Loss and Madness

In two days I lost two of my best friends. One is dead. One…is a place of confusion and pain in my head. He’s alive, but hurt, I know. I don’t know if we’ll ever speak again. I’m alive but hurt. K tried to say things to soothe me. Tried to point out how tragic things happen between people that aren’t truly either person’s fault, and maybe for that, even more tragic. For a minute or two I can hold onto that thought, for a minute or two at a time, it makes sense, even if it doesn’t stop the aching loss…of one friend I couldn’t save and is gone beyond this world forever, and of another friend…at times I think…it was my fault…at times I think it was his…at times I wonder if I’m really the things he says I am…at times I think I’m not…He has other people to talk to…He tells his story, his side, they all tell him how he’s the one who’s right and I’m the one who’s wrong. But maybe not, maybe I’m paranoid and making it up, but I don’t know, I don’t think so…some of his friends aren’t trustworthy. But then, what do I know, if I’m insane then nothing I think might be real, it could all be delusions and illusions and hallucinations. Maybe I’m sitting in a padded room right now only imagining I’m typing this. Maybe I am as crazy as he says and that’s why my relationships fail. He asked me today. Said he wasn’t trying to be mean, said he was just curious…but if he knew me he’d know that “just asking” that question was putting a knife between my ribs and slowly sawing a hole in my chest to get at my beating heart. He’s not mean like that. So I guess he doesn’t know me. Maybe I don’t know him. Maybe we never knew each other. Maybe we did and we get blind when we are hurt and angry and frustrated. Maybe… Maybe I can’t think straight. I can’t even remember things straight. I have to go back to look at homework three or four times because I can’t remember what it said in the time it took to raise my eyes from the book to the computer screen.

I think this might be what insanity feels like when it comes on creeping slow and not all in a sudden break like it did when I was 16. Thoughts milling about, conflicting, confusing, not able to hold onto one before another comes, one second being absolutely sure of one thing, the next second as sure of the opposite… I have not wanted so badly to cut any time in the last five years as I wanted to last night. Wanted to so badly my mouth watered, as if the pain and blood and scars are a fine meal and I’d been living on journey cakes.

My other partner, my former partner, the one who doesn’t love me…that in itself is sawing a hole in my heart. But who can you blame for someone not loving you? That isn’t a blame it’s just life… Sometimes life carves holes in your chest and not for any reason at all. Life doesn’t have reasons. It just is. Like earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes. Some people say that there’s a reason those things happen. That people who die were sinners and the tornado was God’s punishment. But I don’t think it’s true. I think that just gives people a way to feel safe, like the world makes sense, like there is order and reason and justice and bad things don’t just happen because of life…because life has no value system. It has no judgment, no good, no bad… A tornado isn’t punishment. It isn’t a gift. It isn’t anything but a tornado. It just is. And if you are in the way and you die… that just is, too. That’s what life is. Is-ing.

My other partner, the former one who didn’t love me… He cared but he didn’t love me. He…is in a hospital now. The feed him and give him meds and make him do therapy and watch him every minute and give him his food and his exercise. He hates his loss of freedom. Isn’t the grass always greener? I would give anything to be able to give up… to stop trying.. to have everything handed to me… to have only to worry about the cracks in my mind and not putting food on my table, fixing my car, getting a job, paying my bills, taking care of the one baby I have left, my one dog…out of three only four months ago, now I’m down to one… I owe him too much to give up, to go into the hospital, to have everything given to me so I have the luxury of only having to worry about my brain. I have to try to keep all my broken pieces fitted together somehow so I can keep living my day to day and somehow, some way, find some way to not drop any, not let any shatter, not let them drift any farther than they already are, so I can keep going on…going on until somehow, someday I have a chance to try to patch them. For now all I can do is try to hold them all together, like trying to run a race with a handful of shattered teacup pieced together and intact only by the delicate pressure of your fingers… Pray to god you don’t trip…nobody pushes you…you don’t just accidentally squeeze too little or too much…if you do the entire thing will crumble and day to day and in the mind will all become a shattered mosaic and you’ll never put it back together again.

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