A Boy Gone Era
For my next act, the amazing disappearing man will make himself so small perhaps you’ll forget he ever was.
A year ago today I was crying so hard that I threw-up green bile down my tiny apartment shower drain. My empty stomach convulsed violently, on a mission of its own to take me down as well. I didn’t bother to clean it up. I am surprised I even managed to turn the water off on my way back to my bed where I planned to lay in fetal position for the rest of the night. This must be what childbirth feels like, or perhaps more closely, the loss of a child.
In my own self-indulgent fits of grief, I have always tended towards the hyperbolic. I recognized instantly that these were two emotions I would likely (and hopefully) never experience. This too heightens my own sadness. Is it better to die alone or to lose the person who made you feel not so?
My apartment was cold, the type of cold that Jack London wrote about in “To Build a Fire.” The type of cold that only comes from a shithole Boston apartment that you pay far too much for. Each time I see my own breath, I am frustrated like a tension migraine. It is deep dead January, a month used as a sacrificial lamb to eating disorders and orthorexia commencements.
Incidentally, it is also the month of my birthday.
The day I was born my siblings were sick and had to stay at an aunt’s house. My father was recovering from a crash and unable to visit me until the next morning. There was also a snowstorm the night before, because snowstorms were still something we had back then. My extended family was snowed-in, and unable to come to meet this baby. This baby was me, but he also feels more like a child from a storybook than any recognizable version of myself. I, as I exist now, had yet to be born. My mother, a woman who came from a culture never introduced to therapy or mental health and who had had two other happy and healthy childbirths before mine, said that following my birth she was consumed with a post-partum that actually startled her. To her it must have felt like a curse. She felt it was her fault. Here I was, her beautiful baby boy, and no one wanted to see me. In 27 years it feels very little has changed.
Perhaps this self-mythology has informed my own neuroses. Perhaps a child waned on a depressed mother is destined to follow down that same path.
Blame follows me like a debt collector. For, if this was the nexus of my own sadness then it is a sadness bore from love. My mother’s only wish was for me to be surrounded and celebrated. To be wanted, and to know as much. This may be where that crippling sense of blame comes in, that I still wear around my neck— a choke collar two sizes too small. I am forever wanting for someone to show up for me, but never feeling I am worth the trouble when they actually do. And they do. The many people who love me now tell me so, with a fervor and absolution that I can only believe to be exhausting. This belief, or rather disbelief, that people may actually want to love me, may be the whole problem. After all, it is impossible to love someone who doesn’t want to be seen.
For my next act, the amazing disappearing man will make himself so small perhaps you’ll forget he ever was.
Twenty-seven, a year with cosmic implications, was one that I spent packing and unpacking the same three boxes over and over again. (Both literally and figuratively as these things often reveal themselves to be.) If you were wondering where I was, then you are in good company with the United States post office, who informed me after my fourth move in one year, they could no longer change my permanent address. I had to wait two months they said. Two months is a luxury I have not been able to conceptualize for a very long time. Life and the passage of it alternated between feeling like a lazy river and then too that same river now opened up into the mouth of some great waterfall, taking me down to the bottom along with all its sharp boulders and torn-up life rafts.
I used to shirk off the allure of stability. Called it “something for those too scared of change to step out of their comfort zone.” I looked down on those who got married young, who stayed in jobs at companies I’d never heard of— those whose lives seems so utterly small and boring. Then, all at once, the boulder I’d been pushing up the hill every day became too immense for arms weakened by drugs. With a great crack my bones splintered and I rolled to the bottom of the hill.
A year of falling… falling…falling…
After losing what felt like everything at the time, I began to sustain my existence on rejection alone. It seemed only natural that jobs wouldn’t want me. Afterall, my own friends fled to the other side of the country away from my gangrenous limbs—they must have been afraid that whatever affliction I suffered from was the catching kind. The landlord who sold my apartment out from under me gave me two weeks to move, he’d probably need all that time just to get my stench out. The stench of a corpse filled behind the eyes with bugs. And it all felt so deserved.
This feeling was hard to shake; and it seemed that whenever I was able to dry my hands of it, someone would turn the faucet right back on. I am reminded of the experiments on learned helplessness in dogs. The dogs would go towards the electrification because that punishment was all they seemed to know. Much in this way, I followed in my own old habits—running at times away from true comfort and towards that same painful backhand. I’d become a glutton for punishment; and at 27 years old, it is no longer cute to compare yourself to an experiment on dogs with dubious intent.
Besides, who am I to wallow? As the world burns all around me and war wages destroying the lives of so many, who gave me the authority to feel sad? My sadness feels pitiful in the context of a world suffering. My own broken heart looks like that same pitiful green bile I puked up, and I just want to shove it face down into the drain. Maybe if it were to drown, then it wouldn’t winge so insufferably. So I keep to myself, unwilling to be as burdensome as I feel.
Still, a nervous system can only endure instability like this for so long. At some point, your body takes over and tells you what it needs. The creature comforts lay on top of you as you try to writhe away unwilling to accept their help. And it was pressing down on me like a fire blanket to a man mid-self-immolation.
A sister who set aside an hour each night to talk to you—tracking your eyes like EMDR, seeing through your lies.
A friend whose calls feel like therapy you don’t want to attend—but are aware you need.
A man who loves you and acts confused each time you snarl at him—the scared fox in a trap.
A morning run through the woods in the calico light—warming the extremities of your body from somewhere within.
It's hard to feel like you’re something that deserves to be cared for and tended to. Harder still to carve out that energy, to take up your arms still wrapped in surgical gauze and try to push that bolder once again. But the funny thing is, when you get up and try to give it a push, you often find, if you are extremely lucky as I am, that there are some who are willing to push alongside you.
Afterall, I never really was alone in that hospital bed.
Afterword:
I was recently at a friend’s Christmas party, and speaking to someone who was turning 27 this year. Things have gotten markedly better for me, and cautious optimism has replaced some of the old hunting trophies of the frightened animal I was this year. Still, the mere mention of this age turned my stomach over once or twice like kicking a slinky down the stairs. I still remember running from the hunter who put me up on that wall— and almost automatically, I told her the ghost story of my year. Everything from the “Saturn’s return” to the “27 Club”— the words poured out of me in a way they hadn’t for such a long time. I could tell she was uncomfortable. Nodding along to my story in that polite way people at parties often do.
“Beware the curse of 27,” I echoed, an invisible candelabra in hand. The ghost of Jacob Marley over my shoulder. I doubt it made a dent. I wanted to warn her, but who the hell was I kidding? Would I have listened to myself a year ago? Would I have understood just how close to the brink we would get? Are these stories we retell over and over really for others, or are they mere reminders for ourselves?
Beware. Beware. Beware.
happy birthday 🖤