Thirty Five

Deprivation, and I pretend I’m not a masochist.

       We had a fairy tale romance. Well, a post-modern fairy tale. I would dip all the needles in black ink; mark your skin as mine. Stained shadows, the whole mess we made. I was just so young then.

       You’ve become one of those people that I see traces of everywhere and every time I have to pretend I have no reaction to. But you and I did everything together, how can going about the normal routine not continue to remind me.

       

        There’s a whole day after every morning after. You said your Japanese name was Jun, but you said it with uncertainty, with an accent. I didn’t ask why you had one name that was white, and one that was Asian, I just now knew this other side of you.

        And so it goes. Once upon a time I was here and you were there. The times I felt closest to you was when we were listening to music we both liked, and I could exist kind of outside myself, in the space between the both of us. I experienced divinity in you.

        I haven’t eaten since I found out. That was four days ago. My whole mouth and throat feel like I’ve been swallowing assy, ashy pipe bowls rather than cashing them out in an ash tray. The ash tray you made in your 3^rd period high school pottery class and I knew you hated it and were just going to throw it out but I accepted it like it was a legitimate gift because I loved it anyways.

        You knew how much I enjoyed tacky, cheap things. You would buy me, at the strangest times like maybe when they caught your eye and you had some change, jewelry from grocery store vending machines. You got a tiny plastic ring and it didn’t fit any of your fingers.

        You put it on my ring finger. You said, “Someday we might get engaged for real.”

        I kept it on. I called you Mirai. It means future.

        Now, unable to still my shaking hands, I twirl that quarter’s worth of a warm memory around my hands and fingers excessively. From my thumb, to the pointer on the opposite hand, to my fuck finger, back to the ring finger where it had always been before. My ring finger where I pretended like it was a symbol of your commitment to me.

        Yeah that’s right. I pretend I’m not a masochist.

        My throat burns with each hit of smoke I inhale, but don’t think, baby, that I’m trying to mask my pain. No, I’m just trying to survive it.

        I couldn’t do this otherwise.

        I’ve smoked three quarters of a dub sack by myself today. Just today. Sure Jason and I could get through that in a day, but Jason flew out a few days ago.

       Such cotton mouth..

       

       I just now realized I never said I Love You, I only ever said I Love You Too; it was just so much more comfortable in my mouth.

        I still haven’t eaten. I keep hoping my high will inspire an appetite. Food now, just the thought of a flavor feels foreign and intrusive. It’d be hard to shovel food into my mouth, full, past the sobs, past the awful cotton dryness.

        Inhale, hold it in, exhale, start crying again. And when my abused lungs and aching diaphragm feel up to it, I’ll load one more fat bowl and I’ll do it all again.

        Avery. Mirai. Mi Corazon.

        I take off your ring from my wedding finger. I rub the cheap, dirty metal over my chapped lips. I repeat in my head the word agony, the word despair, zetsubou which was despair in another language, the word brevity, the word gone. Experience changes the way you feel things. No longer would brevity be a moment less than 17 years and twoish months. Gone had always meant misplaced or replaceable.

       Words mean nothing except to hope that maybe, just maybe, someone can possibly comprehend the context in which it’s used.

        When I’m high, THIS high, I’m not an atheist anymore and I believe in something beautiful for you. If I’m not this high, then you’re just gone. Gone for fucking ever.

       And the last word I ever said to you was uhhuh.

        My mom brings home a lovely cake because I’ve been crying and because she doesn’t know what else she can possibly do. I put a piece in my mouth. I chew and I swallow. I don’t taste a thing. My mouth is dry and my throat is sore and I’ve been coughing up smoke, coughing up those tears that don’t liquefy:

       those ones that stick around solid

       in your throat

       in your heart

       in your stomach.

       I cough up all that cake. Cough it all up over my messed up, sweaty blankets. Vomit it all over a pile of clothes on the floor. I smoke another bowl, then I brush my teeth, then I deal with the mess.

        Sweet things or any kind of sustenance. There’s no room for it.

        So I’m sitting there, coughing and sobbing, wallowing. I’m a mess and I say your name and I say Uhhuh uhuh huhuh baby I love you too, I say Was there any part of you, love, that wasn’t corporeal? Was there any part of you that I can hold onto? Or did you rise up, like a long tendril of smoke and disappear into atmosphere.

        You don’t answer. Of course. I bury my face in your old clothes that I’ve kept and worn often since you left. They just smell like me and my things now. Not like your autumn, your adolescence.

       

        I’m sober for my flight out. Sober and silent. I don’t ask for anything to drink. I don’t accept any flighty snacks. I ate last night—quinoa and steamed vegetables—but I didn’t taste a lick of it. I just swallowed it down with my ashy phlegm.

       

        The person next to me asks why I’m going to New York. Just making conversation. Am I visiting family?

        Well, no… but how do I put this so that they’ll stop talking to me.

        “I’m going up for a post-funeral thing. I couldn’t make it to the actual funeral, but they just cremated him so I guess there’s going to be some kind of ceremony.”

        “Oh that’s awful! Were you close?”

        We were adhesive. We used to spit into meals we prepared for the other. We were going to, if you had your way, have our wedding in Thailand and, if I had mine, we were going to have our wedding in The Shire. We used to sit together, our toes in the sea, and talk about the dynamics of side-characters in television shows, about Steam Punk, about psychology and philosophy.

We used to talk on the phone until 4am your time, about our days, about our dreams. Rosy retrospection, sure, but I’m even heartbroken that we don’t get to have those tedious conversations about nothing ever, ever again.

        I shrug. “I guess we used to be.”

        “You look like shit,” Jason says to me the minute I arrive. It feels like an accusation. Your apartment gives me chills. It smells like you. All your stuff has been cleaned up by your father and Jason and Aiko over the last few days, but this place still feels like you. The way the furniture is laid out, the kinds of things you owned. It was clearly your place.

       Your father offers me green tea. Oh good god, I think he brewed it in your Neti Pot. I take it, I sip from it once, and I set it down. Jason, next to me, finishes rolling a joint and he hands it to me with a lighter. Thank God. Your father says nothing, but he doesn’t join us. We finish it before we start talking about anything. Jason and I both, silent and still thinking the same things. Asking ourselves the same questions.

       We’re sitting at the kitchen table, separated by a partition from the living room. I notice we’re all stiffly avoiding your sofa. Jason and I keep glancing at it and at each other. I want to ask Jason if he saw you before the cremation.

       Jason, did you see his heroin arms? Did he have track marks? Was he into into heroin or was he just unlucky?

       I clear my throat. I can’t bring words past my blocked vocal chords. The smoke, the sadness, the phlegm have become an awkwardly dry, smoggy paste. I don’t have a lot I want to say. Not a lot I can say without breaking down again.

       Your father and Jason and Aiko lead me to a room with a small shrine for you and another shrine with tablets with your ancestor’s names. Incense is burning, it smells like Opium and Sandal Wood.        He lets me hold Urn. I clap my hands and bow before it. I make a silent prayer.

       I Love You Too. Uhhuh.

       How can you fit in here? All your life, all your vibrancy: how can it be contained in this vessel?

       “Can I have a minute?” I choke. Your father never liked me. He puts one hand, open palm, on my shoulder. He bows his head and he leads Jason and Aiko out. He closes the door to give me privacy.

I hold your urn to my heart and I start to sob. I weep with such despair over it that I feel my body, all my muscles tighten and freeze. My eyes sting. I rock back and forth over you until my body feels done for now and I’m not crying anymore. Still, my throat, my sinuses are full.

       And I’m so hungry.

       I want to eat. Taste something.

       I want us to go to a fancy New York café together and point out everything that feels like a romantic metaphor. I had such different plans for the first time I’d come out to New York to visit you.      
        This isn’t how I pictured myself holding you in New York arms.

       I open your urn. Just to make sure you’re in there. I feel like somehow, I’ll find something more than ash. Like maybe your spirit, maybe your smell. Maybe you’d burst out, grin and tell me I’ve freed you. Tell me I can perform some sort of ritual, go on some kind of quest. Find me a body worthy of me, your ghost voice says morbidly in my head.

       I’d do it. I’d kill for you. I wouldn’t let your dad call an exorcist.

       I wet my pinky finger. I dip it into your ashes. Some of you sticks there. I peer at the tiny little specks of you. I put my pinky in my mouth; suck you off like confectioners’ sugar.

       

       I look back in the jar. So much left of you in there. Now I wet the whole of my pointer and middle finger, swirl my fingers around the sandy soft remnants of you. Put that in my mouth. I still can’t taste anything. Your ashes are the perfect complement to my cotton mouth, to my bile.

        I cover you back up.

        Uhhuh. Uhhuh. I love you too.