Suicide Letters

                                                                                

Thinking about the ones who’ve left Earth a lot lately. Torn between loneliness, jealousy, sorrow …so it goes.

I remember vivid how they told me you went away. A drunk on the corner told me you were gone. The feeling started in my chest and like a solar flare it spread to my shoulder blades, upper arms, down the blue and purple flowers of my tattoo. It reached my forearm, down to my fingertips and out onto the pavement. It poured out of me into the littered brown cigar butts you had in your warm oversized lips not 12 hours earlier. My eyes exploded and that was that. Everything inside burned up but my skin stayed cool as a cucumber.

I was loading a guitar amp into a sticky floored, dimly lit nightclub when they told me you were gone. I walked into a room full of pool hustlers betting on shots. I sat in a misplaced looking red chair in the corner of the room and placed my head in my palms. I pictured myself holding you from behind on a borrowed mattress in a moist basement all those months ago. Beaded dread locks and the smell of tide floating off your tie-died T-shirt. When I finally got up from that red chair my hands were so wet. I rubbed and massaged the salty grief into my skin like cool sanitizer and it evaporated – just like you.

I read you were gone…I saw on the news you were gone...a flash sentence then onto the weather. It’s going to be hot today – but he wont feel the sun on his broad tattooed shoulders.

Flashes of the last things they saw. The constellation mural on his bedroom wall while the drugs pinched his toes and dragged him down to their furry little cave. The cases of Dr. Pepper and Benson and Hedges 100’s as the rope burn became the last sensation he probably felt against his skin. The while tiled ceiling and the crisp starchy sheets while the morphine and pangs in his gunshot belly collided and made light.

You are no longer with us.

Last night I sat with you on a picnic table and looked at the lights of the buildings flickering on and off like fireflies in the lake. You said you weren’t gone at all, that you were just away visiting family. Yet still in the stillness I knew something wasn’t right. You took my hand and brushed it against your lips and I felt the hairs on my arm gently lifting and reaching for you.

It was only when I surrendered to this thought that I woke, opened my eyes, and smelled your cologne spinning around with the dust in the air above my bed. Dancing in the fingers of light that reached in through my skylight. I felt a oneness in this moment like yesterday and tomorrow, ground and sky, my soul and yours were all weaved together in a soft little ball in my hand. I held and caressed this feeling, rare and beautiful like the cardinal and used to fly and perch on a tree in our backyard when I was young.

Just the same,

Red wings spread and caught the light like garnets

And it was gone.

And this was ok.