Secret Society in Smaller Lies at the Circle Bar.

I was supposed to be home at like 12. Yeah right. I think around 6 or 7 am when the 17 year old girl Jett was crying on my porch, Joe was crashed in my bed, and Tony and I were still drinking on the porch, I realized that my plans has been blown to the wind. Fun times though; great friends :D

   Jen Tem           

                                                                           “Waterfalls”

     

     Ron is 31 years old and he is going to die. There will be flowers and food and black and white snapshots, tears; and I will be there with a poem and some words that won’t matter to anyone but me.  I can tell them I know how he likes his sandwich. Roast beef, mayo and lettuce.  Should I say he likes white women and noses?  I can tell them that he loved rock and Goth and wrote poetry.  I can say sweet things and no one will listen because he was the one who listened. Listened and---- there is a song inside me that sings when I’m around him. It starts off as a slow melody and violently peaks and dips and hugs the curves of the scales that play. Hear that Crescendo!  From time to time it finds its way off of the page and leaps and bounds happily into the memories that are ours. Sometimes it dips so low that it hurts me in deep places. It is a song for soul mates, and Ron is mine.

   When I was 17 I saw his feet pass by 11 times. I counted. They were in shoes that were black and red and had lighting strikes caught in plastic and rubber. I never thought to look up, only wondered at the shoes that passed back and forth in front of me. I wondered if the owner was aware that his Docs were incredibly cool. They looked like shoes that knew they were cool.  Once upon a time they stopped moving, and I looked up. I found myself. I knew his fears were my fears and I wrote them in blood on my heart.

   Then it was our time to bleed.  His mother was gone, and his father was drinking; his father was crashing; his father was screaming and twisting and sleeping on the street. His father was raping and cursing and crying out to God to save him from himself. His father was gone, so quietly that I never saw the storm at my back. Then my father was gone, and we were swept away in the downpour.

    Like a hurricane our lives changed, and we were holding onto each other on a raft in a great sea.  I couldn’t see and he couldn’t see. We stabbed each other in the dark at night when visitors came to feed off our rations. We held each other in the dark of night when we were the only ones left. We were empty and clung to each other, like callous shells stuck together by habit, not choice. I couldn’t love anymore and I had nothing to give. He was dead and I was dying. I was drowning and I thought we would hold each other’s heads under water until we both stopped breathing. I was all he had, and I tried to die.  He held my head out of the water and I woke up gasping for air in a bar with florescent lights aglow and naked men’s smiles that I thought meant ESCAPE. They really were Death. We held hands and I sobbed and he put me on a plane and I left the man who saved me.

   When I came back I learned of his suffering. The suffering he did without me. I learned about the drug raids and the murder and the life he had to live. I learned about the hospitals and the kidney failure and the four tubes they drilled in his neck to make him live. He told me about the white girls who popped pills and sucked his dick so he could die.  He told me about his deaths; there were two of them.  One when I left and one when he realized what he had become without me.  I cried and died and then it was time to live. But there was a day when we drove in the car and we passed a field of wildflowers. He told me where to find him in heaven.

    “How will I know where to look for you, Ron?”

    “I’ll be in a cave like a hermit; a wise hermit, behind a waterfall.”

    “What if I can’t find you?” He smiled and held my chin.

    “I know where you will be, under the willow tree, my sweet angel.”

 

   I felt then for the first time that nothing lasts. Then the years passed and he watched and I grew and I flew and just yesterday he finally told me I was safe.  And then there is today. And today is spinal taps and tubes in his throat and not being able to walk ever again. “1 in 3 chance” the text messages say and I pause and wait and try to think what to say but there is nothing to say, nothing to say.

     “I’ll bring you burritos” I say,

    “And sugar-free cookies?” he adds.

   Of course love. Of course.  And I’ll call your sister who threatened my life and who said I’m no sister of yours, because it’s hard to understand what it means to have a soul mate. But because I can’t be the only one to love him, I’ll call. Onions of layers of years of love, and only me to give them. I’ll peel them back. I’ll find the center, I’ll let you bite. I’ll give you what I have to give and it won’t be enough. There is not enough time. And we pray for vibrancy but the world is now dull and we live in slowed heartbeats of moments in color. Our hands touch and the nurse turns away from the black and white and we become something else behind her back; something floating and colorless.  We sail and dance and I kiss him goodbye. It is silent and bright outside and I must go on.  One day it will be time to search for caves beyond waterfalls, but not today.

   And the simple truth is: I have lived because of Ron. I have lived because of him.