right there in the middle of the parking lot. No one cares. The last instant before nothing was spent thinking about the one I would have rather been trapped in a cash register fog with, if her cigarette was burning only halfway at that very moment. It was the byproduct of fever, more of a composite taken from snatches of blurred memory and wishes than anyone or anything to do with our real world, a thing of which as the seconds ticked away mattered to me less and less. Of her facing out her bedroom window while golden afternoon sun waned its way to the western horizon, a blank warmth like a spell in her eyes like looking at old photograph after old photograph. She is from the past, or she was from the future. I couldn't remember if she smoked or didn't smoke but I liked the idea of her smoking.
Silence: drowns. The spaces in between seconds like jumps on a trampoline, some completely other time way too far away and getting ever farther.
3.
"So you're a Buddhist. Well, more than I am. Whatever. So what does The Buddha say about suicide?"
"Well...huh...basically he doesn't like it."
"Hmm. Yeah. Thought as much."
"The irony about killin' yourself is that 'cause of reincarnation, of course, all you do is just come right back, having to face the same things that you couldn't handle in the first place."
Going through a six-pack of Shiner Bock and for once, it isn't a bad afternoon. Light jacket weather. We are sitting against the side of a metal building. I'm moving my feet back and forth to dig in the gravel. Force of habit: I tend to fidget a lot. I always have this urge to have something to do.
"But you don't come back as like a boll weevil or a slug or anything?"
"That's if you really hurt somebody. Although, yeah although...I guess that if anyone commits suicide they are hurting other people, like their family and friends, anyone who cares about them."
"So you may."
"...," about to say, "yeah I suppose so."
"All right. Thanks."
"You bet. But um, why'd you ask?"
"Ah, you know."
"A girl?"
"Nah. I wish it were about a girl. If only it all could ever be that simple, anymore."
"It ain't money is it? Don't ask me for money."
"Says the guy who wasn't the one who bought the beer this afternoon."
A whiff of auto body paint carried along soft zephyr; it's March and it looks like March and it feels so gorgeous like March can feel. Another spring, another New Year. I feel like crying but I quickly decide that I'm not going to. There are so many different reasons for me not to, but still so many reasons why I do want to cry.
"No, it's...it's all up here, you know. There ain't no reason for it. For mental illness I guess there don't have to be."
"You're not mentally ill."
"You can honestly say that for as long as you've known me, you'd consider me completely well-adjusted."
"Yeah. No. I mean, who out there is completely well-adjusted? But uh have you ever, like, tried anti-depressants? Maybe that could help you out, I mean, if you really do feel like you are."
"Here and there I have, sure, through the years. But I ultimately just don't like the way they make me feel, which is to say, I don't feel anything. 'Sides, it interferes with my drinking. But enough about me."
"What causes it? Like stress?"
"Stress certainly don't help, but. I really wish I knew. I've been tryin' to figure that out for so long you wouldn't believe. The only way I can explain it is that sometimes, I'll get this white noise in my head. They aren't cognitive thoughts, no words or even any meaning. Just these random, completely unrelenting emotions like flyin' shards of glass. It hurts about as bad. And there's never any reason why they start and no reason why they go away. I wanna say that I've gotten real good at hidin' it, 'cause I got to, but..."
"Jesus."
"Yeah. I know...sorry."
"Naw, that's okay. It's fucked up through."
"I know. Okay yeah, I won't talk about it anymore."
"I mean d'ya think you're ever gonna do anythin' to hurt yourself?"
*****
It's something I'm sure I've known before in my life but maybe it's been so long ago that I can't remember the exact time and place. Spiraling backwards into long-ago early days it would seem there were many such moments, alone in the woods surrounding our little house (before they reclaimed it), our family's acute lack of technology (until we were forced into it), being far away enough from the highway but I wonder if I look for too much through the lens of my own nostalgia.
I do. I know I do.
It's something I'm sure I've known before in my life but maybe it's been so long ago that I can't remember the exact time and place. Spiraling backwards into long-ago early days it would seem there were many such moments, alone in the woods surrounding our little house (before they reclaimed it), our family's acute lack of technology (until we were forced into it), being far away enough from the highway but I wonder if I look for too much through the lens of my own nostalgia. I do, I know I do, and I wish there was a word in English that described the unexpected feeling a person gets once they realize they really and finally are surrounded in indisputable silence, no background noise of any type, not even the sound of birds singing or cars or trucks driving around nearby, the small shock, the lack of precedence. Maybe it's such a rare thing that a word for it should never be coined, maybe it would just be a waste.
This kind of silence is a reflecting pool, echoing what we feel already in the recesses of our soul, or heart, or any term we like to use in reference to that cobwebbed attic of emotion and spirituality that resides so deep inside each of us. I can see it at once being a refreshing and light-hearted moment for some and nothing other than wave after wave of suffering for others, depending on who and what they've recently been going through up to that point. But not very long ago, as I sat, the breath and the thump of my heart being the only things that I knew that actually were and the absence of anything else invading my mind, there was nothing. I neither liked or disliked the nothing, I simply lived within; my nights were a curled-up ball under a sleeping bag in an empty walk-in closet with the door closed. My days were meals of fresh fruit and lentil soup, using the bathroom whenever, looking out to the forest and the lake and a solemn grace of another Winter, in equal parts just as far away from Heaven as it was from Hell.
After awhile and suddenly: my enjoyment of Limbo waned and I grew restless. Every sound I made, such as walking on the floor it felt louder, obnoxious like testing the tornado sirens during the first week of every month, jeering at me the inevitability of the quiet never possibly lasting forever. And I needed to look for something else; whatever it was that might distract me from myself. I was peering into boxes and empty medicine cabinets. At first I couldn't find anything but I kept on, because I knew that there had to be. In restless solitude I began imagining myself as embarking on a kind of quest and Fate would give me something that would tell me, or instruct me, what new direction I needed to go. An almost-empty pack of discarded Marlboro Light 100s in the cabinet of a small rolling cart, empty save for one. Our eyes met; it looked up at me expectantly. My heart sank in its lock.
I lit up using the wood that was already burning in an ancient cast-iron stove. I inhaled the smoke and gently fell back on my haunches and onto the floor; exhaling and watching its curls dance in the beams of sun coming in through a window. And then the cherry burning at the other end, a blank expression on my face.
One half of the cigarette had been spared by the fire, untouched, the other half smoldering and providing all the smoke I was currently breathing in. When I was younger someone - time now refuses me recollection of exactly whom - had told me that if I lit a cigarette and it burned in that way, someone out there was thinking about me at that very moment. As a young and completely stupid hopeless romantic I instantly appropriated the idea as my own. I understood the simple and sweet moment of bonding there was between two people lighting up, dying slowly together. I liked the idea of other people thinking about me and it never quite went away; every time my cigarettes had ended up burning this way ever since I'm always reminded of that little nugget of superstition.
Little ever really changes. It doesn't matter how many times I'll be disappointed, there will still be a little bit of faith left inside of me, always. Regardless of how old and tired I'll get, I'll always get back up. Albeit slower than what I used to move and perhaps ever more reluctantly with arthritic joints, my gradually deflating spirit, but when all is said and done that's the only option I'll ever have. As all the edges fray, the failures compound, to just keep going. To fight. The horizontal cherry started to burn out of control and I dispensed the whole cigarette in a cup of tepid water left aside from the day before.
The thing hissed at me in anger, and died.
2.
Hanging out on an afternoon at the insurance office with my coat on, shivering so bad that my teeth chattered, was when I knew I must have caught something. It had been going around and there were too many people coming in and coughing without putting a hand over their mouth or anything, making their payments. I cursed the lack of manners and couth of the humanity around these parts and thought very long and hard about getting out of my chair to the fridge and perhaps get a can of Diet Coke, something that was cold, that might counter the fever and lower my body temperature enough to where I might feel okay about going to a store to get maybe aspirin or some other kind of fever reducer, anything. But ten paces there and back to the chair just felt so far away, forever away.
My pupils dilated, the eyes fell out of focus staring out the window into the parking lot and the cars and the trucks. The hum of the one fluorescent light above. A quick moment and I wished I were a kid again so that someone could help me out. Or in a committed and loving relationship, whatever that means. I didn't want to have to be tough because I always have to be tough. I always have to be the one who picks himself up by the bootstraps, as the old adage goes and what the hell are bootstraps really anyway, but there they are. And here am I. And maybe that's my own choosing, ultimately.
Click-click-click-click, my mouth.
Jim walks in, back from the lunch with his wife where he had to tell her how much it was going to cost to get the Grand Prix fixed and talk about whether or not it might be time to buy a new car. It's the fuel injectors. The parts alone were going to be something like two hundred-and-fifty dollars and he wasn't sure he could do it himself, and that doesn't even factor in the cost of labor involved. Between the both of them: her the manager of a local bank and him being a self-made man, I have to wonder why she's driving a '96 with over a hundred thousand miles to its name and he a '98 Ford F-150 with almost the same kind of mileage. There's probably something else going on that I don't know about because as time goes by there's always something that I'm never privy to until much, much later. Usually when it's no longer a factor or I don't see those people involved anymore and I'll hear it from somebody else and I'm always the last to know, somehow.
"how'd it go," is what I say.
"She doesn't know what she wants to do," he said. "We're going to talk about it later on tonight."
"ah."
"Why are you sitting around with your coat on?"
"i'm apparently runnin' a temperature."
He starts going through the pile of mail that the mail-lady left on my desk, about an hour before. It's mostly commission checks, junk mail targeted to independent insurance agents. I wasn't making eye contact; I was still staring out the window.
"And fuckin' gas is over three dollars now again," he said.
"yeah, they're callin' for it bein' four," I said. "before too long."
He opens an envelope containing a check and looks at it with suspicion in his eyes. "That's weird. I didn't think it would be as much as it is for last month," he said. "Four dollars. Hmmph. I wouldn't be surprised. Really wouldn't."
"same here. i mean, i wonder just what's going to happen when gas becomes so expensive that people are goin' to be forced to not go anywhere unless they just absolutely have to. because if it's going to be four, then what's stopping 'em from charging five bucks 'fore too long, you know. then what. joyridin' around is almost the thing our entire society is based upon, going wherever we want, when ya think about it. and when that's taken away it'll probably alter the way we live our lives, even how we all see ourselves. it could be a lot more drastic of a thing than i think we may realize."
"You don't sound good," he said. "Maybe you oughta go lie down for a little while."
"it'll be fucked up, man."
"Hello? Jason?"
"pretty soon we'll all be ridin' around on horseback. fightin' people for potatoes."
I was hearing and comprehending what he was telling me. Jim's words sounded like a muted trombone, dancing against my ears. It's just that at that moment I was far more interested by imagining the people around here in a battle royale for the last case of Easy Mac that made it into town before America ceased to function as it has since before anyone living now can remember. No one around here would really know how to live off the land and I don't think they'd be at all inclined to even want to, but we all are armed to the teeth and after years of being out here I'm convinced there isn't enough interpersonal camaraderie to go around that would keep any semblance of order if the times were to get tough. Once the shelves of Price Chopper and Wal-Mart Supercenter were stripped bare of food - in the span of a week at best - all bets would be off.
In my altered state I decided the odds of such a situation actually happening to be about one in five, maybe. A quick snap of my neck to Jim and I assured him that I was fine, I was going to be fine. And then I got up and fumbled for my keys and left for the Dollar Store.
*****
The store was empty of anyone, even in the middle of the day, save for a bored-looking girl at the cash register who said hello on cue as the little bells hanging over the door signaled my arrival. Every time I go to the Dollar Store in town they always have that little yellow sign: WET FLOOR - PISO MOJADO right there in front but the floor never appears to be wet. Every time I notice that big yellow sign that reminds all those who walk in that the cash registers never hold more than two hundred dollars in cash at any moment and I always think it's funny that any potential thieves would ever think that there could possibly be more money than that for the taking, at the Dollar Store, here.
At this point it's obvious I'm only occasionally visiting reality, popping in to say hello back to the cashier girl and then leaving again. She seems oblivious to the fact that I am wandering through her store looking at random things without any appearances of me actually buying them. I go to the foods and stare at cans of potted meat and Vienna sausages and sardines with Louisiana hot sauce. I go over to the household products and try to imagine what it would feel like to eat Ajax and wash it down with Murphy's Oil Soap, solvents disintegrating upon contact my throat and esophagus on its way to my stomach in what might be one of the worst ways to commit suicide. I see condoms and think about buying them just for right before some future intimate moment when I could confess to the girlfriend where my Trojans came from, because it would at once be totally hilarious and let her know that I'm sensitive to any of her concerns and smart with my money, too (bonus), but then I wondered if a three-pack of condoms for only two dollars would really work as advertised, even if they are name brand. I look at the clothes and I decide that I wouldn't look good in any of them.
Everything is cold to the touch and I decide that I love the Dollar Store. They leave the heater off in the dead of winter in order to pass on the savings to the consumer. Conceivably they have everything I could ever need. There might be some people who think they're too good to shop here, but fuck them and their iPhones, going to Trader Joe's, all of them. I lost the ability to quit shivering and I can no longer remember a time when I wasn't; I feel fat cells burning and melting in my legs, the tops of my arms, up and down my back.
I approach the girl and the cash register with my only purchases: a bottle of ibuprofen and a 20 ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. I can see my breath and her own and they soon join together to form greater clouds of vapor and then, within moments, a fog that envelopes us both. She has big brown eyes and a round face and there's a quality about it all that I would have found unbelievably sexy had I actually been attracted to her. I curse silently that I should have this moment with her; something about it feels wrong and at that moment, just about unbearable, but I have to stand in place because the linoleum floor is covered with a layer of ice and I'm afraid of tripping up and falling over. Money changes hands with a sliding debit card and a stylus that helps me tell the touchscreen interface my PIN and also no, I never need any cash back. The receipt prints and it's over. I'm finished. She told me to have a good day and I said you too.
Among the few remaining things I enjoy about living in the Valley of Vitality is the lack of necessary social graces, never having much use for them anyway. This town is sweat pants, and Wal-Mart, and chewing tobacco and if I want, after I open the bottle of ibuprofen and dose myself with one thousand milligrams, being sure to wash it down with diet soda, I can fall asleep in the pickup right there in the middle of the parking lot. No one cares. The last instant before nothing was spent thinking about the one I would have rather been trapped in a cash register fog with, if her cigarette was burning only halfway at that very moment. It was the byproduct of fever, more of a composite taken from snatches of blurred memory and wishes than anyone or anything to do with our real world, a thing of which as the seconds ticked away mattered to me less and less. Of her facing out her bedroom window while golden afternoon sun waned its way to the western horizon, a blank warmth like a spell in her eyes like looking at old photograph after old photograph. She is from the past, or she was from the future. I couldn't remember if she smoked or didn't smoke but I liked the idea of her smoking.
Silence: drowns. The spaces in between seconds like jumps on a trampoline, some completely other time way too far away and getting ever farther.
3.
"So you're a Buddhist. Well, more than I am. Whatever. So what does The Buddha say about suicide?"
"Well...huh...basically he doesn't like it."
"Hmm. Yeah. Thought as much."
"The irony about killin' yourself is that 'cause of reincarnation, of course, all you do is just come right back, having to face the same things that you couldn't handle in the first place."
Going through a six-pack of Shiner Bock and for once, it isn't a bad afternoon. Light jacket weather. We are sitting against the side of a metal building. I'm moving my feet back and forth to dig in the gravel. Force of habit: I tend to fidget a lot. I always have this urge to have something to do.
"But you don't come back as like a boll weevil or a slug or anything?"
"That's if you really hurt somebody. Although, yeah although...I guess that if anyone commits suicide they are hurting other people, like their family and friends, anyone who cares about them."
"So you may."
"...," about to say, "yeah I suppose so."
"All right. Thanks."
"You bet. But um, why'd you ask?"
"Ah, you know."
"A girl?"
"Nah. I wish it were about a girl. If only it all could ever be that simple, anymore."
"It ain't money is it? Don't ask me for money."
"Says the guy who wasn't the one who bought the beer this afternoon."
A whiff of auto body paint carried along soft zephyr; it's March and it looks like March and it feels so gorgeous like March can feel. Another spring, another New Year. I feel like crying but I quickly decide that I'm not going to. There are so many different reasons for me not to, but still so many reasons why I do want to cry.
"No, it's...it's all up here, you know. There ain't no reason for it. For mental illness I guess there don't have to be."
"You're not mentally ill."
"You can honestly say that for as long as you've known me, you'd consider me completely well-adjusted."
"Yeah. No. I mean, who out there is completely well-adjusted? But uh have you ever, like, tried anti-depressants? Maybe that could help you out, I mean, if you really do feel like you are."
"Here and there I have, sure, through the years. But I ultimately just don't like the way they make me feel, which is to say, I don't feel anything. 'Sides, it interferes with my drinking. But enough about me."
"What causes it? Like stress?"
"Stress certainly don't help, but. I really wish I knew. I've been tryin' to figure that out for so long you wouldn't believe. The only way I can explain it is that sometimes, I'll get this white noise in my head. They aren't cognitive thoughts, no words or even any meaning. Just these random, completely unrelenting emotions like flyin' shards of glass. It hurts about as bad. And there's never any reason why they start and no reason why they go away. I wanna say that I've gotten real good at hidin' it, 'cause I got to, but..."
"Jesus."
"Yeah. I know...sorry."
"Naw, that's okay. It's fucked up through."
"I know. Okay yeah, I won't talk about it anymore."
"I mean d'ya think you're ever gonna do anythin' to hurt yourself?"
*****
It's something I'm sure I've known before in my life but maybe it's been so long ago that I can't remember the exact time and place. Spiraling backwards into long-ago early days it would seem there were many such moments, alone in the woods surrounding our little house (before they reclaimed it), our family's acute lack of technology (until we were forced into it), being far away enough from the highway but I wonder if I look for too much through the lens of my own nostalgia.
I do. I know I do.