11:28 a.m. - 2001-07-03
more memoirs
During the time I'm afraid to remember, I spent my hours curled on his bed, in his tree house, out on the hill. He radiated warmth from his skin, it flowed over me and seeped through my pores, drugging my bones and electrifying my mind. His presence was like ecstasy for the soul; ideas and images poured out of me like blood itself, rainbow colored and diverse, eerie in their implications. Fire was salvation, conformity was a painful death, the trees I drew had rough branches and dangerous angles. Beauty was amazing; I told him he was beautiful over and over, listening to him whisper, 'you're beautiful, too.' The one and only time I'd have ever believed him, and captured within those moments, I did. I was beautiful. The sharp angles of my body were soft curves, my mottled skin turned pure ivory, my mangled fingernails became smooth. The image of my body expanded to fit the frame of my mind, which was unimaginably diverse by that point; to the point where I could simply bask in his glow and the glow of everything else, snaring concepts and images as they went gliding by.

He would stroke my trembling fingers with his left hand and write furiously in his spiral notebook with his right. I remember, on a basic level, his divided attention bothering me; that he was even thinking about transcribing at a time like this rather than simply trying to feel the sensations disturbed me even more than the notion of everyone's impending death, which was a big deal to me, overwhelmed by these seemingly universal truths. His need to transcribe these conversations was simply more proof that we, as a whole, were washing quickly down the drain of the death of the soul.

"You're dead," I insisted, over and over, "you're dead."

"I'm alive," he pleaded with me, squeezing my hands. "Don't you feel me? I'm here. I'm alive." His eyes would change from green to gold, slowly, unbearably. "I'm not dead." Whispering through the fog of warm breath, that warmth that was lost to me.

No, he didn't understand. Maybe he wasn't dead, but he was dying. Floating within the blue, excruciatingly bright haze of my altered mind, I could literally feel his warmth fading away. To this day I don't know the reason why, inside these states, my sense of touch, taste, and smell would fail nearly completely. By far what scared me the most was how his warmth was indiscernable, even holding onto his neck and breathing in, desperately, as I was, trying to find his smell, trying to find his heat. To me, this void was the complete loss of how I perceived him; in my mind at the time; transformed into his death. For all purposes, this mind, mine, which knew then the future or the universe and understood every muse, also refused to believe that my best friend was not dying.

I didn't consciously remember these exchanges until about two months ago, over a year after they actually happened, I think. All this time I've been going through life wondering why he always acted like I was a ticking bomb, set to explode at any time, and now I know why: because our friendship was crazy. We're barely real over half the time; either immersed in analyzations of ideas or situations that were almost always hypothetical, or sitting on a bed, hazy, discussing metaphorical life and death. It always seemed real to me, which was easy enough, since I didn't remember it. I carried it around like a forgotten dream, while he must have had a real memory.

Thinking about it now, I don't know what I would have done had a friend kept insisting, ruthlessly, that I was dead, sketching fire and trees and societies in my notebook with a hand that couldn't feel the pen. It sounds ridiculous, now. I want to be face to face with him so that I can duck my head and blush, shake my head and apologize for the confusion it must have caused. Catch myself, I'm lying. No, I don't. I'm proud of it. I'm proud that 'unique' is a concept that I can still think about without having the nagging tought that somebody else has mirrored my actions. The same actions that cause everybody to back up, hands up, eyes wary, are the actions that ensure my personality stays intact. I still haven't figured out yet if it's a fair trade-off. When I think my life up and put it on the line, the result of my imagination is never the same as the result that I imagined my imagination resulting in. Or the sensicality of that sentence.

previous - next