treadmill life
Hey! I hope you are all doing well. The clouds came back.
Content warning for mentions of other person’s suicide and self harm. Also brief mentions of eating disorders. I’m doing just fine.
I have somehow found myself unable to study or write papers. I can hardly even read. I spent the entire day yesterday biking around the city, collecting antiques, and running on the mountain. Admittedly, it was a lovely day. I decided today I would get some solid work done on a paper I have to turn in in two days. Needless to say, that did not work out as intended. I’m writing this laying on a couch in the back of one of the smaller libraries at my university. The room is still, lit with white fluorescent overheads. I have enough caffeine in me to keep my head just above the water.
Life is so good from afar. I think this is all there is. There are no greener pastures.
I think it’s time I admit I am lonely. It feels like a failure. I’m surrounded by people asking to love me. They get close enough to see the brush strokes and I pull away. I learned there are three kinds of love. Companionate, compassionate, and romantic. It is apparently natural for humans to search for all three kinds. I let none of it in. I want to tell you a story.
When I was thirteen, I would spend my nights on Skype calls with friends and strangers. I was friends with this one man who must have been in his late teens. We got along in that we both stayed up late enough to fall asleep on Skype together. We talked mostly about music, video games, and other innocuous subjects, but I remember eventually he started to open up to me about his suicidality. At the time we didn’t call it “mental health”, we called all of it “depression”. He had no friends in real life; I had only a few. I remember, even at thirteen, I was getting fairly desensitized to talk about suicide, self harm, eating disorders. He began sending me images of his wrists all cut up and red with blood. I got somewhat disturbed by the time he started telling me how he planned to kill himself. I told him to knock it off and that I didn’t want to hear him talk about that shit. He told me he has no one else to tell, so I figured God, this must be what it’s like to have a best friend and allowed him to go on detailing his ideal death. He told me he wanted to take a bunch of pills while listening to Burial. I told him he should get a therapist and he said he had no money, so I said nothing. Only a few months after meeting him, we were on a Skype call late at night when he broke into tears. He told me he was really going to do it this time. At first I didn’t know what he meant, but then I heard the pills rattle. Neither of us had ever used our webcams. We had known one another by voice and profile picture alone and called one another by our respective aliases. That’s just how things were back then. I heard the pills rattling and I figured he was trying to play some sick joke, so I laughed because what else would a thirteen year old do but laugh? I remember he said, “Fuck it” and left the call. He sounded entirely uninterested. I never heard from him again. I was told he died later that night, painfully and slowly. Apparently he had taken enough of his grandmother’s prescription pain meds to bring him to the edge of death, but his body kept him alive for several hours despite his mind’s wishes. He lived in a small one bedroom apartment with his bed-ridden grandmother. He slept on the couch in the living room. I believe his grandmother was hard of hearing, so he could say or do what he wanted. I was told they found his body when his grandmother woke up the next morning and awaited her daily medication and breakfast from her grandson.
This is the kind of terror that can only exist in the 21st century. I remember trying to find out what his real name was or where he lived so I could call the police or do anything at all. For all I know, he could still be alive. The stories about his death were only rumors, but given his obsession with suicide, there is really no telling.
It’s been days now. Maybe weeks. I am done with exams. Mom came to visit and helped me move into my new apartment. I moved to a new building further from campus, alone. The opposite of where I have spent the last eight months, an ancient, crumbling victorian townhome filled with my friends, cracks in the walls, swollen floors, barred fire escapes. I’m ready to breathe in something clean again.
While moving in, Mom invited me to come stay with her in the Fairmont downtown. I spent the mornings and evenings of the next few days sitting with Mom in the lounge on the 21st floor. In the mornings the servers would bring cappuccinos to our table overlooking the city while Mom and I ate decadent assortments of fruit and charcuterie. My life tends to oscillate between decrepit foraging and utter luxury. When my friend died last year, Mom came to visit and she stayed at the same hotel. Her and I befriended Nick and Giorgio, the two servers who worked from six to ten at night. Nick recounted his days as a jazz saxophonist, insisting I must continue my studies in jazz piano. Giorgio constantly offered to take photos of Mom and I. He said what we were doing was so good. He told me to enjoy what time I have with my mother and not to worry too much about my studies. I smiled and agreed and felt that this man was seeing in me something that did not exist. A kind of youth that I lost. It is reflected in the bags under my eyes, my thinning hair. A totaled car is still a car, but it cannot drive.
Giorgio showed us photos of his two sons the first time we met him. Months later, the other night, Mom asked Giorgio how his family is doing. He choked up. He told us he has been going through a tough time. He said he has been taking care of his dad for nine months now but he is dying. He’s losing his memory. He doesn’t want to eat or drink or talk or do anything. After Giorgio’s mother died during the pandemic, his father went into a depression. He said it’s hard to take care of yourself after being married for so many decades. He said, “It’s hard when you’re alone.”
“I just don’t want him to feel any pain.”
He said it again and again.
The cat is dying. I think we got him when I was four. He’s lost all his weight, just bones now. He spends the entire day drinking water. He’s sick, but does not know how or why. Mom said he’s not himself anymore. Most die slow and alone. We get confused and irritable. What we once knew as certain has become a question we are too tired to answer. We can find beauty in all things. See decay, see life. It is a rot collage, strokes toward immortality. We make symbols out of it. The totem, the prayer, the funeral. We write obituaries when we should be publishing the dead’s first words. “Ball,” “Dada,” “Mama.”
I see Mom’s back sloping toward the ground. Her neck holds weight in a way it did not used to. She spends her days exercising and doing skin treatments to fight gravity. I didn’t sleep in my own bed until I was ten. I used to dream of a bed so large it could fit my whole family. We hold on to the warmth like it will save our lives. My head on my mother’s chest. I can feel her heart beating. That is my heart. That is my chest. That warmth kept my brother alive for weeks. He was born purple, choked by his asthmatic lungs and umbilical noose. The doctors kept him in the Nicu until he looked human. Mom and Dad took him home and loved him back to life. He slept on my mother’s chest every night, her warmth keeping his blood circulating.
Giorgio insisted on taking photos of Mom and I sitting together. I think he saw her heart was exploding. I think he knew she was painting her mortality on the face of everyone she met, staring into the eyes of fifty-five with astigmatic vision. We used to find beauty in symmetry. I say we scream and see what echos back. Giorgio wants his father to die without suffering. There is a new lonely in waiting to die. Look up at the ceiling. Death tastes like metal in your mouth. Morphine tastes like sunscreen. Grandpa has become furniture. A dead body is a raft, a dying body just sinks. The bedroom of a cancer patient smells hopeless. My preacher friend often says, “God has bigger fish to fry.” God must be busy giving children cancer. Show me your worst fear. The scary movie shuts off and the screen is black. What do you see? At night, anyone can see into your home. The light coming from indoors reflects off the inside of the window, so all you see is a faded reflection, but anyone outside can see right in. The scariest part is that no one is ever looking. For how long could you go missing before someone noticed? That is how we decide worth. We all have that friend who stayed with their parents while the rest of us left at eighteen. He’s waiting for you to come back home. I wrote him a note. Where did it go?
It is a treadmill life. I can’t tell if I am a spectator or a specter. Run as fast as you can. Imagine fire. All you have are embers. Our world ends slowly. Stop writing about death, it is unbecoming. It is unbecoming. So, tell me what you are afraid of and I will show you architecture. Termites follow ballpoint pens. Hand the plate to the waiter and touch hands. We’re all men here.