Youth

staring into the dirt and picking myself up a bloody tooth sat amidst the blades of grass where you pushed me; this is as far back as I can begin when it comes to you, when your name echoing around in my head finally bounces off a synapse and I am recalled suddenly to this moment, and I reach out for that tooth, which must now be in my palm, and continue upwards into your face, grinning, set against the green field and boundless sky behind you, which must have clouds, the sun in your eyes, and you walk me to a teacher,

and after recess I sat back down at my desk, and I must've thought about you, since I wrote about you, when I got home from school, in a notebook that's still up in that dusty attic buried with my departure and my mother's passing; it still impresses me now that I had a sort of grasp about writing, and feeling, at that young age to think to document you;

but I never knew how to ask the question, you know, that one question that would change everything and make us one, so that our friends could not utter your name without mine and mine without yours, and so I just basked in that feeling of trepidation, where every time I talked to you I knew there was something I had to do and I didn't do it- how amazing that felt, to ride the death drive, to watch as you found lovers and left them,

and eventually we both were off to live our own lives, and I found lovers and left them, but stuck in the back of my head was you, since each and every day, right in my hand, was a peephole right into your life, which I stared through from time to time:

one time I recall you were on a beach and I don't know particularly where, but it was overcast, and you were with your friends. and the strangest thing was that the whole thing felt as though it were indoors, even with the dunes of sand and the ocean behind you and the gray sky, it was all a sort of prison. I wasn't sure if it was my fault (ie. the God trapped by its object of worship), but it kept closing in, the invisible walls, as if to crush you, suffocate you, and I watched as your friend walked up to you and asked you about somebody she knew, and your quizzical look, and then her slap, and then the rest of her assault, and the rest of your friends rushing to break it up, and it kept getting narrower and narrower, amidst flashes of skin I saw your face, blood splattered under your nose, your mouth open, pores, creases,

then you were in a car, driving right along the road, one of those beautiful open roads lined with trees that probably were the epitome of our nation's dysfunction, which looked right out of a dream when the sun hit the horizon, and your face, damaged, shifted in and out of frame with the bumps of the road, and I watched your face the whole time, stern, obstinate, as you moved to wherever it was- his house, you got out of the car and went to him, but I couldn't see him, just you as you lay in his bed, your face against orange sheets, and it brought me to when we were young again at the beach: I saw your face impressed against yet another surface, that beautiful sunset- scarlet fading to pink and purple, the sun trickling across the water, something I'd seen dozens of times as a child but never understood how sublime it was until that very moment, I'm sure- the silhouettes of our friends out in the tide pool as we talked on the sand flats, and it's hard to know if I was tricked into loving you because of the scene that was set, if I believed this meant young love, but there it was anyways, and I talked without knowing what I was saying, since I felt something bursting forth from me that wanted to sweep up all of you and all that could come out was the foolish language I knew, and still you responded (what a miracle that was, that it always was),

and I was stuck with formless sentiment and feeling; or, seeking a form-- relapsing, seeing your face above mine, eyes closed, ecstasy, the pleasure only I could give you, only you could give me, until after (The comedown, the withdrawl, agonizing, lying in bed waiting for your message). The dead tan of my dingy room enclosed me and I couldn't leave and run into some presence that was all too reasonable and level-headed. The laughter echoed off the walls, but it got louder, which I knew was wrong, and I tried to hide from it, but it was omnipresent, I couldn't close my eyes or plug my ears or hide away under a blanket, it was there, the creeping feeling that something was wrong,

in the summer before we'd go off to school I went out with you and a couple of friends, with a camera, and realized I was the voyeur in this moment and every other; it was only obvious now with the object in front of me

(i've heard before: when you get the message, hang up the phone. I was again looking at a small hole in my hand, which I'd been speaking to the whole time-- of course, I was the message! it was all the message, every day when I would step outside into the sunlight, I slipped into my porch's narrow hallway and made my way down the road; a family packing up for vacation, a few teenagers sitting on the curb sipping beer, a couple, hoping to be invisible, catching my eye as he leaned in for a kiss, and I knew that he would never get what he wanted; a hidden figure, morphing into nothing when I walked by it; that was the message! every day of every life, all flattened out before me, zero horizon and limitless expanse: being a boy, being with boys, loving a girl, getting serious now- raising a family, having a daughter, failing her, watching her go; a compressed and manufactured mythology (The best compression ratio achieved to date, but I wonder if you could do better, if you could pick 4 images out of my field of vision, and compress them with JPEG, or something even better- make them 10 times smaller, which doesn't seem to matter much since memory is lossy anyways- and you could upload these images, and someone could see them, and immediately know me in my entirety, as I did with you every day))

when exactly did we begin? the chronology is known to me as it is you, but means nothing-- your image was scorched onto me, and I don't know when that was, since it didn't really happen in the sense that things typically do

secrets, I don't think I can keep from you; as you produce them and I receive them, with instruction: Keep them from others or you will find out. you are planted deeper than I imagined. I found your roots sticking out of the floor at a party once, in the basement, growing out of a crack in the ground: curious, I pulled on them until your leg emerged, and then your ass, your torso, the whole rest of you, and hanging onto your arm were 2 others, and with a heave you and 2 fully inhabited bodies appeared, as if you'd been there the whole time, as if you'd pulled yourself out of the crack- I hid just outside your peripheral vision, and before you turned around, driven by some force to attempt to identify my presence, I threw my hood over my head and walked outside

I was dead later that night, using a ritual I'd learned from my father, regarding how to kill yourself-- nobody noticed the three days I was dead, since the body was still inhabited, walking around the apartment, scraping jelly onto bread, washing the knife and the plate, pissing, shitting, washing up, sleeping, working, talking to my roommates, playing games, everyone was fooled well enough. And there was nothing biblical about it, really, it just takes 3 days to come back to life, that's how it is for anybody if you ask them. I woke up suddenly in my body again, and started to sob- how good it felt to be corporeal again.

After a few days I noticed the hole was gone, which surprised me, since I thought I would've checked sooner. That's just a side effect of the ritual, that you get plugged up, but I suppose it's a bit better this way.