— For Tom
It’s
strange how many of my memories have nothing to do with you, friend.
Like
the beautiful pile those two-hundred strangely sharp, individual metallic
wrappers made after I’d ripped the sleeping pills from them; how even after
I’d gulped the pills down and turned out the lights I could still see
that shining
little mound from where I lay on my bed waiting to see what
death was like.
You weren’t there to see that, so I give it to you
now, a gift from years ago but
still somehow of my present darkness too. I’ve
always thought it strange that I
didn’t think of you then, as I made
my escape, that the fugue-state fantasies
which consumed me like someone
else’s dreams never brought your face among
all the others, sad,
angry and disappointed. Later on the plane to the hospital
(that I clung to
life was the gift of two kinds of miracle: the mundane one of
medicine, and
the most intense and human one in the way that my mother, a foot
shorter
than I, found me on my back without detectable breathing or pulse, my
arms
crossed over my chest like I’d already been buried, and carried me bodily
up two flights and down two more to the car to save me) all I could smell
was
something like bile and I fell in and out of love with the nurse a
dozen times as
I fell in and out of life, unsure of where I’d stop.
But I didn’t think of you once then,
just continued about my business
of taking away everything I had ever given anyone,
as an estranged father
might murder his children while his wife, who taught him
what love was by
finally taking it away, sleeps dreamless in the next room.
Even long after
the "incident was in the past" as others would dare to say,
after
two nights strapped to my bed so I wouldn’t rip my IV’s out again,
after
weeks of short-term memory dysfunction, after months of my mom’s
question
"why?" her mouth shaping into the familiar ‘O’
and relaxing again and again,
after my last years in that town trying to
fit back into the jagged space left
for me within all that I had intended
to leave behind— after all of that we never
once talked about it. Not
really. So I’m talking now. And I thank you, friend,
not because you
wouldn’t have talked, but because you didn’t, because you sensed
the
reversal, knew that life had suddenly become what death couldn’t be—
something I had to have at all costs, because you never asked if you were a
reason,
because you never made the lame overture that you knew how I felt
or, worse,
that you had thought of "doing it" too... because of
all of that, and because you really
had everything and nothing to do with
both the staying part and the leaving part,
and because you gave—and
still give—me so much faith that you should be investing
in yourself,
I’m writing to thank you, finally, by telling you the most important
things,
and to say again that it’s funny, isn’t it, how many of
my memories have nothing
to do with you, even though you’ve always
been there . . .
