Theron

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Whenever he was sick he would dream of fighting tornadoes - colossal grey twisters that blackened the sky and ate up the land- the kind you would only see on the weather channel and in the Midwest. Alone and without protection, he’d fight them with his fists, and though it sometimes came close, he always won. Two weeks before he died, he told me he had the mother of all tornado dreams: “There were so many of them Jen, and I lost, Jen, I lost,” he said to me. My heart dropped to my stomach. He’d never lost before. But he’d been fighting a horrible Lupus attack that stole the use of his legs, and left him bedridden. And now this dream, foreshadowing his death. Then two weeks later, he had a heart attack at age 31.

Theron was tall, over six feet, and the color of dark chocolate. He never left the house in less than perfect form. He always wore black and white Converse high tops, dark grey or black slacks, button down shirts in white or black, and grey brim hats with tiny grey-blue feathers pointing to the sky. The hats sat upon a head full of dreads with dyed tips, sometimes red, sometimes blonde.  I never tired of looking at him. There was a lot of him to love also. He had his mother’s wide hips and full belly. From the day that we met, Theron and I were rarely apart. Our friendship started with me buying marijuana from him. I’d pick him up in my Kia and we would ride to his cousin’s house and on the way there he’d do anything and everything to keep me laughing.

It didn’t take long before we were one hundred percent convinced there was no one else like us in the world.

I don’t even remember the transition from friend to soul mate. He was a sun people revolved around. I wasn’t the only one to love him, not by far. Anywhere he was became a place full of people and laughter. People would drive hours to spend time with him. They could never stay away. He made everyone laugh, but more than that- he listened to their deepest fears, and took them in as his own. He knew empathy.

My younger sisters loved him truly as an older brother. He lived with us for a while after his last parent passed. He would wake up early in the mornings and cook breakfast for my whole family. He would talk to my mom for hours in the morning, sitting at the breakfast nook, waiting for the rest of us to wake up. He became like a son to her. He was there while my sisters grew from children to adults. He became their confident. My youngest sister came to me after his death, sobbing, and told me that he had asked her to come by and she didn’t. She showed me the last text he sent her. It said, “If you don’t come by, I’m going to have to kill Alvin, and he’s the only one left of the chipmunks. The rabbits killed Simon and Theodore yesterday.” I held her and told her it was alright. He knew she had a child and was busy. He loved her. He loved us all.

For hurricane Katrina he evacuated to Tennessee with my family and I to my stepdad’s small town that may as well have been named “White-ville”. It was one of those towns with one dirt road and a school that taught kindergarten through high school. When we pulled up in my stepfather’s mother’s driveway I thought she was just about to fall over herself and die of shock. She’d probably only seen black people in movies, and here was one in the flesh, standing on her God-blessed land. You would think a six foot two, 300 pound black man would be a bit intimidating, but over the next week, Theron spent his days hiding in our room, asking me to sneak him things to eat and drink. That old white woman scared the be-jebus out of him. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life as I laughed at him hiding behind doors and running to the bathroom after I’d called out “Clear!” I teased him relentlessly. At night he kept me up laughing as he whispered in the dark that she was gonna come in, drug him and hang him from her tree. I laughed so hard my sides hurt. He made me sleep by the door so I’d wake up first if it happened.

            He wrote about it, too, a funny little story that made her a vampire. Theron was a poet. He had written over 200 poems, and many short stories. At first, his poems were about vampires and killers, autumn and girls. As he got more and more ill, death became a prominent feature in his poetry. Titles like “Hospital Bed”, “If I fall”, and “Prelude to a dying girl” were on the top of the list of poems I edited for him. They were dark pieces about being sick and alone. He was getting close to publishing a book of poetry. It would be titled “The Intrigue”. He had found a publisher and I was working with him to get his poems edited and the photographs taken that went with each poem. He was so excited about it. The last one he wrote was “The Gift”. In it he played a man who had moved away from his best friend and got word that he was dying. He came back to New Orleans to tell her. His main character in the story was also in love with her his whole life. He told me “that’s you,” and I tried to smile. I edited his death away with commas and semicolons and grammar agreements. It was my way of controlling it. I calmly revised his fears and anger and sent it back to him in neat word documents. I saw the anger, terror and acceptance of his death in the pages he sent me. I saw it, and I put it in compartment in my heart and would open it at times so I could feel what he felt. It was agonizing. He had known death for so long. Both his parents died while we were friends. I think that killed him faster than the Lupus.

A week before he died he told me everything he’d ever written was for me. I told him through crying eyes, “I know.”  Later on that night I slept in his bed and he held me and whispered in my ear,

“I’ve always loved you, Jen.”

“I know. You’re my best friend.”

 I pretended to be asleep when he whispered not too much later:

“I love you as everything. More than a friend. You are my everything.”

As I lay in his bed that night, and many other nights, I thought about what it would be like to make our friendship romantic. I owed it to him to try, because I loved him that much. One night he asked me, “Jen, can I kiss you?” We had been drinking all night and I thought maybe I should give it a shot. I loved him more than anyone I’d ever known, already. So I kissed him and touched him, and let him touch me. Nausea quickly came. It was a nightmare for me, probably heaven for him. I didn’t talk to him for weeks after; I didn’t know how to face him.

I never tried again. Two days before his final Lupus attack he was scheduled for gastric bypass surgery. He was due to lose over 200 lbs., then his attack hit. If you’ve never seen a Lupus attack, it’s a hell of a thing. It involves ambulances, steroid shots, radiation treatments, and hospital stays. It involves immense pain, and tears and dashed hopes. The dashed hopes were hard to swallow the last time around. His bypass doctor refused to do the surgery because of the condition the attack left him in. The surgery was his portal to a new life; he was going to be able to get healthy. Without the weight he would run, travel, do the things he always wanted to do but was too big and sick to do. And in the back of both our minds, we knew we were thinking the same thing without saying it, because those words would have hurt too much to say. The words were, for me, “Once you lose the weight, will I be able to love you like you want me to love you?” Maybe we could finally be together the way he wanted us to be together, just he and I, forever. I was too much of a coward to give myself to someone I wasn’t attracted to, someone fat and black. Even as much as he meant to me, I couldn’t give him the one thing he seemed to want more than anything, me.

So he took whatever I would give him. Years before, on a lazy sunny afternoon in my car, while waiting for a bridge over a bayou to open, we both sipped on snowballs, mine coconut cream and his nectar.

“Where will you be in the afterlife?” he asked me.

 Death was the furthest thing from both of our minds. This was before his parents and my dad had died; and death was something we read about in books and watched in movies. It was just a question. But it’s a question we hoped to remember forever.

“Hmm,” I thought, “I’d probably be in a field of flowers, like a wide open field of flowers. And there would be a tree…”

“A willow tree,” he interrupted. He smiled a perfect white smile and took my hand.

I smiled back. “…a willow tree, sure. And you? Where will you be?”

“If I’m not there waiting for you, you can find me in a cave, by a waterfall. I’ll be a hermit, like a cool samurai hermit, waiting there for you to find me.”

“I like that,” I replied, squeezing his hand in mine, a hand I thought would be in my life forever.

The sun was warm and our snowballs were cold and everything was good with the world.  But this was before he had his first Lupus attack. Five years later the last attack rocked him to the ground. He lost the use of his legs and was in the hospital for two months. Every day I brought him food and every day he put on a smile for me. The nurses loved him because he brightened up their day.  It was almost like they were the patients and he was the nurse.

“You have a cute nose” he’d tell one.

“Is that your real nose?” he’d ask another, laughing. When she left he turned to me and said,

“Man, I don’t like her. Her nose is ugly. She probably eats bunnies,” and we’d laugh and laugh. On his last day in the hospital he told me,

“Jen. I love you more than anything or anyone I’ve ever met, or ever will meet.” I cried and told him he was not allowed to die. If only it was that easy.

He called me every day with his walking progress.

“Today I walked to the bathroom on my own Jen!” he’d say, excited.

“Won’t be long now ‘till we’re dancing together again.” I could hear him smiling. Other days it was hard, and he’d call on those days also.

“I’m not sure I can do this, Jen. It’s so hard. My fucking legs hurt all the time. This body is failing me. I’m getting weak and I don’t know how much longer I can fight off these demons.”

“You have to be strong,” I’d whisper into the phone.

 He always described being sick as “fighting demons.” Sometimes they were his demons, sometimes they were demons from somewhere else. In the end he never conquered either one. There just wasn’t enough time.

If I had made it on time, I would have been there to see him die. I was supposed to pick him up and take him to a poetry reading, but I was running late due to an impossible computer lab. I had sent him a text saying:

         “I won’t be able to make it in time. I’m sorry and I love you!”

 He wrote back saying:

        “I don’t feel well anyway. I love you too.”

 When I got out of lab I sent another text asking him if he was ok. I got a text back that simply said,

“I’m sorry to tell you, but Theron has passed away.”

I wrote him back and told him not to ever joke that way. My heart pounded as I waited on a response. I got a bit angry. A phone call from his roommate moments later let me know that he had died. “Passed” is how she put it in a voice that could have been relaying the weather conditions on Hwy 90. I don’t remember the ride home from the university. All I remember is collapsing in my mother’s arms. My mother was strangely calm; I guess she had seen it coming. Everyone had. I wouldn’t accept it; he was always so strong.

            Everything collapsed. My long term relationship ended with my boyfriend. I dropped all my classes but three and failed the computer class that kept me away from him that night. Turns out everything I was doing was supported and driven by my relationship with Theron. I was taking my classes so that upon graduation I could buy a house for Theron and I to live in. I was dating my boyfriend because Theron loved and approved of him. He thought he was safe and good for me. I often wonder if I had left my boyfriend earlier and dated a jerk would Theron have hung around longer to make sure I was fine?

 I drove to my hometown in silence that night and considered the trees along the highway, and which one would be best for a final crash. As I ran out of trees I considered the sharp objects in his room and if they would make a burial plot big enough for both of us. When I got there though it was occupied by his friends and roommates. I stayed for a while then I left, ill to my stomach, and went on to another friend of mine’s house, where the people who truly loved him ended up anyway and stayed up two days drinking and talking about him. Sometime in that period his sister called and asked me if I wanted to see his body before they cremated him.

            There were other people there, at the funeral home. I think they were crying. They may have been sobbing. They may have been hysterical and out of their minds. He was already laid out on a slab, a sheet pulled over his head. The funeral home director pulled it back and exposed his naked flesh to the waist. It was hard to look at him so I focused on his left arm. I stared at it. I held it in my hand and put my right arm next to it to complete the phrase we’d had tattooed on our arms three short weeks before. My arm: “Mona lisas..”. His arm: “..and MadHatters”. My arm was pale and his was the color of ash. My tattoo was in red and his was in black. The words still fit; the font similar. If you’ve ever had a soul mate, you know that there is a world where only the two of you exist. “Mona lisas and Madhatters” was our world. And soon there would only be half of us left, like half of the tattoo. I touched his face; it was stiff and chilled. I kissed it anyway.      

            I often think of what I miss the most about him. I think what I miss the most is hearing his voice simply say, “I love you, Jen.” I thought for a while it was our jokes about squirrels and rabbits and other silly things. I thought it may have been his brawny hair, or the way he smelled, or the way I always wanted to touch him.  Or his style, his brim hats and converse, the way he always looked so good. The way he would introduce me to new people: “This is Miss JEN SOIGNIER” he’d say with a beaming smile, like he was introducing the love of his life. He was. He was the love of mine.

            I selfishly miss receiving his texts and phone calls, his attention. I’ve made a few friends since but nothing sticks; it’s not even close to the same. It’s like having Velveeta Mac and Cheese from a box after you’ve had pasta under the stars in Italy. This feeling of being bored-I was never bored- because Theron was always there. It’s hard to get used to. I miss the nights of wine. I miss the sushi trips he loved so much. I miss the way he looked last year, like a kid in a candy shop, when I bought him his first birthday cake. He walked in on that and his eyes lit up.

“You bought me a cake!?! My first cake! This is so cool! I love you guys!” he laughed.

 It was such a simple thing, but so important to him. I’m thankful for the things I could give him: for the cake, for the dinners I brought him, the Christmas and birthday presents, for the hats and the tats we have matching. I’m thankful for the love I could give him, though it’s never enough. I wish I could have given him more. I wish I could have loved him romantically, and had his child, so that we would live on. This is my biggest regret. He always told me we would make the most beautiful child, and he was probably right.

            He wasn’t well educated. He wasn’t pretty, or sexy. He wasn’t a particularly hard worker or a rich man. He wasn’t a lot of things that others need, but he was mine. Some people looked at him and saw just a fat, sick, poor black man, but I saw so much more. Now that he’s gone I have to live for us both, and make it worthwhile. My only hope is that wherever he is, he knows that I love him more than I ever realized. In the words of Sir Elton John:

“I thank the Lord there’s people out there like you...while Mona Lisas.. and Mad Hatters, sons of bankers sons of lawyers, turn around to say “good morning” to the night, for unless they see the sky, but they can’t and that is why, they know not if it’s dark outside or light.”

My Mad Hatter is now in the light.