guys go missing

October 16, 2024 / Montréal

I’ve been looking for patterns in things. I sent my friend a text. 

“Poem while running:

cave walls

i origins

schizo posting leaves (like from trees) fibonacci spiral homer simpson backflip 

this is perennial this is in the in between 

is this all there is no you can line it all up and make something new”

I’m not sure where to locate any of this. 

It’s been a year since we met. There is something gentle in the gesture, a message sent with no reply. That is the pattern I’m looking for. That’s the alphabet I’m creating. It’s one of gestures, waves without a shore, a joke for no audience. Something like that, at least.

October again. It’s been a year. Guys disappear. They go missing. In national parks, under bridges, in rivers and oceans, sometimes in cities. Guys go missing all the time. Every time I see my friends it’s “I haven’t seen you in weeks.” I’m sorry, I’ve been in the national park under the bridge in the river in the ocean in the city. I’ve been missing. I’ve been looking for patterns, remember.

Here’s the best we can do:

We meet in a bar, probably one with weird lighting. I’ve got sweat on my brow and you’re six inches taller than me. We have that kind of boyish rapport. You make fun of me and I punch your shoulder. “Fuck off man.” Something like that. We’re laughing. Maybe a bit too much. Someone I barely know emerges from the crowd.

“Hey it’s good to see you man.”

“Oh shit. You too.”

I introduce you like we’ve known each other for years. Your eye meets mine at the corner. Pattern.

The music is muffled. It’s a low hum. It’s like packed snow. My head is underwater, in a way, and your hand is playing with your jeans.

My hand makes its way to your shoulder, down your back, around your hip like it was always meant to be there.

The bar is empty. We’re dancing alone. The last dance at prom. Dancing in the quiet kitchen late in the night. My hand in yours, yours in mine. You can see over my head, but you choose to bury your face in my hair.

A year goes by. 

What if one of us goes first? 

The best we can do is die at the same time.

I’m projecting my love. I’m projecting my heart onto the sand dunes. I’m getting all blurred up. I’m homogenizing.

November 2020

I’ve been going to concerts again. Live music makes my hips move. I used to wear ear plugs to concerts to protect my hearing, but now I just let the guitars crash through. It all kind of turns into white noise, the cymbals, guitars, bass, vocals. The audio spectrum is a rectangle. One massive white structural effusion. Fluids inseparable from tissue. When I get there, to that white noise, I see flashes. I can’t help but think about a video of a man blowing his head off with a 12 gauge shotgun. He puts the barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his big toe. There’s a flash, a bang, a splatter, a liquidy trickle and then total silence. There it is, that white noise.

Someone told me love is that moment you forget about death. You look into the beloved’s eyes and see something that goes on forever. But, when I see the back of your head I think about blowing mine clean off.

Someone told me love is something that can only be identified by those who have felt it. So then love is a feeling. There’s no hierarchy to it. It’s just love or everything else. This same someone told me she doesn’t understand how I use the word “love” in my writing. I think it’s because I don’t see love as a feeling. It’s a thing in a kind of Platonic sense, I guess. I don’t know it. If you put love in front of me, I’d blink twice out of confusion. I can’t recognize it. I just know the experience of it, but that experience, what I know of love, is not love. It’s the experience of diffusive love. A byproduct of it, maybe.

I matched with a 27 year old doctor on Tinder about a year ago. We talked for only a few hours as I passively scrolled through his profile. I saw a beautiful face in black and white, scattered around photos of waterfalls and towering trees. 

Caption:

 “It’s been a year. I miss you more everyday. I will love you forever.”

So he’s dead and I’m crying. They fell in love in university at the same age I was then, 21. They’d met at a bar. Cancer killed him fast. It started somewhere innocuous and spread to his brain. It’s terrifying how cancer moves. Cancer moves.

The doctor posts photos of waterfalls now. He bought a cabin in rural Quebec. When I asked how he’s doing, he said, “I’m not looking for love.”

I’m not looking for love. It rains down when you close your eyes.

It’s been a year and this has never been about you.

I remember my old friend Grant. He’d spend hours drawing shapes and writing poems and song lyrics on printed out photos of sexy women. He’d developed an obsession with this one Russian woman. She had the physiognomy of a doe and the body of a waif. He’d print out photos of her almost naked and cover her body in sketches of guns and buildings, little ghosts and cartoon explosions. He’d scribble poems into the white space. Mostly stuff about obsession. Some lyrics from rap songs.

He called me late one night crying. He was shouting some shit into the phone, but I could only hear the rush of cars passing by. He said something something something something, “I’m gonna fucking run into the fucking road.” And so he did it. And the cars stopped. All of them. He drew me a sketch of it, him standing there in the middle of the road, cars all around him. No one honked, they all just stared at this kid, no more than sixteen, with long hair and bright green eyes standing still, breathing heavily in the middle of the road. I was still on the other end of the phone. I could hear his breathing. He wanted me there when he did it.

He sent me a text the next morning apologizing. He said, “I don’t know what was up with me bro.” This is how we talked about big things. I told him, “Suicide is played out.” I really said that. “It’s corny as fuck. Ever since Logic made that ‘1-800’ song.” He laughed kinda and we smoked backwoods in the forest behind my house later that day, rap music playing softly out of his fucked up phone speaker.

His obsession with that Russian girl got worse. He started messaging her random shit everyday. She wasn’t a celebrity, just some Russian girl he found on Instagram. She had like 800 followers. She blocked him on every account he sent messages from, but he just made more and more accounts. He sent her photos of his drawings, his pulpy splatter porn, visual poetry. She opened every message, never said a word. I don’t know if she could read English. He gifted me a massive painting for my eighteenth birthday. He poured coffee all over the canvas, painted some blobby colors here and there, and wrote out a whole monologue from Donnie Darko. Frank, the rabbit, stared at me from the center of the piece. I put it up on my wall.

We’d go to punk shows together and mosh like atoms colliding. Like water molecules when you heat them up. I’d catch his eyes from across the pit. Anger. He was smaller than me and weak. He went wherever the mosh took him. Flash photo. Shotgun to the head. He showed me that video. We’d smoke in the woods and go to punk shows.

My friends are all having sex. I want to get in a fight. I want to walk into a mirror store and ask, “Where am I?”

Maybe:

Love is that thing across the pit. Love is that thing all over the Russian girl’s face. Love is that thing in the shotgun shell. Love is that thing in the camera flash. Love is that thing in the white noise. Love is that thing in the middle of the road, cars all stopped, everything is quiet. Love is that quiet. It’s really that quiet.