An American Myth

Chaplaincy

I am awake in my boat. My boat is on the stormy sea. I will not sail. I will not row. I will quietly look at the stars

fixed in their places. 

*All shall be well. And all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well. 

*Julian of Norwich

T.

One of my favorite things we used to do was to run at each other as fast as we could the moment we first saw each other. On campus, where I went to school and he worked; in the grocery store; walking in approaching directions on one of the streets near our house. 

T. was athletic and he could certainly outrun me but he went for style as well as speed. If he was carrying anything, he either dropped it immediately like a dead body, or threw it as high as he could into the air. Once he threw a paper he was reading while walking into the air and by the time it fluttered down he was already a block away. He would run while kind of doing this gallopy hopping at the same time, sometimes punctuated by this very fast hand clapping and grinning. When we would get within a block or two of each other, we would both throw our arms up in the air in a big dihedral "V" like turkey vultures and then hold them exactly that way for the remainder of the running. Its really actually pretty hard to run fast with your arms up that way. 

When we would get within a few feet of each other T. would slow down and I would speed up, and he would bend his knees to bring the trunk of his body down to be even with mine. I would push off my right leg because that's my stronger leg, and I would jump into his arms. I just loved how that felt. My whole entire body would be in the air for at least a few seconds, or it felt like that, and then every part of my body would be in contact with his. His arms would come around my back and waist so fast, and he would just totally crush me into him. I would bury my face in the hollow of his neck and he always smelled so strong. He was not a daily showerer and he didn't wear deodorant, I don't think. But he always smelled so nice to me, in a full and rich and powerful kind of way. Sometimes his hair would flip forward and his ponytail would fall against my neck. He had great hair. Thick, thick black strands, always gathered in a low ponytail, often using one of my hair elastics shoplifted from my basket of hair things in our bathroom. 

There were so many other things I loved about T. but that was my favorite. It surprised me at that age, in my last year of college, and it still surprises me now how hard it is to find someone who will truly play with you. Who will commit to dropping everything on a regular basis to make, and enjoy, a moment of joy. Who sees it something like I do, that things are important and serious in life and that they are also a zen-nothingness, absurd, intangible, rice-paper-thin and dissolving and gone, threaded with death and receding into invisibility like a wind-thiefed balloon into the sky. It feels easy to play to me when I can see myself as really just an electronic battery icon, simultaneously living and generating while also depleting and running out. Living, and dying, at once.

Every single time T. ran at me and I ran at him I was happy and I think he was too. Every time we got to the crash and hold part I was also happy, and full, and I felt like I loved him simply and truly and he loved me back. I think he felt that way too. Its hard to imagine he would have kept doing the whole routine for as long as he was alive if he didn't. He would have known I would have wanted him to, but he didn't like me that much. 

It was three months from the last time we did a run and crash, when we spotted each other walking in different directions on Eddy St., to the moment he shot himself in the temple with a gun he had bought a few weeks earlier. By then I was gone and living in Seattle, and he had moved out of our apartment and was living with our mutual friend G. G. was the one who found him, in a pool of blood on his bed, and T. must have known it would be G. to find him. There weren't any other housemates at the time. G. was so angry about that, for a long time. The selfishness of T. doing that to him, leaving him with that image in his head. 

I don't know why he did that. Shot himself. I don't know what it was about. I still think about it a lot, 20 years later. He was a housemate and a friend. He wasn't a best friend, really. Our lives were really different and we only lived together for 6 months. But I did have a genuine love for him. And I know he loved me too. That's a lot, in addition to the run-and-crash, in 6 months. 

I think sometimes that I wish I had been more serious with him, that if I had been, I might have gotten a feel for something going on in his moods or thinking and that I might have been able to somehow influence him away from death and towards life. Affect his trajectory, directly or indirectly, and change the part of his future when he takes the gun he bought out of the trunk of his car, walks up the stairs, sits on the edge of his bed, puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. What would it take, how much would have had to have been different, to change that part? I don't know. I didn't know. I had no idea that his battery icon was outlined in red, that warnings were beginning to come up on the screen to plug the device in now before automatic shutdown and loss of data occurred. 

When G. called me to tell me T. died, I felt and I still feel undeserving that I got so much of T. in those last 6 months. He had a girlfriend, a sister, an ex-girlfriend, a mother, a best friend from grade school. But a lot of his time for those last 6 months of his life was with me in our apartment, teaching me how to make curry, showing me his collection of Japanese weapons and his comic books, making me heavy metal mix tapes to counteract what he saw as my terrible folksy taste in music, watching MTV with me late at night in our kitchen, sitting on the folded and duct-taped mattress that was our couch. And doing the run-and-crash. 

The truth is, I would like to run-and-crash just about everyone I love, and everyone I like. I would like to hurl a gallon of milk and a plastic bag with blueberries and a roasting chicken and a bag of pretzels sky-high and take off up my street doing the gallopy-hop. But at 40 years old I don't find there are a lot of takers. I think most people I know would be OK about it once, maybe. I think if I did it the way I would really want to do it, all in, they would find me to be what they consider a little abnormal. I might be. That's possible. My kids would do it. There are people I love who might participate, but they aren't here, and are all far away. 

Nothing is different, though. I still sometimes do mental run-throughs of run-and-crash with T. when walking around, as if he might be just around the next corner, and I need to be ready, even though he's been dead for 20 years. Twenty years later and that's still with me. That means something really good, I think. I still have the impulse to do it when I see someone I love, and I sometimes hug that person that way, and smell their necks, although I do it with discreet restraint, and I don't drop or throw anything up in the air beforehand. 

Nevertheless. Run-and-crash. And T. I still feel about all of it the same way. I still say, and think, and believe: joy. Joy. And death, too. 

Both, at the same time. 

Death

The body dies while it lives. My heart dies. 27% of my heart is dead, from infection. I thought we were watching West Wing reruns and recovering from weariness, my heart and I. I thought I was figuratively heartsick. Dear heart, sweetheart, I thought you were pounding in my chest like that just to shake me a little, just to say hi. I thought you were pounding and that you and I were full. Full hearts.

You weren't. You were resisting a mugging. You were slapping his hands away and yelling, really loudly. You were trying to run except you were tethered and chained in my chest.

A little bit of my heart is dead. No one broke it. It got sick, it died. Its how it happens.

Its not a euphemism. Its just viruses, being dead themselves, being elegant, being perfect at what they do. If you're going to strive for the highest possible level of consciousness while your ticker is still ticking, forget about mediation, yoga, certain books, certain music, certain things with certain people.

Fall in love with a virus instead. I did. A virus stole my heart. A piece of my heart.

All is fair in love. I don't know yet about war.

Untitled

One time, Jared asked me to come to a function at the house he lived in. He had advantages, living in that house. He was special for living there and he was probably special all on his own, though I don't remember, or possibly I never knew, what it was about him that made that so.

He was from California. He had great hair. He was charmingly nervous underneath his coolness, adaptability, and intelligence. I was...I don't know what I was. I was 19 years old. I didn't own a dress. I borrowed someone's plum-colored cotton sheath in a size two sizes too big for me. I had some white satin ribbon, I'm not sure why. I tied a cord of it around my throat and I sewed some of it to my shoes and wound it around my ankles. I put my hair up. That's how dressing up still goes pretty often for me. I think its safe to say now that I'm not the girl with the right thing to wear, or the ease. I don't hate it, or mock it. It just moves away from me, like same-poled magnet ends.

He liked the way I looked. He liked me well enough although he did all the talking. He liked, I think, my listening. I think I can now and could then listen so hard that it would knock you out. Its not my party trick or my thing. Its not my way in or my way of getting you to stop thinking about you, while you're talking about you, and instead notice me.

Its just what I would like to do, usually. I'm generally interested. I'd like to know you, usually. And also it works with my shyness. That hasn't changed. I do now have a dress appropriate to each season that fits, and shoes and some jewelry that will go with it. Its 20 years later, and now I have something to wear that I don't have to sew an hour before I get picked up. It seems like a grown-up thing to arrange for myself that makes me feel a little better. It alleviates the background anxiety a small amount, to have that in place, and to know its in place. I don't want to have the outfit for you, so that you like the way I look. I just don't want to have to find something to borrow and then sew on it to make it OK. Its for me.  It gets it out of the way.

Anyway, that night we listened to a famous newsman give a speech. We had a glass of wine and we held hands and we had a small kiss goodnight after sitting for a long time afterwards in his musty basement apartment, him smoking weed, me in the beanbag chair, him talking, me listening, with party lights on and ska music playing. Then I got a ride home with a friend and the friend and I had a small kiss goodnight with the car idling, the dashboard lights on, the radio playing the college station. He liked the dress too, and especially the choker ribbon.

I walked into my dormitory and waited for the friend's car to pull away. I think back on that, and I thank fucking god for the world without a smartphone just then, no texts, no pings, no notifications, no nothing. Just watch someone pull away in secrecy, from a room with the light turned off on purpose, and when they're gone, they're just actually really gone, and its over. Its done, its ended, its over. And you can say, OK, and goodbye to that whole thing.

I waited a few minutes and then I walked down the hill through a cemetery that was there. I found a particularly soft spot in front of a very old slate headstone, worn and illegible, under a pine tree, cobbled with mounds of pincushion moss. I laid down and untied the ribbon at my throat, ripped the ribbons off my shoes. Rubbed my neck a little. Put an arm back bent under my head. Looked at the stars through the pine branches. Was alone. Felt comfortable.

Listened to the wind in the pine branches overhead, and the murmur of voices going on up the hill.

Untitled

I remember that Lara and I used to go to the rock quarries to dive. We were 12, then 13, then 15. We didn't go the year we were 14, because that was the year that Lara's dad was always drunk, and pissing out by the pool because he couldn't make it to the house. Lara and I would cling to the edge of the pool in the deep end, with the very ends of our fingertips, heads as low in the water as we could get them, silent as we could be, hoping not to be seen. We didn't go to the rock quarries that year because Lara's mom was always screaming at her dad and then crying alone in her bedroom, and neither of us felt like being around her, but we also didn't think we could leave her. So we just hung out in the margins of the house and tried not to be seen.

At 12 and 13 we just did pencil dives, banana split dives, nothing head first. Then we were watching some TV show and one of the characters did a huge swan dive off a cliff and into the ocean. We were hooked. It took us hundreds of jumps and watching and commenting on each other to figure out how to do it. We never quit on it, even when each of us took a couple of turns almost killing ourselves at it. We got scared but we never stopped doing it. We did it every single day all that summer. I don't know what it was for her, but for me it was that long trajectory of so much relaxation, in the midst of so much simple and elegant control. An arc, like life, and then a good death.

Those rock quarries were so shitty. Little caves here and there in the woods full of graffiti and empty beer cans and broken glass. Poison ivy. Scrubby oak trees, hard little well-worn foot paths crisscrossing all over. Low stone walls running at angles with each other. Hardly any birds at all.

There were three pits in the quarries. Two were too narrow to swim or dive in. The third one was huge and square. A small cliff above that you could edge out on to get up and over it. Black-green water, freezing cold, never in the sunlight. Not a trace of frog or lily pad or bullrush or anything alive at all. An old knotted prickly rope that someone had tied to a tree draped over the quarry edge and just touching the surface of the water, the only way to get out once having gone in, hand over hand to haul yourself up the side.

We would walk to Lyman's pharmacy and buy a roll of the thickest medical tape they had. Sometimes it would be papery, sometimes plasticky, and sometimes kind of silky. It was always white. When we got to the quarries we would drop our shorts and pull off our shirts and hang them over tree branches. We always had our bathing suits on underneath, already. Then we would tape up our wrists as tight as we could stand it, until they were nearly rigid. We would rip the tape with our teeth to cut the ends.

When you hit the water, your hands would be in front of you, one hand grabbing the opposite wrist to brace it for the impact. And without the tape you would be guaranteed a mild sprain by the end of a few dives, from the force of the water snapping your wrist back, no matter how much you braced for it.

I remember that. I remember that perfect. The overcast sky and the too-still woods. Standing at the very edge of the cliff and looking into that opaque water. Being scared and happy and a little sad at the same time. Then bending your knees as deep as you could, and trying to pop up fast and hard and out. And then not feeling any feelings at all.

Falling and spreading arms as far out as they would go. Flying. Nothing but nothing, air, chest, lungs, arms, fingers fanned and extended and splayed like flight feathers. Thighs and ankles squeezing so hard together.

Popping your eyes open, searching for the water. There. Fast fast fast arms forward, head down, chin tucked, shoulders against ears, left hand grabbing tape on right wrist, grabbing and squeezing and making both arms into one, making a blade out of your fingers.

Then the shock of impact, and another shock of cold, and another shock at the deepness and the dark. Waiting for the dive to stop, underwater. Resisting the urge to kick for the surface, because you can't see the surface, and because you don't know where up is. Rising panic with air hunger as you wait to neutralize, then rise, showing you where is up. And then kicking and kicking for up. Swimming for the rope, scraping feet on the sheer vertical rock while hand-over-handing. Then watching Lara go, standing wet and shivering with dirty feet.

I remember that, although nothing in my life now should bring it to mind. No quarries, no shitty woods, no drunks and crying and pissing, no cliffs, no being 15 with a bathing suit on underneath clothes. It comes back exactly though, everything about it, usually when I'm driving a long drive. I remember the feel of the swanning, arms out and chest and heart bared, and it still makes me feel happy, and a little bit sad, and not really scared anymore.

And when I get out of the car, I sometimes will reach for my right wrist with my left hand, and brace it. I'll brace it when I'm talking to someone about something big or sad, or when I am alone in the basement and its cold, or under the table when everyone is having drinks and laughing very loud. It calms me to do that. To take care of myself, in that one little way, even now.

The Lupus

Ouch! My fingers are so stiff, my wrists and ankles are hot and painful, I've had a fever for more than a week that doesn't respond to Tylenol or anything else. My head hurts and spins when I move, and I wake up most nights in a puddle of cold sweat. I feel worn out and worn thin from all of the above.

Who knows how long this flare will last? I don't know and from what I've been reading and reading this week no one else will either.

But this evening a nice thought comes. I can still do just as much as I was recently wanting to do. I will have to adjust and do it differently. And who knows? Its an unplanned, unsought change, but maybe it will be the thing that in hindsight was a freaking gift. Its hurts a little to type: I become less wordy, always a comment I get in anything of mine that gets edited. I quibble less and become more decisive. I make better choices in content and subject because it hurts and I'm not very comfortable and if I'm going to make the effort I'm going to get to the point and its going to have to be worthwhile. No dithering. Better judgment.

That might not be such a bad thing. Also, fevers can make you kind of floaty and dreamy. Aren't we always reading about some incredible work done at a fever pitch, in a feverish state, with great heat? That doesn't sound like a bad precondition for poetry and prose alike.

At least it has such a nice name. Lupus, Latin for wolf, for the malar rash that in the first observed cases some theorized looked like a wolf-bite to the face.

At least I don't have a wolf-bite to the face. That would be worse.

People with lupus call themselves loopies. That works for me too.

Lupus! Welcome to BSD. Let's make friends, and have a really good time.