jellyfish two
Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well. I am writing from Atlanta. Here is jellyfish, from August 22, 2022.
What a strange place. You need a car to get anywhere, but driving couldn’t possibly be more dangerous than it is here. Sure, I lived here for 18 years, but it feels like a different city since I’ve moved to Montréal.
A few friends have come and visited, but the house is empty now. My parents are abroad and have left me alone with the cat. He’s gray, relatively small, and very needy. We saw a bat last night on the back porch. He meowed but more squeaked honestly and patted his little paws on the window. It was night (bats) so the cat could probably only see his reflection. I remember when I was a child I thought only humans could see our own reflections. I figured mirrors worked a lot more like paintings than mirrors. Light was just paint so everything was intentional I guess.
Two of my friends and I drove down from Atlanta last week to visit my grandmother in south Florida. She lives in this impossibly wealthy Jewish compound deep in the heart of suburban hell. She lost her husband recently, my (step) grandfather, and mourned with a facelift more expensive than most new cars. The drive was easy when we split it three ways. It’s mostly familiar “abortion is murder” billboards, personal injury lawyers smiling down, pecan shops, roadside attractions, plantations, historic whatevers, destroyed forests, toppled towns, all sorts of grease and sweat. My grandmother greeted us with a conversation about student protests, their futility and dangers. We nodded along because she was clearly made of nothing more than fear and love and we knew there was nothing we could do to untangle this impervious post-Holocaust knot of grief, confusion, hatred, everything. She grew up in a small town in North Carolina. The one where Pepsi was invented. Her dad owned the town, but she says they weren’t wealthy. I think what she means is that he wasn’t born wealthy. Wealth, to the truly wealthy, has nothing to do with money. She moved to Florida for obvious reasons (love, sun, family, money, heat – in that order) and was found by my dead grandfather. He spoiled her and she loved him with everything she had in her (a lot). I think she’s a lot like a furnace. Warms rooms, burns down houses. I love her dearly.
She took my friends and I out to a restaurant we will never be able to afford. I chose a wine off the menu, something less than $100 for a bottle, and we toasted “le chaim” because my grandmother and I both cling to this collection of things we call Judaism. I had some clams in some pasta. It kind of had no flavor, but I could tell what I was supposed to like about it was that it was simple. I don’t like clams at all, but I force myself to eat seafood when I go to nice places because it feels like the thing I’m supposed to do. I was raised to simultaneously respect and laugh at all of the rules of hospitality, the ones which govern every aspect of high middle-class, low upper-class life. Shake hands. Always. Eye contact. Always. Pick up your date, cover the tab, tip, never go outside in sweats unless you are on a run, always converse with everyone. Civility has always been something to perform for the sake of it, but also something to laugh at and break from under specific circumstances. Premarital sex, for one, was never really shunned in my family, but any relationship lasting less than five months is considered a fling. And flings aren’t classy. Have sex all you want, but do it with your partner who you will marry. Strange.
My grandmother cried when I told her I had to leave a day early. She said, “Well that’s no good.” I could tell I had reinforced some insecurity growing inside her. I’d sprayed cold water on the icicle, let it grow, jab at her insides. It must be hard to stay alive when your lover is dead. I imagine life has to be figured out all over again, all the manuals for being made useless and everything leading towards something totally unknown and unknowable. (Not death, loneliness). See, we can’t know ourselves. We can only know what we know about ourselves. So we create these little painted mirror things, not reflections, feedback really, to try and approximate our form. I lay on the beach in Florida. The sun burns my skin, my heart beats into the air, seagull sound, wind, wave crash, etc. I’m almost alone. I stand up because my body hurts from being awake and I leave an impression in the sand. Something like a body. Something like a form. That’s either me or what I’m supposed to be. I can’t quite tell. My grandmother says my dead grandpa is in heaven praying I will become a doctor. I spin the wine in my glass, take a sip. Watery at first, then sweet, then salty. I try to coat my whole palette, but I’m no good at drinking wine. Grandmother is telling me I’ll make a wonderful doctor. She’s tearing up. I’m thinking about my grandfather's body. She is too. My friends are smiling and staring at nothing. They’re uncomfortable by default. I’m at the aquarium. Jellyfish in front of me. They float, don’t move. Someone once told me that jellyfish aren’t alive. “Technically alive”, he said, to be exact. I don't know what it means to be “technically alive”. Being alive has something to do with floating. The beach is back. My friend is telling me about the water. He says it’s cold and I think that’s kind of funny because the whole world feels so, so hot right now. Grandmother says she eats to live. She hates food, fears it. I want to say I live to eat, but sometimes I’m not sure if I’m totally alive.
A friend of mine got engaged. I met him when I was twelve and he was eleven. He was tiny and I was huge. He was brown and I was white. Muslim and Jewish. Neither of us were funny, but we made everyone laugh. I was uncomfortable with the whole concept of being alive. I was about a year from drugs and a few more from sex. Gore was my thing at the time. He got engaged to a wonderful woman who doesn’t speak much. They talk the same way, regardless, so I guess she kind of speaks through him. That’s an apology.
I hosted an impromptu engagement party at my parents’ house and the new fiancé invited 75 of his closest friends. Something around that number showed up. The vast majority of them were students at Georgia Tech. They talked non stop about their internships in the Bay Area and used words more akin to arcane language than anything resembling the kind of academic jargon I usually encounter in these semi-formal collegiate things. Another old friend showed up at the party. He was the one I’d watch gore with in sixth grade. He was also smaller than I was then and I think I scared him a lot but he loved me because his life was in shambles all the time and I told him that absolutely nothing mattered. We played this fun game where we’d try to find the most fucked up video on the internet. Lots of suicides, car crashes, shootings, the like. We had almost every class together and we both hated school and loved porn. I don’t think he was even sexually attracted to anyone yet, he was pre-pubescent. But, he loved the allure, the risk of it all. Or maybe he was just afraid of me.
We sat outside on the porch and he told me about all his friends at the University of Alabama. They’re all dying and not doing a very good job at it. He’s roommates with one of my childhood best friends who is apparently addicted to coke and never leaves their apartment. He said he never sleeps in his bed. Instead, he blacks out the living room windows with blankets and sleeps on the couch with the TV on. He’s too wired and depressed to let the dog out, so it shits in what was supposed to be his bedroom. My old friend, let’s call him Walker, describes Tuscaloosa as a “scary, scary place”. He loves it. I think that’s something we have always had in common: attraction to morbidity, something carnal and counter-primal. We love the shit we’ve been told to fear. I loved him for many years. Only ever as a friend and companion. He scared me in high school because he’d drink too much and drive his truck. His heart was always broken and his parents made him miserable. He doesn’t speak to his dad anymore. Money was never the problem. It was everything else. He apologized for being a burden to me in high school. I told him I was a terrible person. We both laughed and I wanted so badly to hug his eleven year old self, hold him and tell him to please take care of himself and to never talk to me again.
Walker and I chatted for maybe half an hour about some of my childhood friends he’s at school with. They seem to all be doing terribly in about the same way as his roommate: cycle of coke, booze, grief, onwards. One of the childhood friends who used to be particularly funny, Walker said he’s done so many whippets his hands shake all the time. He has to play with these fidget toys constantly to try and train whatever’s left of his motor functions. When my sister’s ex died, all his friends spiraled. This guy was his closest. It’s all connected. Some of them plateaued near narcotics and therapy, but most continued down. It broke my heart, hearing about my old friends, these guys I used to look up to, worship even, bottoming out, destroying their bodies. It made me think about how I’m maybe the same, but with somewhere to put it all. I’ve got the same wounds I guess. Maybe that’s wrong. It’s ridiculous to see my life as a tragedy. It’s all been handed to me.
The party went on too late. There was confetti everywhere. The beer sucked and that was my fault I guess. The fiancés lingered alongside a few other stragglers. I wanted them to leave because I was tired and confused about the weird mix of pride and sorrow I felt after the conversation with Walker. I said, “Alright guys, it’s getting late.” and “I’m exhausted'' and “I think we should wrap this up,” but the guests couldn’t seem to take the hint. They continued playing cards, chatting away, and told me goodnight, see you later, thanks for hosting. I guess they expected to just stay the night at the house. I mean, that’s what we usually did, but things are different now. I’m an angrier person and I’m terrified of everything. My friend asked me what’s wrong and I said, “It’s been a difficult…six months,” and kind of fell out the door. I stood outside and stared at the house. Crickets, thick air. It had rained earlier. I couldn’t see into the dining room where they were playing cards because the humidity made the windows fog up. I traced the lights with my one good eye. The house has these bright yellow bulbs pointed up at the bricks so that at night the house is illuminated in a kind of daunting way. Like how a kid points a flashlight up to his chin when telling a scary story. Like that, but a house. My eyes went red and I was at the beach, at the dinner table, counting grains of sand in the hairs on the back of my head, jellyfish floating. I felt nothing but anger. I’m sure jellyfish aren’t alive. Nothing with a heart knows how to live in peace.