farewell cycle

Montréal // December 4, 2024

There’s this game I like to play. You can do it too. It doesn’t have a name, but it has something to do with exploding all over the place.

I’m on a run. I do it often. Daily, even. Slow songs as I crest that hill, the one over the city. It’s not the peak, but it’s damn near close to it. Skyline emerging like a million little explosions caught in stasis. Iona texts me, “people can be so careless” and that message is projected over the skyline, the purple clouds kind of leaning out of the frame. This is night time. I try to take a photo. All those lights. I can’t capture whatever this is. I can’t capture the depth of it all. I try to take another photo, this time with my face right in front of the camera. It’s somehow even worse. I have no right to be seen here. I can’t get myself to smile. I think of sending this photo to my mom, but then, “people can be so careless” is projected over the sky, remember, and so it gets worse. This city, it’s slipping from me. I’m phasing between it. I’m that guy left behind. My self is stuck in the bathroom by the choir room in my old high school. I hear all my friends singing songs about saying goodbye. It’s 9am on a Thursday and I’m crying here in this bathroom. It sounds like a Christmas carol. It won’t snow this year. Four year farewell cycle.

I drank fourteen beers the other night and ended up in the emergency room. I’m running from a mood, a kind of something. So I drank fourteen beers and ended up in the emergency room. I tried to drink water and threw it up. I spent the day watching the sun set and vomiting all over the place. I called my mom and she said I needed to go to the hospital. I love the hospital. I couldn’t walk so I ordered a cab. I had to tell the guy to pull over three times so I could throw up on the side of the road. The streets were so quiet. No one around. Night time all day. The driver waited patiently as I heaved and groaned, wiped my mouth on my t-shirt and climbed back into the car. He dropped me off a good half-mile away from the hospital. I couldn’t walk, so I half-crawled, half-fell into the front entrance of the complex. To get to the ER I had to walk through the neurological trauma ward. I saw a dead guy on a stretcher and a nurse on her phone. I saw a couple crying and a needle on the floor. I saw a guy with electrodes on his scalp and a lady who couldn’t blink. I made it to the ER and the girls working the front desk are my age, early twenties. One of them is talking about “fucking some guy” and the other is watching videos in French on her phone.

My friend came and entertained me as I waited, dry heaving into a piece of tupperware. He took funny photos of me and laughed a lot. It made me feel more like a human. I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who do that.

After a few hours, a nurse takes me into Salle 009 and verbally pokes around. She wants to know how much I had to drink. “14 beers.” She says, “Oh that’s a lot.” Yeah. We’re inside but the sky is cloudy overhead. It’s dark, of course, but the whole city’s awake. Fourteen stories above street level, two kids wait for their nurse mom to return home. TV’s on. Something in French. The nurse asks, “Why’d you drink so many beers?” “I don’t know.” She leaves the room. A bigger, older lady comes into the room. “Did you learn your lesson?” “What lesson?” She laughs and sticks my arm with the IV. Friend’s taking a funny pic. Haha. I can feel the drip make its way through my veins. Just what I needed. I ask my friend, “Does it just all go into my blood?” “Yeah man.” He’s kind of laughing, but we both know what I’m really asking.

I’m on the mountain, by the little lake, taking a break from my run. Seagulls freaking out. Sky is all gray. Weirdly warm for mid November. Phone screen covered in rain. It’s getting more intense. I can hear it like white noise, little impacts on the water. Sirens in the way distance. Old man shuffling by. All things come back around. Looking at the ground, just enough rain to see the reflection of the branches overhead. Hair weighed down. It’s getting in my eyes. You know what I’m describing: the heart, the veins, circulation. The man I passed a moment ago passes me. The man in my phone apologizes for disappearing. This is a privilege. There is no agent here. This world beats like a heart.

The sky is clearing up a bit, the sun's last effort to show face before it sets too early, embarrassed. Legs covered in mud. I remember a scene from that one play some kids put on when I was in high school. I auditioned, but my eyes were so bad I could barely read the script. Those days I spent shaking. In the scene there’s a boy and a girl sitting on a bench. Teen angst, like the kind of electric current that runs between two hands four inches apart at the movie theater. The girl wants to say “I love you”, but can’t get it out. They’re talking about the stars instead. Something about how they never move. And then she says it. “I love you” (Beat. Boy Just stares at her. Beat. Boy looks away from her. Beat. And does not respond. Beat. She takes in Boy’s reaction, deflates, and then looks away from him, trying to figure out what has happened.) He scoots a few inches away from her. She says something about how, in a way, he’s getting closer. “Closer…closer…closer…” He’s off the bench now, he’s standing, he’s walking away, he’s off the stage.

You hold me. Yes, the clouds are still there, even this late at night. I shower and you’re dressed by the time I turn off the tap. We kiss and you take the last train home.

A love so good you know it can’t be for you. See, you’re this hole, this absence. Every friend group you’ve ever been in has a group chat without you in it. Every freak out, late night text, whatever, they remember them all. He remembers it all. You aren’t playing it cool. You can’t take it easy. Everyone knows this. It’s made clear the moment your neck twitches, you bite your lip a bit too hard and taste blood. They can taste it too.

So I’m looking in the mirror and I see nothing.

I used to sing this one song at the bar to an audience of 30ish drunk students. It’s Coldplay. Ha. I saw sparks. I remember singing that one to you.

Photo from my running route.

A guy died again. He did that thing where you die on purpose. A couple days later, my friend texted me, “My dog is getting old and I’m freaking out.” I started to write out a message about how watching a dog grow old is a real gift, but I saw dead bodies all over my laptop screen and looked down at my elbow to check on the bruises from the IV. Green and purple. I could still see where the needle went in. I was writing about all my dead dogs, how I laid my head on Sugar’s belly as her heart stopped beating. The tears just kind of happened all over my keyboard. I sent the message, made my way to the bathroom and collapsed onto the floor into quiet sobs and the psychological equivalent to dry heaving. Country slow dance playing in my headphones. It’s barely snowed this year. Just some stray flakes. Someone outside the bathroom door says, “These things take time.”

I think about my brother when I’m sad. I think about the missing years. The times we don’t talk about, when life and that other thing got all blurred up. When I dropped out of the school musical to go to the gym alone at midnight. I’d lift till failure, push the sled, carry seventy pound weights up six flights of stairs dozens of times. The men’s locker room closed at 11pm, but they never locked it. I’d go wade naked in the hot tub until 2am. Jerk off in the sauna. Weigh myself a few times. I read John Wieners and Richard Hugo those days. Frank Bidart too. Just the same few poems. Not much else. Shoegaze down the highway. Rain makes its way through the windshield. This is barely alive. This is barely living.

I think back on those nights when I think about my brother, when I think about death. I don’t care about that poem that says the world ends with a whimper. I don’t care about that poem that says the soft animal of our bodies. My friends had to pull me out of the bath. I was paralyzed by the distance between fear and expectation. None at all.