the brick wall that holds you

Montréal // September 24, 2024

Mom is trying to sell the house again. She’s packed up all my things and donated half my wardrobe. I’m not pressed, this was inevitable. Dad needs to retire at some point and the house is filled with empty bedrooms. It makes sense. It still sucks. Mom said something like “It’s not the house that makes the memories, but the people.” Something like that. I said, “The house helps.” And she’s right. And I’m right. But, the house is still there. Somewhere.

About a month ago, when I was last in Atlanta, I remembered my ex girlfriend and how we had sex in the car and in my bed and on my couch sometimes too. I remembered her bed in her childhood bedroom and the way her hair covered her birthmark on her cheek and all of that and more. We were at the end of our run as teenagers and trying to cram in all of the memories by the end of the fourth quarter. We rushed to have sex, to fall in love, to fall out of love, to break up. In that order. When I was home last month, I searched for a Polaroid I took of her. I just wanted to see if it still existed. It didn’t and it doesn’t. Instead, I found a small notebook, the size of a pack of gum filled with drawings and poems and stuff like that. She gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday. It had some poems in there that gave me chills. She gave me chills all the time. We had a suicide pact type relationship. 

I remember painting together in the park, two trees over a purple background. Her tree was so much better than mine. I’m awful at painting. After we broke up I woke up in the middle of the night, pulled out a hunting knife I hid in my drawer and cut the painting out of the canvas frame. I don’t know why. It just felt like it needed to happen. I still have it rolled up somewhere, unless Mom threw it out. Maybe I woke up one night and burned that Polaroid. She was in her bra. So strange how we loved like that. So strange how we loved and didn’t know anything. That’s probably why we fell in love. We had nothing to lose. Suicide pact type love. Romeo and Juliet shit. I try not to think about it. Her boyfriend kind of looks like how I looked when she and I first met. That makes me laugh a bit and I feel this little pain in my chest. Have you ever seen a heart beat? Like, really seen the heart going at it from outside the context of the rest of the body? It works so hard. The muscle of the organ is freaking the fuck out at all times. The second it stops, it's over. The moment blood no longer reaches your brain, you’re pretty much dead. Romeo and Juliet shit. Suicide pact shit.

Mom sent me a picture of a card my childhood best friend made me when I was eleven. It’s blue with a little house made of cut up construction paper pasted on the inside. It says, “I can’t wait for you to sleep at my” and there’s an arrow pointing to the little colorful house. I was too afraid to sleep at other people’s houses for all of my childhood, but my other friend was in the last stages of terminal brain cancer and I wanted to go stay with him at his mountain house. I slept in the same bed as my parents until I was nine and moved to the couch at the foot of their bed. I needed to be able to hear their breathing. This card was given to me to encourage me to do a “practice sleep over” at my best friend’s house. Kids are perfect, you know. There was another card. Blue like the first. “I new you could do it!”

So we’re on the phone, Mom and I, and I feel like crying now. I’m still scared to spend the night at other people’s places. It feels compromising, like anything could happen. I haven’t had sex in a long time. I look at my bed and say, “That’s a cold, cold bed.” And I’m right. The bed is cold.

Mom found another note. This one was from my brother. “I love you so much mommy.” She’s crying on the phone now. Everyone’s busy. Everyone’s got stuff to do. So when I say it gets worse, I don’t mean that it’s all over. I’m just saying that and only that. It gets worse.

I used to lift weights everyday. I loved the feeling of the lactic acid streaming through my muscles. The headrush when I’d try to deadlift something thirty pounds passed my max. Pushing my body to the limit like that. That’s what it’s all about. I’d put my noise canceling headphones on and pump iron like a true stoic. I just run now. The extremes of life lose a lot of their appeal once you've seen someone truly burnt out. No one looks at a damp old campfire and says, “I wish I was on fire.” No one says that. Best you can ask for is a little warmth.

I wrestled for years. There was something perfect about it. The way we’d use every millimeter of our bodies to conquer our opponent. The rules of the game made everything more fun too. You couldn’t just grab at whatever. We’re civilized animals. I miss the contact, guys pressed up against me like that, pulling my limbs into strange contortions. I miss the way we’d look into each other’s eyes like, “I’m going to fucking kill you,” and we meant it out of love. Sportsmanship is love and love is spiritual, that is for sure. Our team was small, so sometimes I’d have to wrestle up a couple weight classes against guys significantly larger than me. One of these times, my opponent was this guy maybe eight inches taller and twenty pounds heavier. That’s a lot of inches and pounds when you’re fourteen. We got into position at the center of the mat and the big guy, the man, the overgrown teenager, lunged at me, grabbed at my right leg and took me down to the mat with a thud. I heard a crack and then felt a crack. Icy pain shot from my right shoulder to my neck and I knew I was totally fucked. The guy didn’t let up. How could he? This was life or death afterall. He spun me around, my body mostly limp, and held me briefly in his arms and legs. I was completely taken. Once he’d pinned me a few seconds later, I stood up, shook his hand, looked at my right shoulder and collapsed onto the mat. He’d broken the fuck out of my shoulder. It was like all the way out of the socket, rendered completely useless. I was in a sling for a while after that. I remember my coach asked me if I could cut weight for the finals. I lost maybe ten pounds in a week. My friend and I would go run sprints in sweat suits and eat one full meal a day. We’d do pushups in his sauna. I wrestled on a barely healed shoulder. I got second in my weight class and took home a medal with two guys “locking up” in some bronze. Their arms were wrapped around one another’s heads and their backs were parallel with the ground. A true animal pose. True athletics.

It’s been a year since the Australian guy. Him and I had sex once and went out only a few times. He fed me a flower he found in a street side flower bed. He drew me a diagram of the flower. He drew a stupid little fish on my fridge door white board. I remember I asked him what his favorite things were. He said, “Magnets. Ocean.”

“How did magnets make the top five?”

“Stfu.”

It took me six months to throw away the back of his earring he left in my bed. Took me even longer to erase the fish drawing.

I talked to my friend this morning about the anniversary and how things linger like this. They said, “Loving him must have been like loving a brick wall that holds you sometimes.”

A brick wall that holds you sometimes.

The flower diagram.

I don’t think he thinks about me. I mean, it’s been a year. A whole year. He’s probably married by now or maybe he’s dead. I have no way of knowing. I looked up his name and “obituary" and found nothing. Maybe he’s writing about me like how I write about him. So, it gets worse, yeah. It gets worse because things just keep going and that means they get worse. Everything trends towards worse. I know this because I’m listening to shitty emo again. So that means it’s getting worse. Mom and Dad will sell the house. The memories will go away. I can already feel it, that diffusion of meaning into nothing. Everyday life becomes everyday and we forget what it felt like to be totally destroyed. I see people on dating apps saying stuff like “Fuck up my life.” Fuck up my life. 

Fall is coming soon. There’s a little bird tapping on my window. I wonder if he knows it’ll be cold in a matter of days. Enjoy that sun. Let it burn your skin a bit. The future isn’t promised. It’s just the opposite. We’re lucky every second. Ha. I know it sounds crazy, but it gets worse, trust me. If you kill yourself, it’ll be because everything is way too amazing.