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| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Demon Update: The Demon with Wounded Eyes
Demon Update: The Demon with Wounded Eyes I ran into Matthew outside the good professor�s office today and when I asked if he were talking to me, I received a �no,� in a tone of voice that implied that this was something that should be understood by someone even as dense as I am. I took no offense; the landscape is familiar. I asked if he had checked his email. No, of course he hadn�t. I told him that there was a link to the same apology I was choking on. Later, before the Shakespeare class, there was an interesting amount of eye contact, which is conversation without words I�m afraid. Eye contact is the perfect way to indicate that you�re still in someone�s space even if you aren�t going to make a sound. So I tried to apologize, but wasn�t very successful I don�t think. When I get nervous, I start to try to protect myself with all that sarcasm that I learned from sitcom television (along with the belief that major problems can be solved in 22 minutes with time out for commercials for personal hygiene products). Thank you, Three�s Company, Mork and Mindy, Gilligan�s Island. Thank you. You�ve helped to ruin more friendships than I ever could have on a steady diet of Children�s Television Workshop offerings. (See, I get nervous now just thinking about what I said, and I start trying to protect, to build a wall of words to push out the demons.) I doubt that when the semester ends I�ll ever see or speak to him again. I can�t quantify the sadness this thought brings. About endings: Matthew and I talked about suicide once and I told him that I would hate for him to disappear from my life this way. He said simply, �You�d get over it.� A demon inside me, hearing this, woke up, uncurled himself from around my heart and moved into my throat. That demon was my best friend in high school, Robert Campbell, who took his own life in May of 1988. He was seventeen. He broke into his father�s gun cabinet and took a shotgun and drove out to the Bosque and sat down beneath a tree and shot himself. I remember the memorial service. His parents had asked me to say something, so I wrote a short piece about how it was necessary to sometimes follow one�s heart and to sometimes follow one�s head. (I still have a copy of it, wrapped around a dried lily from one of the arrangements at the funeral home, and stuffed into a copy of a book he gave me about Marilyn Monroe.) On the afternoon of the service, we drove to the funeral home and there were easily two hundred people there. I sat there, looking over the crowd, hating every one of those fucking people. I was infuriated. I hated each and every one of those fuckers. Out of the hundreds, there was a scant handful of people who had ever said to Robert that they loved him or valued him or cared about him. There were even fewer who had ever opened their hearts or their homes to him when he was having trouble. And they had no shame over this. They showed up with their faces painted like the sad clowns that they were and went through a pantomime of woe. It was so tragic to all of them. It was such a loss to all of them. They said. I was so angry that I couldn�t read what I had written. Instead, I got another friend, Chris Hotchkiss to read it for me. I stood behind him as he read. I stood behind him and hated. After Robert was gone, I tried every way I could to say goodbye to him. The day after he shot himself (two days before the memorial service), I went to the place where he had done it. He had picked a huge, beautiful cottonwood tree off a path in the nature center on Rio Grande. Someone had spread fresh dirt around the base of the tree and the flies were going crazy trying to dig their way down to the blood. His ashes were buried in a cemetery near the last school he ever attended. There had been no gravesite service. His parents were not religious and so there was no priest to say a prayer as the coffin was lowered into the ground. There were no flowers to drop into the open grave. There were no handfuls of dirt to let fall. There was a tiny marker with his name and a couple of dates that were inexplicably close together. For years I�d go sometimes at four or five in the morning while it was still dark and sit by his grave and talk to him. I'd leave the car door open and turn up the radio. I couldn�t afford flowers so I�d write letters and burn them at his gravesite, hoping that they�d somehow reach him. I stopped doing that a few years ago. I went one morning to see him and his ashes had been moved. I don't know where he is now. I miss him still. My heart aches something fierce as I write about him, and I'm fighting back tears here in this too public place as I try to wrestle this demon down from my throat and back into my heart where he always sleeps and will always sleep until I finally do too. I miss you, Robert. You were one of the first of the hundred demons I tried to conquer. I was not successful. I don't want to let you go ever though I know that so long as I hold onto you, you will never be able to let go either. I'm selfish this way. I know you'll never truly rest because of my selfishness. But I miss you. I miss you. I still love you. I'm still angry at you. I'm still grateful to you. I still miss you.
So I�ve lost friends before. Some of them I got over. Some of them I know I�ll never get over. Which one will Matthew be?
More lies:
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Robert, ready for prom. A week before he died.