There’s a kick in the bowels of the building, crackle zap pow, and the florescents strobe to life. Nervous laughter all around. The steady whir of machinery resumes and my belongings find their way under the rubber strips and through the scanner. I pass through security without incident and walk up the stairs to Gate One. There’s only one gate.

The atmosphere is the same inside as out. Soupy air that makes your clothes stick to your skin like tissue paper over a shaving wound. Heat and ever-present strangeness. And dust, every smell comes out of the dust. No one tracked it in here after the airport was built, it was always here. There was dust where the contours of the building would be one day, the dust told them where to build, it was already raining from the ceiling materials before they formed a ceiling.

The second power outage, while I’m in the restroom washing my hands. The water runs cold, and I hear young men out in Gate One yelling jokes into the musty dark in a language I can’t understand. Scattered laughter in response. Just knowing they have a sense of humor about their fickle bitch of a power grid is enough to make me laugh, too.

I can’t find a level chair anywhere. The plastic seats weren’t designed to not lean at one angle or another. A few shops populate either side of the rectangular off-white room. They sell the same gold-painted statues and silk-bound portraits and knock-off sunglasses that the street vendors shove in your face every day. At one end of the room is the VIP Lounge and the Business Class Lounge. In a single gate airport. There’s always room for a little socioeconomic distinction.

By the time the fourth power outage has run its course, the whole event has lost its novelty. Boarding time comes around, and we pile onto a rickety bus that takes us twenty meters up the tarmac to the lonely plane. We step out into a dark cloudy night, and walk up the mobile stairs. When everyone is aboard, the tail half of the plane is full and the front is totally vacant. Some genius of efficiency decided to sell the tickets from the back up. Before we take off, I move up to claim a row for myself.

It will be raining when we arrive after the hour flight. We’ll descend through some serious turbulence, several gut-wrenching drops as if gravity suddenly remembered what to do with solid objects that are thousands of feet high. When we break through the clouds we’ll see orange city lights below and splashes of white lightning from above. The wings will shake and the landing gear will extend and we’ll come in hot. Then another twenty meter bus ride.

It could be the same bus if it weren’t for the spider web up above the passenger handles. One of the biggest webs I’ve ever seen, and here it is in an airport shuttle. Either no one wanted to sweep it away, or no one bothered.

But you cut down that tree,
and I buried those leaves.
And that wood –
It kept us both alive.
It kept me warm
and kept you sweating
beads and drips
of bitter wanting.

“I wanna hold you close
But I push you away
I wanna feel your skin upon my skin
But I’m not feeling great about letting you in”

“I deserve every stone that’s thrown out at me
And I think of your smile
I’m in love with your teeth”

•     •     •

Recently it occurred to me that I’m not afraid to die. I realized it one day at work. I thought, you know, if the mansion I was in were to blow up at that very moment, or if I were to have a premature heart attack, or if someone were to run into the room and shoot me in the chest, or whatever, it wouldn’t really bother me.

I once took a philosophy course. I don’t remember what I learned. But the one thing I do recall the professor talking about pertained to death, and this was it: “It doesn’t matter how you feel about death, because you won’t be around to feel bad about it, anyway.” I guess that’s true.

So before you think, “Oh, well, of course it wouldn’t bother you if you died, because you’d be dead“—just relax. I realize that.

What I’m saying is that, even if I had knowledge of my impending death, it wouldn’t rattle me the way it might have in the past. Besides finishing a novel about a post-apocalyptic America ruled by a theocratic monarch who also happens to be manic-depressive eighty-year-old man, I’ve generally done everything I could ever want to do.

I could move to different cities. I could travel. I could eat rare delicacies. I could get better jobs. I could love and be loved. I could even walk on the surface of the moon. But I don’t know that I would be any happier. I’m just not a very happy person. What’s the world got to offer me?

The fact that I am sad all of the time doesn’t mean that I want to die, or even that I’m looking forward to death. Rather, it has come as a passive acceptance. If the Grim Reaper were breathing down my neck, I’d probably turn around and shake his skeleton hand. “Come on,” I’d say. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Man, you took the words right out of my mouth,” he would say. And then we’d go wherever I’m supposed to end up.

•     •     •

I have written extensively about the pains of adulthood. It’s a terrible place to be. The only way to get out is to wait for old age, when you are effectively a child again. I don’t know if that’s ideal.

See: I miss my mommy and daddy. I don’t think I’ll ever get over wanting to feel safe and cared for and loved in a sense that is unconditional and eternal. I want someone to look over to me and to guide me. I want somewhere to say, “There, there” and “Shh, it’s okay.” I need help.

Instead I wake up and don’t shower and bike to work and sit at a computer and edit manuscripts and listen to music for seven and a half hours, and then I go home. When I go home, I sit at my computer and write things to keep myself sane, or I play guitar to keep myself sane, or I take a bath to keep myself sane, or a I ride my bicycle around the neighborhood to keep myself sane, and so on.

We’re all so afraid of dying, but my God, when it comes to living, what’s all the fuss about?

Hey, listen: Every now and then something will happen and it will make me regret saying things like the previous sentence. I’ll stand at the foot of the Pacific Ocean or catch a glimpse of Mt. Fuji or meet a really fantastic person or feel a warm nighttime breeze or remember how much I love my kitties, or whatever, and I’ll put my hands on my hips and say, “Yup. It was worth it. This is OK. I like this.”

But these fleeting moments are fleeting fast. It’s a rare thing that I feel this way. Mostly I just want to curl up in bed and take a really long nap. And when I wake up, I never have any real idea of what comes next. Half the time I’m bored out of my mind. The other half is spent working or sleeping. I guess that’s why I wouldn’t mind being dead, if dying is a nap that lasts a long time.

Mostly I just wish I had some friends. Maybe then I would still be afraid of death.

•     •     •

Today, on my bike ride home from work, I stopped at a red light on Rio Grande Street. I was next to a restaurant called Cain and Abel’s, which is a pretty stupid name for anything. Normally there’s no one sitting on the outdoor patio—except on Fridays. It’s packed on Fridays, usually with jerkoff college freshman who may as well be cockroaches.

As I waited for the light to turn green, I could see out of the corner of my sunglasses that a young man was staring at me with a stupid look on his face. He was smiling in a way that made me uncomfortable, because he was chuckling under his breath. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was a judgmental one. He couldn’t tell that I was looking at him, as I was seemingly staring straight ahead. He patted his friend on the arm. “Look at that guy,” he said. His friend turned to me and, having surveyed my appearance, began to make the same contorted, twisted, devilish grin. They chortled in unison. The other friend motioned to  two girls also seated at the table, and soon everyone was laughing at me, and they weren’t being quiet about it.

I had no idea why. I was just sitting on my bicycle, waiting for the light to change. But something about me was different and weird and funny, apparently—and thus I was worthy of being mocked and ridiculed to my face.

The light turned green and I sped off in the direction of home.

I came inside and sat down at the foot of my bed. I’d worked all day and was feeling hollow. I had been laughed at by total strangers for reasons that are still unclear to me. It didn’t bother me one bit. One day I would be dead, and so would they. The only difference was that I wasn’t afraid of that day at all.

•     •     •

Welcome to Issue 0014 of the Starsailor Newsletter. This week’s episode isn’t really about anything. I just feel like talking about some stuff. I shall do my very best to ensure that, from here on out, the remainder of this issue is devoid of anything more depressing than what I have already said. I will likely fail. This might turn into the darkest Starsailor in recent memory.

To clarify, I am not particularly sad tonight. In fact I feel all right, which is something of a triumph for me. I’m just . . . not going to cling to life like an addict anymore. I don’t need the juices of existence; I do not crave them. One might argue that, as a result of this revelation, I am even freer and stronger than I had been previously.

See, I once took this poetry course, and on the first day of class we had to tell everyone what we wanted to be one day. I said, “I want to be a puppeteer.” The class laughed. I stared unflinchingly ahead and didn’t so much as blink.

“And what kind of puppets do you want to work with?” said the teacher with a wry smile on her face.

“All kinds of puppets,” I said. “I can’t get enough of puppets. I love them all.”

Later, after class, a group of people sitting nearby asked me what I really wanted to be. I said I didn’t want to be anything at all. I told them I wasn’t trying to be cute or weird, but that I was dead serious: I didn’t want to be anything.

“There is nothing this planet has to offer me,” I said.

“Not even money?” said the girl next to me.

“Especially not money.”

“You’re a dangerous man, then,” said the guy on the other side. “Not wanting anything. That means you can’t be bought.”

I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. “You’re absolutely right.”

And not to sound like a monologue from Fight Club, but there you go: the less you want and need, the less you fear, the freer you are to be whatever you want.

Sartre kind of said the same thing about existentialism. People are always saying it’s such a gloomy mindset, to think existentially, and people are often wrong. Really, says Sartre, it’s the man who rejects the notion that essence precedes existence that is truly free. Once life is seen as it is, as a bunch of dumb coincidences—as a mass of unfair bullshit, as a series of irrelevant and disconnected events overseen by a cold and indifferent universe—bang! You’re the freest human on the planet.

Camus said something similar: Life is absurd. Get over it. You’ll be a better person for it. (I guess I did learn something with this minor in Philosophy.)

I don’t want money and I won’t fight wars. I am immune to advertising. I don’t want go own stuff. I am inches away from figuring out how to put my brain in a vat and shed this stupid corporeal husk.

Not afraid to die.

Hell, I may not be dangerous, but I’ve certainly got my eyes wide open. These eyes sometimes do cry, though.

•     •     •

The first line of this newsletter, which, if you’ll recall, was this: “Recently it occurred to me that I’m not afraid to die”—was written almost two weeks ago. I was roaring drunk when I wrote that. I was ready to admit to the world that the ravages of time were of no concern to me.

I had gotten drunk after work. It must have been a Friday. Ever since Dante and Virgil’s fourth birthday, I have stopped drinking on weekdays. It’s just too sad. Too weird.

Yes, and though the revelation had come to me at work, I wasn’t prepared to tell the world until I’d had a few beers in me. So I pounded out that sentence. I chose and a title and changed “Issue 013″ to “Issue 014″. I pulled a verse from a song I was listening to—in this case, “Twenty Miles” by Deer Tick—and slapped it at the top under the date.

“There,” I said, “it’s ready to go.”

I minimized the window and walked over to the other side of the room. I picked up my Jag-Stang and sat down on my bed. I put a capo on the fifth fret and strummed the chords to “Twenty Miles”. I was ready for oblivion.

•     •     •

As a white American adult man, I am programmed to bathe in complete silence with the lights out. I joylessly shave my face once every four to five days. I comb my hair limply and mechanically. I clothe myself with whatever is clean and happens to be at the top of the clothes pile. I bike to work. I work. I each lunch. I work some more. I go home and stare blankly at cyclists and people walking their dogs and old ladies on afternoon strolls, all of whom are just outside my bedroom window. I eat dinner. I read a book. I listen to music.

At twenty-four I am programmed to clean my dirty dishes and put gasoline in my car. I pay my bills. I mow my lawn. I check the mail.

If I wanted to, I could have my clean laundry smell like mountain flowers or cirrus fruits or nothing at all.

If I don’t eat, no one cares. If I don’t bathe or shave or change my clothes, no one says anything.

Mountain flowers.

•     •     •

Where is the life I once imagined? Where is the spirit of adventure? Will I ever be settled and complete and happy? Will I ever love?

Why can’t I just get what I want?

•     •     •

If it were up to me, I would live on a small, earth-like planet with all my friends and literary heroes and a handful of relatives.

Sylvia Plath would be my best friend, and Virginia Woolf would be my mentor.

And my mother and father would be there, and they wouldn’t hate each other. And my brother and sisters would be there also. And Omie. And Uncle Ned and Aunt Margaret. And Ned and Jack. And everyone would love one another.

Yes, and Madeleine and Dante and Virgil would be there. And they would be so happy to see me. We would all roll around in the grass together. And D and V would mew and purr and meow and chirrup, saying, “We love you!” and “We’re so glad you’re back!” and “Let’s do this forever!”

There would be rolling hills and lush forests. There would be gentle snowfalls and light rains to be enjoyed from porches and bedroom windows. There would be long summer days and warm nights filled with lofty breezes, and lit up by fireflies and lanterns. There would be gravel roads and dirt roads leading to cottages and beaches and valleys and canyons and even jungles.

No one would eat animals, and no animals would eat each other.

There would be nothing to be afraid of, and nothing would hurt.

I would be twenty-four years old forever.

•     •     •

Can I tell you a secret? Rock shows aren’t doing it for me recently. And I love rock shows. They used to make things easier. Now I go, and I sing along, and nod my head, and I cheer and clap and study the fingers of the guitarists to learn the shapes of all the chords I want to play when I get home. Yes, and I enjoy the camaraderie, and the chants and singing in unison—and the solos and the drum beats and the bass lines from songs I love so dearly. But their effectiveness has waned as of late, and I’m just not really sure what to do about that.

For instance, last night I was at a Deer Tick show in San Antonio, and I sat on a couch near the stage for the opening band, Turbo Fruits. I just felt weird and numb. The music didn’t surge through me and make me want to be alive. It just vaguely kept me from wanting to feel dead.

When Deer Tick went on, I livened up a bit and felt all right, but not in the way I did during SXSW, and not in the way I did on New Year’s Eve.

Something inside of me is changing. Nothing is working anymore. I guess I’m just destined to feel like a pile of protoplasm for the rest my life, because every time I think I’ve got it, I lose it so quickly.

•     •     •

I’ve told a few people recently that I don’t think my medication is doing the trick anymore. It’s not that I’m back to sleeping fourteen hours a day and barely eating or anything horrible and devastating like that. I’m way better than I was back in the summer, when my entire life fell apart.

No, it’s not that.

Something is missing—something so simple and dear to me. It is, I think, this: a feeling of serenity and comfort. I cannot be comforted. I am standing alone under a streetlight with my hands in my pockets, watching particles of dust gently rain down on the concrete below. I am hollow.

•     •     •

A recurring theme of these things, I think—these newsletters, or whatever they are—is feeling sad and hopeless. I’ve talked about it so much that I almost feel like a caricature. Sometimes I feel like an exaggerated version of myself—a simple parody. I feel two-dimensional.

Gentle reader, listen: I am genuinely sad beyond hope. I sometimes make the joke that I was born sad, and will die sad. I’m starting to believe that maybe that’s true, and in turn I feel even worse. Hah!

Earlier this evening, Jason and I put a new Seymour Duncan SH-4 JB humbucker into my Fender Jag-Stang. I went into my room and hooked it up to my amplifier to test it out. I strummed a few chords and felt a rush of relief, which then quickly dissipated. Where did it go? Am I losing that feeling, too?

So just a few minutes ago I performed my nightly routine, which is to sit cross-legged on my Persian rug in front of my amplifier, strumming chords that are pleasing if slightly sad. I hum or sing gently. I’m trying to feel something. It didn’t work.

•     •     •

Isn’t that the most depressing visual image? A young man, unable to receive happiness, sitting in front of an amplifier at two in the morning with a guitar on his lap, aching to feel anything at all that doesn’t involve sadness? God, what a joke I am!

See, and I have tried so hard to make the best of it here on planet Earth. I’ve tried all the things normal people do in an attempt to fit in.

I wake up a reasonable hour, for instance. I have a steady job and a steady income. I sip tea at my desk. I exercise. I eat food.

All of it may as well be ash in my mouth.

•     •     •

I once read a news report about filmmaker/blogger/game designer Theresa Duncan’s suicide. This was back in 2007. She’d taken a combination of pills with alcohol and went to sleep forever. She was forty.

Jeremy Blake, the video artist and Duncan’s partner of over twelve years, found her body in their apartment. We can only imagine what that must have been like.

A week later, a woman called 911, saying she’d seen a man go far out into the ocean. When police searched the beach, they found some clothes and a wallet and a suicide note. They belonged to Jeremy Blake. He was thirty-five.

Blake, I’m sure, went to his death knowing there was no possible way he could continue to live without his best friend of so many years. Their lives were likely entwined to the point where his suicide was no longer just an option: he had to do it.

It’s sad, to be sure. It’s sadder than hell. I was so moved when I read that. He loved another human being so much and so deeply that walking out into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was the only place he could possibly go to make his grief go away.

•     •     •

Don’t be alarmed. I’m not at all saying I’m ready to follow Blake and Duncan into eternity. But I very much understand the feeling of total hopelessness in the face of loss.

I’ve lost so many friends—some of whom are gone forever and ever. Some are still alive. I’m not sure which hurts more.

I’m here to stay, but God damn is this thing—this life—hard to grasp.

•     •     •

It’s times like these that I remember, nearly word for word, the last thing Virginia Woolf ever wrote. It was for her husband, Leonard Woolf. It makes me sadder than anything else I know:

“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”

•     •     •

“I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

•     •     •

I just want a small, terraformed, Earth-like moon to live on. I just want to play my guitar and go to rock shows and eat apples and wear sweaters and fly to new cities and hold my cats and see my friends and love, love, love. And I want it to work, and make me want to be here.

But I can’t. I just can’t do it. Nothing works.

As much as it pains me to say it, because it’s so terribly uncreative and likely untrue, I will say this: I may be defective. Roll your eyes, for all I care. I’m certainly rolling mine.

Why can’t a human just be happy when it wants to be?

•     •     •

I am awaiting a very important phone call. I am waiting to be validated. Please, make all of this worth it.

When that phone rings, I’ll be there to answer it. And then maybe I’ll have some answers.

Until then I will sleep dreamlessly and live numbly. I will watch as the effectiveness of my medication wears away. I will go to work and make money.

I will daydream about two cats and a girl who used to love me.

The Gloom-King weeps, all right.

—Ryan

It is time for me to hide:
Run, hide, lock your door,
cover your face, crouch to the floor
I am no match for your tongue or your strength.
I am no match for anyone.

Fear is creeping, thick and sharp
up my pale skin, slipping to my heart.
Behind my closet, in a secret room,
I hammer nails into a spindly square.

This blackness is deep and my lamp is cold,
but here in my haven your voice will never reach me.
Here your god will never find me.

But again your nightmares haunt me.
My door is locked, the window barred.
How can I still see what you see?

I am paralyzed by imaginary fear.
The strain pulls me down, crushing my lungs.
Then the demons crowd around
I feel them crawling in my chest.

You say that I should pray them out.
I pray and pray, but I am too afraid
to banish them aloud.

You say the demons cannot read my mind.
You say I have to speak to them,
but I breathe shards of voiceless glass,
and I am only twelve.

I myself have been dealing with this ravenous, black-hole emptiness since I started finding girls attractive. I sure wish it would go away.

I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I guess this emptiness is here to stay.

There are things people do to pretend that emptiness doesn’t exist. Sometimes people buy dumb bullshit, or they get into really bad relationships, or they have a baby, or they put psychotropic substances into their bodies, or they kill someone, or they kill themselves, or they jump out of an airplane wearing a parachute. Sometimes they pray to the Creator of the Universe.

As for me: I have several ways of dealing with it. I take hot baths, read books, ride my bicycle, take naps, eat cashews, drink tea, play my guitar and listen to rock and roll as loud as possible.

That last part—the part about rock and roll—that’s what matters to me the most. I can’t think of anything more important and life-affirming than rock and roll.

•     •     •

Sylvia Plath used to say a lot of poignant and beautiful things. One of the nicest things she ever said, out of a whole lifetime of saying nice things, was that, hey, there isn’t a whole lot a hot bath can’t fix. She was saying, in her own way, that hot baths make that emptiness subside for a little while—just long enough for one to say, “OK, well, I guess this is all worth it after all. I’m going to put this pistol down and go for a walk.”

Listen: I believe that. I want that on my tombstone—that thing about hot baths. Except I would add one more thing, so that my tombstone would look like this: “He genuinely believed hot baths and rock and roll could save his life.”

Rock and roll—what a thing. What a God damn spectacular thing.

Were it not for rock and roll, I don’t know that there would be any reason for me to do anything. I would shut down and collapse. I would wither and die.

So three cheers for rock and roll, I guess

•     •     •

There’s a story here. It involves a band.

It started like this: I was at home reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I was feeling pretty rotten about everything, which is why I was reading in the first place. I took a break and read something else. I turned to the internet. I found out that good old rock and roll would be coming to my town. Rock and roll had a different name that day. It consisted of two words. This is what it was called: “Diamond Rugs”.

I gasped. “My God,” I thought, “Diamond Rugs—in Austin.”

They would be in town, I read, for South by Southwest, the music/film/technology festival that annually graces Austin with its chaos and spirited debauchery. So I searched for every possible show they were playing. I scribbled the dates and times down on a pad of paper. I went into my roommate’s room and shouted the words “Diamond” and “Rugs” and “we” and “have” and “to” and “go.”

He shrugged. “OK,” he said.

I was ecstatic, because I knew that I wouldn’t have to feel so empty for a little while. Free at last, I thought—free from the clutches of soul-sucking, life-consuming, happiness-eating emptiness. And then I returned to my book.

•     •     •

For the uninformed, Diamond Rugs are an “indie supergroup” comprised of members of Deer Tick and Dead Confederate and the Black Lips and Los Lobos and Six Finger Satellite.

Two of my favorite humans make up a third of the band: John McCauley and Rob Crowell of Deer Tick.

And I like Dead Confederate and the Black Lips. I think they’re a bunch of all right dudes.

Really, it’s a weirdly perfect amalgamation of musicians. It’s dropping an A-bomb on the minds and souls of everything with a heartbeat. It’s God picking up an megaphone and screaming, “Fuck you, creation!” at planet Earth.

It’s a good idea, is what it is.

•     •     •

I’m hesitant to make this comparison, because I’m certain just about every music website on Earth is going to say the same thing, but I’ll say it anyway: All of this reminds of Middle Brother, which is another another John McCauley side project—one which I assume came about because JM is the hardest working man in rock and roll, and because he was probably bored.

Middle Brother, as a band, is a brilliant thing.

Middle Brother, as an album, is just about the best thing to happen to music in a long time. It’s a flawless collection of songs. It was crafted by three frontmen who knew exactly what they wanted to do, and then did it—for all the world to hear.

As I said, Diamond Rugs’ origin story isn’t too far off. I don’t know the particulars, so I’ll add a few flourishes of my own.

•     •     •

John Joseph McCauley III, taking a break from his immense success as a traveling musician and songwriter, was sitting in his backyard in Nashville, Tennessee. He was having a few beers with the nicest person to ever exist and best keyboardist on the planet, Rob “The Crow” Crowell. Rob was in town because Nova Scotia was generally uninhabitable during that time of the year, due to the baseball-sized hail and fifteen feet of snow, and because Nikki Darlin was touring Europe and John needed someone to spoon at night.

After ruminating on the prospect of conquering the music world, John finally opened his mouth to speak. Rob, who had been sunbathing, sat up in anticipation. “Man,” said John, “let’s invite Ian over.”

“I’ll call him now,” said Rob, removing the cucumber slices from his eyes.

Fifteen minutes later, Ian Saint Pé of the Black Lips showed up, and without telling anyone beforehand, brought Steve Berlin of Los Lobos with him. “Sorry guys,” said Ian, “couldn’t get rid of him.”

“Shit,” said Rob. “I think I just pocket-dialed Hardy Morris of Dead Confederate.”

“Aw man,” said John. “If he comes, he’s going to bring Brian Dufresne of Six Finger Satellite, and that guy always eats all the hummus.”

“Too late now to back out now,” said Ian, pointing toward the driveway. “Looks like those fuckers were quick on the draw.” He smoothed out his mustache and sipped tequila out of a diamond-encrusted goblet. He burped. “Y’all wanna record an album or something?”

And so Diamond Rugs was born.

•     •     •

Yes, and Diamond Rugs came to Austin the middle of March, and they played a little over a half-dozen shows, and I dutifully attended five of them. I was front and center, just below either John McCauley or Hardy Morris or Ian Saint Pé, and I nodded at all the right times, and dug what I was hearing.

As luck would have it, I was able to attend their first SXSW show at the Lustre Pearl on Rainey Street, because the managing editor I was working for ran out of things for me to do. “You’re welcome to leave whenever you wish,” she told me. So I left work a little after one in hot anticipation of the three o’clock show. I biked down to Rainey Street and got in line.

“I don’t mean to be that guy,” I said to the gentlemen in front of me, “but what am I standing in line for?” A common, irritating thing that happens at SXSW is that people are always asking you what line they’re standing in, and I felt pretty bad about doing that.

“Uh, this is the line for Deerhoof,” said the man, adjusting his sunglasses.

“Deerhoof?”

“Yeah, and, uh, some band called Diamond Rugs.”

“Oh man, great,” I said. And so I stood in line patiently for a half hour, boiling in the sun. I watched people buy five-dollar snow cones from a school bus that was also a restaurant.

“Five dollars,” said a man behind me to his friend, “for ice and sugar.”

•     •     •

Around two-thirty, in exchange for flashing my driver’s license to a bored man sitting on a stool, I was given a black wristband and told to walk around back—and to not, under any circumstances, enter the Lustre Pearl proper. I shrugged.

“OK,” I said. “Why not?”

“Just don’t,” said the man. He spit.

I walked around the side of the charming-if-shabby Lustre Pearl, which wasn’t anything more than an old converted house, much like the other bars on Rainey Street. I passed Hardy Morris as he was buying a hot dog from a food trailer. People were seated a tables, laughing and drinking without any visible cares. It was an all right place to be. It was the only place to be.

•     •     •

There, under an enormous white canopy tent, was the main stage. Almost no one was standing before the stage—just six or seven people waiting with their arms crossed, sipping beer and talking about how they didn’t really know what to expect.

I walked up a flight of stairs leading to the back porch of the Pearl, and saw Rob Crowell of Deer Tick, the nicest guy in rock and roll. He was with a young woman, and both of them were wearing white BluBlocker sunglasses.

When the woman he was with stepped away, I walked up to Rob. “I’m the guy who offered to pick you up from the airport,” I said. I had, yes, offered to pick Diamond Rugs up from the airport—but Rob had told me the day before that their flights were staggered over the course of twelve hours, and thus it would be a logistical nightmare.

“Oh, yeah!” he said. “You were at the New Year’s show—at Brooklyn Bowl.”

“That’s right, in New York,” I said.

We talked for a little while. He told me he had to get on stage in a few minutes. I told him we’d talk after the show.

The woman he was with a few minutes earlier approached me. “You know Rob?” she said.

“Yeah, we’ve met.”

“I’m Carrie,” she said. She shook my hand. “Rob’s a really nice guy.”

“The nicest,” I said. John McCauley walked by sipping a Lone Star tall boy.

“There’s John,” she said. “They’re about to go on.”

“Yeah,” I said. We stood together and faced the sun, awaiting the arrival of rock and roll.

•     •     •

A young woman with short red hair started walking up the stairs leading to the porch. I pointed at her. She gave me a look that communicated that she did not want to be spoken to as though she were an object. I subtly communicated that I was not about to do that.

“I know you,” I said. “You work at the Belmont.”

“That’s right,” she said. She smiled and let down her guard. She was relieved that I wasn’t trying to hit on her, since that’s the only sort of male attention she was accustomed to receiving. I had witnessed it personally at the Belmont.

“I remember seeing you at the Delta Spirit show a few days ago,” she said.

“Yeah, that was me. That was kind of a shitty show. The sound was really bad, and everyone there was a complete jerk. I don’t think anyone even knew who they were.”

“God, yeah,” she said. “Who are you here to see?”

I pointed at the stage. “I’m here to see them—Diamond Rugs.” The band was setting up.

“Oh, I’ve never heard of them. We’re here,” she said, pointing to her friend, “to see Deerhoof. Do you like them?”

“I have never in my life heard a single Deerhoof song.”

“I guess you will soon enough.” She smiled again and dashed into the Lustre Pearl—past the security guard, who was preoccupied with sipping a cup of Lone Star.

•     •     •

Diamond Rugs performed. I was one of a few dozen people standing before the stage. No one knew what to expect.

Ian announced each song as “Song One” and “Song Two” and “Song Three”, and so on. He was immediately likable. He was suave as hell. The way he talked gave me the impression that he was the kind of guy who could successfully flirt with your mother—and on the other hand, I felt he had enough charm to sell me a used car.

“What you’re witnessing is less a show,” he said, “and more of what I would call ‘band practice’.”

“Yeah,” said John, “I’m sorry that you guys won’t really recognize any of these songs.”

“Our record comes out April 24th,” said Ian, “which isn’t too far away.”

•     •     •

After the show ended, I stood dumbly by the gate near the stage, waiting to say hello to John McCauley. He was taking equipment off the stage, so I started talking to a girl who seemed over the moon that John was standing five feet in front of us. “Oh my God,” she said. “There he is!” She held her clasped hands up to her chest and grinned like a lunatic.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s a pretty cool dude.”

“Have you met him before?”

“Get this,” I said, “I’ve kissed him before. Twice, even. It was a nice thing to have happen.”

She looked like she was about to faint. She grabbed my shoulders. “Shut up,” she said.

“No, really,” I said. I took my phone from my pocket and pulled up a picture photographer Sam Cornwall had graciously sent me from Deer Tick’s New Year’s show. In it, John McCauley is wearing blue adult-sized children’s pajamas. He’s bent over on the stage, holding his Fender Jag-Stang away from the crowd. I’ve got both hands around his head, and we’re sharing a passionate New Year’s kiss.

“Fuck you,” she said, smiling. “Seriously, fuck you.” As she said this, John came out from behind the stage.

“Yo, John,” said the girl. “This dude’s got a sick picture of you.”

John approached me and smiled. “What is it?”

“Man, it would be really lame if I showed you the picture,” I said.

“Nah, come on.”

“All right.” I handed him my phone. “From New Year’s in Brooklyn, remember?”

He turned to me. “Ah man,” he said, pulling me in for a hug. “Come here.”

•     •     •

John told me they were opening for Counting Crows later that night. He laughed as he lit a cigarette.

“How the hell did that happened?”

He shrugged. “No idea, but it’s funny as hell.”

“I’ll be there. See you later tonight,”

“Yeah,” said John, turning to the girl who was very angry that I had kissed the love of her life.

I had three hours to kill, so I walked across the street to see Delta Spirit play at Clive Bar. It ended up being the seventh and final Delta Spirit show I had seen in five days.

Just as I got in line to enter the bar, I heard another band take the stage at the Lustre Pearl.

“Hey everyone,” said a voice over the PA system. “We’re Deerhoof.”

•     •     •

Around six-thirty I biked downtown and across the bridge hanging over Lady Bird Lake. The show was at a huge outdoor pavilion called Auditorium Shores. There were tens of thousands of people sitting on a massive lawn—huddled together on blankets and beach towels. The fiery amber skyline of Austin shone in the distance as the planet turned, changing the sky from light blue to a deep murky blue. Everyone was excited to see Counting Crows. No one seemed to give a damn about Diamond Rugs.

I made my way up to front. I overheard two sassy older women say they missed Virginia, where they had lived, they said, for some time. They were swearing like sailors.

“Did you say you’re from Virginia?”

“Not from Virginia, but we lived there for a long time. In Ashburn.”

“Oh, I know Ashburn. I’m from Manassas,” I said, “near Fairfax—which is by Washington, D.C.” I threw in as many notable nearby cities as I could.

“You are!” they shouted in unison.

“We have friends there!” said one the ladies.

“Can you tell we’re sisters?” said the other one.

“Yes,” I said, “I definitely can.”

“Who the fuck do you think is older?” said one of the sisters—the shorter one. She smiled and put her hands on her hips.

“Yeah,” said the tall one, “who’s older?”

“Ladies,” I said, “there’s no way in hell I’m going to answer that question.”

•     •     •

“Are you here for Counting Crows?” said the tall sister.

“Oh, God no,” I said. “I’m here for the opening band—Diamond Rugs.”

“Who?” said the short sister, scrunching her face up. “Diamond what?”

“Rugs,” I said.

“You mean those guys?” said the tall sister. She pointed toward the stage. She pointed at John McCauley, who was wearing an oversized yellow-and-black plaid blazer.

“Yeah, those guys.”

“Oh,” said the sisters in unison.

The taller sister leaned in close to me. “They look kind of weird,” she said.

“They’re cool guys.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, maybe you should stand up front. Here, get in front of us.” The shorter sister grabbed me and gave me a friendly shove up to the front. I held on to the railing and waited patiently for the show to start.

“Who are these guys?” said a man behind me. “I wanna see Counting Crows.”

“They’re called ‘Diamond Rings’,” said one of the sisters. “This guy says they’re good.”

“Well, I wanna see Counting Crows.” The man booed at the stage.

At that moment I felt, just a little, that I wanted to be dead.

•     •     •

Ian Saint Pé approached a microphone on the left side of the stage and said a few pleasantly charming sentences to get the crowd excited. They didn’t buy it. Everyone was confused as hell.

The taller sister leaned forward and whispered in my ear: “Sweetie, I think you’re the only one here to see these guys.”

Adam Duritz, the lead singer of Counting Crows, walked out on stage and held a microphone up to his mouth. He announced that Diamond Rugs was about to play. He said he thoroughly enjoyed their album. He introduced John McCauley and Rob Crowell and Ian Saint Pé and Steve Berlin and Hardy Morris and Brian Dufresne.

Everyone clapped because they would clap no matter what Adam Duritz said or did. They were there to see Counting Crows, after all, and there stood their Lord and Savior, introducing a band they’d never heard of.

“Deer Tick, Los Lobos, the Black Lips, Six Finger Satellite and Dead Confederates,” he said. “Fucking fantastic group of guys.”

When Adam said “Dead Confederates” instead of “Dead Confederate,” Hardy Morris turned to John McCauley and stuck his tongue out as if to say, “This guy doesn’t even know the name of my band.”

•     •     •

Unsurprisingly, the crowd was unfazed by any of the music they heard. Occasionally they limply clapped and jeered, and sometimes booed, which I thought was an extremely rude gesture to aim at a group of hard-working performing artists trying their best to entertain a group of people who didn’t want to be entertained in that way.

The stage crew was just as hostile. One of Ian’s monitors was out, and he couldn’t hear anything he was playing. He turned to one of the sound guys and announced that he was playing blindly, so to speak. The sound guy shrugged.

“Really?” he said. “I mean, really?”

None of John’s usual stage tricks did it for the crowd, either. When he did that thing where he picks up a bottle or can of beer with his gold tooth and chugs the whole thing, people just shrugged and turned to their phones or children or cigarettes and tried their best to ignore what was happening in front of them.

They were a bunch of jerks is what they were.

•     •     •

After the set ended, someone announced that Counting Crows would be going on soon, and there was an enormous rush from the back of the crowd. Everyone wanted to be right up front. I was slammed into a steel blockade. I decided it was time to leave.

As I squirmed my way to the back of the crowd—which was the exact opposite direction everyone else was headed—Jason, my roommate, grabbed my shoulder and excitedly turned me around. “Awesome show,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “I mean, of course I liked it, but all of these people are dicks.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Wrong crowd for this type of thing.”

“Let’s just get the fuck out of here,” I said, turning away.

And we pushed and pushed our way out. It felt like swimming upstream. We said “pardon me” and “excuse me” and “coming through”, but no one listened. They stared at the stage before them, mute and listless and utterly stupefied.

Finally we were aborted from the sweaty palms of the madding crowd. We sped off to the parking lot, which was littered with more bored onlookers and their screaming children. Jason told me he had parked his motorcycle near a P. Terry’s, and that we should walk to get it.

“How far away is it?”

“Oh, not far.” We walked for a mile and a half.

After Jason retrieved his motorcycle and sped off into the night, I biked forty blocks home on a major road. It was the scariest twenty minutes of my entire life.

I had seen Diamond Rugs twice in the span of four hours. I was done for the night. I went home and collapsed into a fever dream.

•     •     •

Next day I went to two more Diamond Rugs shows. I biked downtown around noon to catch them at Empire Automotive, which was connected to a small bar. Before the show started, I went inside and sat down in a booth. Jason was with me. We read a newspaper together.

A bartender went around to every table offering spiced rum in black plastic cups with the bar’s name on it. She asked me if I wanted one. I said, “OK.”

“Now, this stuff is strong, all right? Like, really strong.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” I said. She handed me the cup, smiled, and walked away. When I held it up to my nose, I sneezed. It smelled like liquid sin. I took a small sip and sneezed again.

I went to the bathroom and poured the rum down the drain. I rinsed the neat little cup it came in and stuck it in my bag.

“God damn,” I said to Jason, walking towards the booth. “She wasn’t lying.”

“No kidding,” said Jason.

•     •     •

Outside I ran into Hardy Morris. I told him I’d seen Dead Confederate on New Year’s Eve—in Brooklyn. I told him they were great. He thanked me.

And I ran into Ian Saint Pé as he was buying two tallboys from an outdoor beer vendor. He said he was excited for Diamond Rugs to go on tour, and for the album to come out, and that he was happy to be in Austin. I told him Arabia Mountain was one of the best albums I’d ever heard, and that I’d really enjoyed the two Rugs shows I’d already seen. “Thanks, man,” he said, patting me on the back. “Thanks for liking my bands.”

After the show ended, I approached the stage and talked to John. I told him it was the best show they’d done so far.

“Good seeing you again, man,” he said as he unplugged his effects pedals.

“That show last night was kind of hilarious—and weird,” I said, referring to the Counting Crows debacle.

“Oh, man, they were awful to us. People were booing and shit, and the sound guys wouldn’t help us at all.” I felt a little bad for calling it “hilarious”.

“Do you want to get something to eat?”

“I can’t. I’ve got so much running around to do today. If I eat anything, it’ll be, like, a hot dog or something.” He put his arm around my shoulders and sipped a Lone Star.

“Well, I’ll see you again tonight at the Lustre Pearl.”

“All right, man,” said John McCauley.

•     •     •

I went home. I was drunk as hell. I’d had too many Lone Stars at Empire Automotive. I fell into a sort of drunk coma that lasted several hours.

When I woke up, it was time to go to the Lustre Pearl again. It took some real effort, but I convinced Chantal to come with me. Jason couldn’t be swayed. “I’m tired,” said Jason.

So Chantal and I biked to Rainey Street. Downtown Austin was insane. A bunch of drunk jerks littered every sidewalk and club and bar. There was excitement in the air because Jack White was playing at some shitty bar on 6th Street.

I didn’t give a damn about Jack White. I just wanted to see Diamond Rugs play one last time.

•     •     •

The Lustre Pearl was packed this time. Everyone was watching Johnny Corndawg perform when we showed up. People were dancing and singing and drinking and laughing and hugging and smiling. It was a wonderful place to be. The bar itself was open, so we walked through the breezy old house into its dimly lit rooms, looking for familiar faces. I wanted to introduce Chantal to Rob “Nicest Dude You’ll Ever Meet” Crowell, but he was busy talking to people way more interesting than us, so we didn’t want to disturb him.

We did see old John McCauley, though. He shook Chantal’s hand and said he had to get on stage.

And then he got on stage with the rest of the band. Ian announced they would be playing the entire album from start to finish. That’s exactly what they did.

There is a word that is usually attributed to Deer Tick’s live shows, and it’s “raucous”. That’s boring as hell. And anyway, Diamonds Rugs isn’t Deer Tick; they’re Diamond Rugs.

But this show—this last one—it was something way better than raucous. It was spirited and energetic and beer-fueled and funny and uplifting. It made me feel full. It made me feel the exact opposite of empty.

When John held his guitar out into the crowd, people lifted up their hands and strummed it wildly. Hardy handed some guy a tambourine and motioned for him to shake it during one of his songs. When John played “Gimme a Beer”, a tall guy smoking a cigarette approached the stage and gave all the band members cups of beer. People danced and sang along to songs they’d never heard before. People smiled and cheered and clapped and shouted words of encouragement.

There was something beautiful and human about the whole thing. We were all gathered at the center of the universe, as far as we were concerned, to see a band that didn’t even have an album out yet. We were there because we wanted to feel something, and because the men on stage, with their guitars and drumsticks and saxophones and trumpets and harmonicas—promised to deliver something raw and wonderful that would stir us from our ennui, and make us better creatures than we had been before. And we let them; we opened ourselves up and let them inside.

Eventually the night ended, and the band broke down their equipment and hopped off the stage. It was their final show. It was their very best one, too.

•     •     •

Today when I got home from work, a package was waiting for me outside my house. It was in a yellow padded envelope. I carefully peeled open the top and turned the envelope upside-down. I let the contents fall into my open hand. It was Diamond Rugs.

I went inside and opened the case. Six faces belonging to six fine musicians looked up at me. To the right was a blue CD containing music I knew I already loved.

I took the disc out of its case and slid it into my computer. First there was a steady drumbeat on the snare, and then the sound of a guitar—and Rob chugging along with a pleasant bass line. Ian Saint Pé began to speak. He said he’d had his down points and had gotten real nasty. He said his woman had left him.

I was feeling a little sick, and I wanted to hear some music. So I turned up the volume and walked across the room. I sat down on my bed and let the entire album play through twice. For an hour and a half, I didn’t sense the familiar burden of being alive. I could tell, in some strange way, that I was listening to songs written by men who didn’t want to feel like that either.

Diamond Rugs isn’t a cure, but it’s sure as hell close to one.

Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you.

Mine isn’t found in dusty crosses or organ pipes. Mine is at rest on the turntable, incarnated in tiny rifts of black vinyl, waiting to spin and pour waves into the air.

Forty-three years ago in a grungy Wessex studio the magic happened, the sounds were captured. Swift, syncopated horn runs; smoothly wavering flute melodies; long stretches of soft atonality; lyrics to match the grandeur of classical epic.

It’s been raining for three days now. The mint and basil are flourishing, fresh ingredients for my amateur delicacies. The sky is dark blue but the earth, shaded from the blinding haze of its mother, is greener than ever. My toes clench and unclench over the dark, wet grain of the wood. This is my palette, these are the colors I choose: the browns, greens, and cloudy blues of a forest during a rainstorm.

No tempo now, only the cymbal taps and the rambling guitar. The penultimate noises are pregnant with the final song. I can feel it lusting for life. Then, it is born with a simple drum fill; images of mythical kingdoms, court jesters, and towering, striding kings flow across the backs of my eyes. Every time that last song reaches its chaotic death throes and drops out of the air, I marvel that the world remains.

The needle spirals inward and the songs pass me by. As they fade one by one into silence, they go to a place, I imagine, not unlike the scene before me. A place of soft falling water and gentle grasses, where time has evolved the strange feel of both moving on and never moving: so that songs may pass through every note, yet drift on each forever and never end—a hawk soaring in place, hanging weightless against the wind with feathers spread like open hands.

“Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

“I’ve built a kingdom on second chances . . .” 

•     •     •

Six days ago I was tending to my mushroom patch in the eastern gardens, when a sparrow descended from some high place and, having found a spot to rest on a fallen log, said hello in his own sparrow way.

Chirp chirp.

I whistled a little melody from the older times, and my little friend seemed to enjoy it. I felt I had made a new companion.

Since then, he has visited me every day, and we talk and talk. I mostly listen, though. I have little to say, these days.

I have named him Aeolus, after the Greek god of the winds. Aeolus the sparrow, I am sure, has another name, which is uttered by creatures of his kind. Yet try as I may, I am only able to decipher a fraction of what he says—”Oh, the wind is fair today” and “The sun is harsh”—and so I have given him a name in my own language, for it comforts me to call upon him this way.

“Aeolus, Aeolus!” I say. And here he comes, swooping hither and tither, happy to see this old man. I think we shall be friends for some time. I am happy to have a new friend. It has been a long while since I have had any at all.

•     •     •

They say I am the ruler of this land. They say I am King. I do not much believe them anymore.

They call me “Sire” and “Father” and “Lord” in my presence, but they have another name for me when I am not around.

I am King Theodorus Cecilius von Hessel IX. No one calls me that anymore.

As I have said, they have another name for me.

They call me the Gloom-King.

•     •     •

My son Hector loves me dearly. He may be the only one. He says to me, when I have come in from walking my dogs, “Cheer up, old man.” His appraisal is one I cherish, for he sees me as I am.

Old man.

•     •     •

Yes, and I have six other sons, who are called Lambert and Leon and Lars and Ludwig—and Otto and Theodore. They are fine sons, as far as those go. I suppose I love them.

I have a daughter as well. She is called Adelaide. We have not spoken in nearly three years, for she lives with her mother, the Queen, in my winter palace, far across the wastes . . .

I have fallen out of favor with both.

Adelaide and Zara haunt my dreams of late, when I am able to sleep. I do not know if either of them love me any longer, and I would not blame them if they did not.

Here I cough. Here I quiver.

•     •     •

I do not think I am particularly sad. I have my mushroom patch, and my sixteen cats. I have my four dogs, and the coat on my back.

I sometimes smile.

I read and write and sit by the fire. I sleep till eleven. I sip my tea and take my toast.

I am not all that sad.

•     •     •

It is winter. I do not think spring shall ever come.

It has been winter for nearly three hundred years.

Snow and ice. Freezing rain and sleet. Thank God, I say, that mushrooms are so resilient. I would truly be the Gloom-King, were it not for those mushrooms.

As I have said, I have a whole patch of them—too many to count. I cut them up and put them in my soup. I eat them raw.

. . . Hm.

This old man is losing his damn mind. Where was I?

Ah.

Snow forever and ever. Snow at the end of the world.

And it is the end of the world, is it not?

Mushrooms. I have my mushrooms.

Chirp chirp.

•     •     •

I awake at night to screams that exist only in my head. I clutch at pillows in substitute of another human being, for I sleep alone . . .

Alone, alone. I am terribly alone.

•     •     •

You must excuse the brevity of the words I have thus written. I am sadder than I thought. I have only just realized this.

Yes, and long have I paced these halls in this catacomb of eternal winter; and long have I mourned the absences of warmth which were once kept so tenderly inside. Now all turns to ash. I crave the fruit of my younger years, and yet I am met with the icy nothingness of this rotten world—and am mocked and teased by the demons which tug at the ragged strands of me.

I shall never be happy, no, so long as I am kept in exile, so long as I am kept apart. And in my grief I have traversed the lands of my birth, and have sought the answers which I assumed them to hold. I have discovered nothing.

•     •     •

I am alone. I am a wretch and a fiend. I am protoplasm.

I shall turn this dagger toward its master; I shall say good-bye.

•     •     •

These are my final days—the last days of the Gloom-King. I have held out for so long. I have waited in agony for you to call upon me. How I long to hear my own name.

In my dreams, you are there: “Theo, Theo, running hither and tither; come to me now.”

Darling, you must know I am badly wounded. I bleed and ache. I have drunk myself stupid over this.

There you are, across this loathsome land. Here I am, weeping before your altar. My kingdom crumbles; my rule is weakened. I am absorbed into darkness.

•     •     •

This morning I spoke to Hector in the great hall of the west wring. Our voices echoed against the wooden walls. The servants, I am sure, are now aware of my eternal sorrow. They know their master is cracking.

“Hector,” I said, placing an old hand on his shoulder, “do you—do you miss your mother? And your sister?”

“Father, of course. I miss them every day. I miss them now.”

“O, Zara. O, Adelaide. Alas! How I mourn thee!” I lowered my body to the ground and wrapped my imperial purple cloak about me like a security blanket. Hector placed a porcelain finger on my quivering chin. He raised my head towards his, and scanned my face with his gentle blue eyes.

“I must admit—” he said, now joining me in tears, “I miss my father as well.”

He spun around and disappeared into the gloom of the vast chamber.

Alone, alone. For God’s sake—alone!

•     •     •

I am too old to care any longer of how I am perceived, and of the words which are uttered about me. So I tell you now that I wept like a child, and, when the comfort of tears was no longer of no use to me, placed my thumb in my own mouth.

Gloom-King, indeed!

•     •     •

Love me; leave me. Tell me you do not need me.

(I need you.)

•     •     •

Lately I have been falling asleep on my throne. I blame old age. I blame sadness too.

A servant will wake me—”Master, master!”—and I’ll say, “For God’s sake, what?”

And the servant will go on to say that my brother has arrived, and that he seeks my counsel, or some such madness. What anyone could ever hope to get out of me, I shall never know. Seek my counsel? Hah! He should sooner consult a cantaloupe, if cantaloupes still existed!

My brother, Elias, comes to visit me often. He says he is worried about me. That is what everyone says, these days.

Invariably I ask him about my sister, Elaina. Invariably he tells me she is dying.

Dying is just about the only thing I have in common with my sister.

•     •     •

He will say, “Brother, brother—how is the medication working?”—and when he says this he places a hand around my shoulders, and narrows his eyes a little, as if to brace himself for the joy he shall feel when I say what it I always say next, which is this: “Oh, it just does not work anymore.”

“I see, I see.”

Elias, I think, would like to wear a bigger crown on his head.

Elias, I think, will someday soon have his wish.

•     •     •

The doctors give me a little green pill to swallow. They say it will make the nightmares go away. It will turn “no” to “yes” and “yes” to “no”. It will make me feel fit and able to rule.

All it has done is give me terrible headaches, the occasional erection, and has robbed me blind of my creative output.

They once said I was a genius playwright, after all.

So much for that! I can barely assemble a sentence. I can barely think a paragraph ahead.

They say, “old age”. I say, “green pill”.

The worst part is the erections. Having an erection, at my age, is akin to a quadriplegic receiving a pogo stick for Christmas.

The feeling is the same: “Just what in God’s name am I going to do with this?”

•     •     •

In case you were wondering, and bless you if you were, I have not masturbated in over thirty years.

I have been busy!

•     •     •

There is something wrong with my brain, you see. No one wants to say it, so I shall say it for everyone: I was born broken.

I am tripolar, which means I have three moods: mildly sad, hopelessly, devastatingly, catastrophically sad—and completely nuts. I swerve in and out of each mood as if they were lanes of traffic. It is a superhighway up here! (And here of course I refer to my brain.)

More often than not I am mildly sad. Mild sadness asks me gently, politely, if I would not mind watching the birds dawdle in my garden or catch dragonflies and keep them in jars or sit by the fire and watch the snow fall.

The next kind of sadness is where I find myself today. It is poisonous; it is sinful.

•     •     •

I shall haunt these halls, and curse this blackened sky, and weep in secret rooms where no light has shone in decades . . .

I have not seen the stone towers of my winter palace in nearly three years. I have not seen my wife and daughter in nearly three years.

I have not rested without the torment of nightmares in nearly three years.

Alack! Call me Woe; call me Fiend. Call me anything but King fucking Theo.

 •     •     •

My children are having me see a psychiatrist. They say it will be good for me.

Eighty years old—and I am talking to a psychiatrist. I feel like a damn fool.

This is what I usually say to her: “Let me die already!”

“Now, now,” says she, “we mustn’t say thing likes that.”

She is a fine doctor, though. Bless her heart, she truly does try. I may be in love with her.

Often I complain about the very people who have sent me to her. I tell her most of my children do not love me. I tell her I am not sure if anyone loves me.

“And Hector?” she says. I speak of Hector often.

“Hector, Hector.” I let the name roll over the tired slopes of my mind. “Oh, how I love Hector.”

“And does Hector love you?”

“I am not so sure of anything, these days.”

“If you had to guess.”

“I think so.”

“So, is that a ‘yes’?”

“That is an ‘I think so’.”

“King Theo—”

“Please,” I say, “just ‘Theo’.”

•     •     •

I have taken to roaming the palace wrapped in blankets. Let them call me a loon. It is cold in here.

Yes, and I wear long thick socks doubled over at the shin. I glide around the marble floors like a mischievous child, yelling “Fuck!” and “Shit!” and “Testicles!” I strum at my guitar, the old thing, and sing songs no one could ever want to hear. It is the only way to stay sane.

This guitar shall be my salvation. It will take me home to Heaven. I can hardly wait.

•     •     •

If one more person tells me to stop playing this guitar, I will hit them with it.

•     •     •

Do you know what my sister-in-law, the Duchess of the Hinterlands, said to me yesterday? She said, “That instrument is far too loud. You are acting strange, Theo.”

And when she said “instrument”, she meant “device of evil”.

“Really,” said my brother, Elias, the Duke, “you need to calm down. What is the expression? Fake it till ya make it?”

I did not say it then—I was running a fever and was focused on putting new strings on my guitar—so I will say it here: “Am I acting strange? I sure as hell am. I was born strange. Strange is what I am.”

“Let us get weird,” is what I should have said, thinking about it now.

And to my dear brother I say this: “I shall forgo ‘faking it’, as you have suggested, and will instead ‘be miserable forever’.”

•     •     •

If one more person tells me to fake it until I make it, I will scream. Balderdash.

Utter fucking nonsense.

•     •     •

I am frozen. I cannot move. I may not move ever again.

Who on Earth could ever want an immature, manic-depressive king to rule them? Who could ever put up with such an insufferable loser?

See, and I am weak to criticism. I cannot bear it. Occasionally I will say to Lambert or Leon or Lars or Ludwig—or Otto or Theodore or Hector: “Will you please, please spend some time with me?”

And one of them will say, invariably, that I am “too much to handle”—too moody, perhaps. Too mercurial.

They throw up their hands and sigh when they say this.

I am beginning to think that the people who do love me only love me because of what I used to be, rather than what I currently am and will mostly likely be until my death. And when is that? Soon, I hope—soon.

•     •     •

Just the other day, one of my advisors, Malcom, asked me what I would do if food were ever scarce again. “What would you do,” he said, “if you had to fight to survive?”

I am rather fond of Malcom, so I humored him. I said I would not fight to survive. I said I would blow my brains out before I ever fought another human being for food.

“I can sense,” he said, “that the end is near. I can taste it.”

This is, of course, a screamingly funny thing to say after the world has already ended.

•     •     •

Why would I kill myself? Because I am inches away from killing myself now. And I have everything a man—or a king, even—could ever want. I eat the finest vegetarian cuisine in the land, and have a large and sometimes tolerable family—and horses and dogs and cats and lions and tigers and zebras and so on. (I even have a panda. I have named him Paul. They say he may be the last panda on Earth.)

Yes, and I have a mistress whom I do not sleep with, and a gun collection I despise. I haunt the wastes on horseback in fearsome black armor embossed in spiraling imperial purple. I play tennis and eat strawberries dipped in chocolate. My pajamas smell of lavender and lemon grass. I bathe three times a day in my own personal hot spring.

I pluck tulips from my garden.

My garden, of course, is one of a kind. Flowers and fruits and vegetables and ivy and moss and so on spring up from the ground, even in the dead of winter.

I have a team of scientists who can figure out how to perform such miracles when God is not willing.

Yet I would, at the drop of a hat, place a pistol in my mouth and give it all away if I meant leaving this behind.

That gun collection, I wager, would come in handy for something—for I would sooner turn a gun on myself than aim it at another human being.

And who would rule in my place? Hector, that is who.

Not that I give a damn what happens to my kingdom after I am gone.

Is that selfish?

•     •     •

Our thoughts live inside fleshy containers full of bubbling chemicals. And those containers get old and older still. Mine is, anyway.

And then it is hard to care. But it is easy to hurt.

I hurt.

•     •     •

Were I a younger man, I might say that self-preservation is important. I might say to Malcom, “Sure, I would stick around. I would kill or be killed. I would play that game.”

But how young are we talking? Sixteen? For as long as I can remember I have been a pacifist-coward. I do not know that I have ever been a fighter.

Which is why it was hard to convince me to go to war with the Western province, even if it was a war we did not start. Whenever my Secretary of War comes to my bedroom to tell me about advances we have made on the front, or the casualties we have suffered, or whatever, he usually finds me hiding under the bed praying in a fetal position. “Your Highness,” he says, “I have some urged matters to discuss with you . . .”

“What?!” I say. “What, God damn it?!”

“Uh. The, uh, casualty reports are in. I just wanted to—”

“Write a note and leave it on the dresser!” And then I shake a little, and cry maybe.

I seldom read the notes. I am terrified of fighting and hearing about fighting.

And see, my father was a great warrior. He led the armies of the Hinterlands into battle against the Northern savages and created the vast empire which I am slowly destroying . . .

I do not have any sort of witty remark to apply to this statement. I really am destroying everything.

Wait, here you go: So much for that!

•     •     •

Are my requests for happiness unreasonable? I do not think so. Is is so much, I ask, for a man to want to be reasonably comfortable and not feel pain? Is it so much, I ask again, to want peace? And here I mean inner-peace, though it would be all well and good if the war stopped as well.

I say, “No.” I say, “That sounds perfectly reasonable, Theo.”

I am sick to death of pain. I am sick to death of wondering where my life will end up. I can only envision the grave.

No more happiness for King Theo. No more fun.

•     •     •

I miss my wife and my daughter. I even miss the winter palace.

“Winter palace” is a bit of a joke, if you have not figured that out, for it is always winter here.

Still, it was a nice place. I prefer it to the summer palace, which is in the south, and vastly prefer it over the moon palace, which, yes, has a pleasing view of Earth—but the three-day journey is far too much for my eighty-year-old fleshy container full of chemicals.

See, and I liked that place, once upon a time. Terraforming the moon was one of my most popular decrees. It was also the most expensive.

On clear nights, one can see vividly the oceans and jungles and forests of the moon. One can always see the lights of the cities. The moon palace is somewhere in that mass of green and blue. It is where my brother and his wife and children stay most of the year.

They do not much care for winter.

Oh, but, my wife and daughter.

They live north of here—in New Montreal.

I am staying away. I am staying put. The last thing Zara said to me was this: “Theo, you stay in that God damn castle and you think about what you have done.”

She took Adelaide, because Adelaide is smarter than me, and because Adelaide knows her father is a bit of a scoundrel and a fiend.

I said, “OK.” I was sick with guilt that day.

Have I told you what I did to her?

I have not? I ought not.

It involves wolves, if you can believe it.

•     •     •

Happy to be of use.

•     •     •

I miss my family.

•     •     •

I am creating a machine. Or rather, I am having my scientists create a machine. And this is genius, see, because this machine will revolutionize the way people live.

It will make people happy again. Maybe it will even work on me.

It is called the ‘Incurable Sadness Machine’. I aim to cure incurable sadness.

It harnesses energy from the sun, and creates a sort of invisible infrared blanket over the entirety of my kingdom. It will cheer everyone up by jacking up their serotonin levels. People will be bubbling over with endorphins.

Now, I am no scientist. I will be the first to admit that. Even with my four doctorate degrees (and seventy-four honorary doctorates), I have not taken a single science class since intermediary school. So I am not so sure how this thing works. I have been told it does work, though.

I had it tested on real, live human subjects, because I long ago outlawed animal testing in all the kingdom.

These people who have experienced the Incurable Sadness Machine—they were volunteers. I am no tyrant.

Apparently they are pretty happy!

•     •     •

Long ago, people who were doomed to be depressed their whole lives had very few options. They could do one of the following: 1) be sad forever, 2) kill themselves, 3) go nuts or 4) sit in front of a rectangular piece of plastic which omitted a soothing florescent glow.

I myself was all prepared for options one through three until a group of state scientists, fearing for my health, approached the throne one snowy afternoon and proclaimed that they would need funding for a machine which could cure sadness. I did not know such things could be made.

So I bolted upright, is what I did! I tore the lavender blanket from my body and screamed like a child.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “make the God damn thing already!”

See, and I am paying for half the cost of machine out of my own deep treasury. What am I going to do with all that stupid money? Cure the world, that is what.

Or, at the very least, cure the ailing citizens of this fine kingdom.

And then the world, most likely.

We shall see!

•     •     •

We have a patent and everything. It is going to be such a spectacular thing, when all is said and done. Imagine sitting in your living room, happy as a pineapple—oblivious to the ghostly waves penetrating your brain and leaving you at ease.

And listen: this thing is not going to make people grin like dopes, or anything. I have told the scientists that the machine shall only give people the ability to feel “just OK”.

For those unaware, feeling “just OK” for a hopelessly manic-depressive jerk like me is just about the greatest thing that can ever happen.

In this sense, the Incurable Sadness Machine is merely a platform—a stepping stone, really—to feeling like everything is not a complete and utter waste of time, and that life is worth living, maybe, and that suicide is perhaps not the best way to end a five-year plan.

As I have said, I often ruminate on the subject of suicide. I am hovering dangerously close to the big red button which reads “Press To Die”.

The Incurable Sadness Machine cannot come soon enough, I say.

•     •     •

Do you know what I would do with myself if this machine ends up working?

I would love my family dearly. I would turn myself around. I would stop being such a shit. I would send a telegram to my dear wife and daughter, far across this dead land, and I would say:

“Dearest Zara, and Dearest Adelaide, how I adore thee. Forgive your husband. Forgive your father. He has awoken from his gloom.”

And for the first time in thirty-five years, I would not sign the letter “The Gloom-King”, as I am accustomed to doing, for I am one who enjoys a good joke. I would be sincere. I would sign it thus:

“Love eternal, evermore,

Theo.”

•     •     •

Which is not to say that I would not write such a letter now. I simply need this confidence, this boost of “OK-ness”. Were I a happier man, I would put pen to paper and pack a real punch. Oh! the poetry that would flow from my ink. How happy I would be, writing “I love you” and “I need you” and “Come home to meeeeeee.”

I’m getting excited just thinking about it.

And I would write them each a song, and strum it on my guitar.

Oh, happy day!

•     •     •

This morning I heard a pecking at my bedroom window. I sleep in the western tower, high up in the sky—and so noise of any kind is unusual. All I ever hear is the wind.

It was Aeolus, my little sparrow friend. I opened my window to let him in, and he hopped in on one foot and did a little bow.

“No, Aeolus,” I said, “I shall bow to you.” And of course I bowed back.

He told me something. He said he was King of Sparrows, lord of all birds. I chuckled a little at first. But Aeolus reminded me that I too am an unlikely ruler. He said that is why we are such good friends.

“Well, I cannot argue there,” I said, after he had pointed to my robe of purple blankets. I looked like a real loon.

He said, “Cheer up, Theo.” He said, “Be merry.”

Yes, and he told me happiness was the gift of a thousand mornings. He told me happiness was tea and jam and bread.

He teased me. He called me “Gloom-King” as he pranced about.

And then he said something which stopped my blood cold. He had been to the winter palace, he said, and had spoken with the sparrows there—sparrows who have heard the whispers of my wife and daughter. I tensed up and had a seat on the bed.

“Yes?” I said. “What have you heard?”

“Chirp chirp, chirp chirp chirp,” he said. He did a little bow, and flew away.

I sat with my thoughts for a long while. I wept.

“Theo,” he had said, “you are loved, and not forgotten.”

—The Gloom-King

There is steel wool in your system, wedged in pinched tufts at the terminus of each axon—the pulses that communicate spatiality to your mind are scattered and strange: the corners of the room could be round, the walls could be breathing. Dreams are leaking into this reality. The beaker in the attic that holds the acid is cracked. When the words fungus is only a fractal pass through your head, you can only assume they are true and always will be.

You trudge up the stairs and into the bathroom. Why so many damn mirrors in this hellhole? Too late, you’ve seen your face and it isn’t yours. You open the cabinet, splitting your reflection in half. Pain killers, sleeping pills, fever reducers, vitamins. You swallow what you assume is just under a lethal dose of each with a glass of lukewarm water that tastes of limestone. The taste is familiar; you’ve been drinking the unfiltered milk of these mountains all your life. Somewhere in your kidneys a host of barbed spheres are growing, and somewhere in your frightened little soul you know they will have to find a way out one day.

You close the cabinet. The face again, the one you don’t recognize. The walls continue to convulse to the rhythm of your heartbeats. Are the contractions closer together? Is the symphony outpacing the conductor? You’re quaking on the cold tiles. A cruel deity had lit a block of ice on fire and placed it across your shoulders.

The saliva is pooling under your tongue. Every time you swallow an intangible boulder graces your esophagus with its roughest side, so you end up spitting instead. But you’re still thirsty.

You collapse onto your bed in a heap of cold sweat. Ice water flows over you, and your spine is lined with hot coals. You toss and turn until the sheets are wrapped in spiraling folds and pushed to the side. The mattress is damp and your skin porous. There is nowhere to spit so you swallow, and the familiar burning is there: you wince like a child as the fluid slides down into you. Every car that rolls by sounds like thunder between your ears, and the patterns of light on the wall that follow their departure are faces, bright and cruel and bursting with laughter.

Keep your distance from these guys, man. These guys carry knives. It was something your friend whispered in your ear at the fair under the sizzling ferris wheel, or it was only in your head, a part of the dream that begins to take shape.

It all happened so fast. There was fire, there was quiet, and then someone tried to tell you you had always been dead. One of his eyes was half closed and he breathed like the wind was trying to steal the air from his chest. They were lies, like everything else he had ever spoken. Yet his skull was so defined under the skin of his face, and his eyes so vacuous they could have been empty sockets. So maybe this was him, Death: not so imposing after all, just another tired old man with a point to make.

You are awake again and the sun is still under the earth. When your eyes open you see him for the last time, fading just as you try to focus on him like the spots of light that dance at the edge of your vision. Everything is like that now, flaring up and fading away. There is an insect crawling around in your head, telling you your time has come. No, not yet, not without a fight, not when there’s still a possibility that tomorrow you’ll be laughing at all of this, laughing at your own weakness. But for now the malady is very real—almost tangible, a twisted and beautiful witch slurring her way through incantations as old as life.

Standing on the floor now. You need to get back to the room with the mirror, you need to find the drugs. The floor is shifting beneath you. Gazing into the darkness outside your window, you know that discovering your dilapidated house adrift in the ocean would be no surprise. As you walk the boards sink, conforming to the arch of each step. When you get to the mirror and see the emotionless tears running down your cheeks you begin to choke, and out of your gut streams a substance that shouldn’t be part of you. The color of urine, viscosity of sludge, taste of fresh shell casings.

When there is no more, when the convulsions stop, you lift your head and wonder at the world around you, amazed that you are still here. Then you see the mirror. Drugs, there are drugs in the mirror. But your fingers won’t seep into it as they should. Should they?

Cowards, do you want to live forever?

Hell no. You plunge a clenched fist into your own face and it comes away bloody and filled with fragments of whatever-is-opposite-themselves. Maybe it’s wrong, but there are the drugs in translucent pharmaceutical bottles, lined in gleaming row, and you can already feel them in your bloodstream. You swallow them again, three at a time, followed by a chorus of pain in the throat. Your throat. Yes, it will belong to you until whatever is doing its work inside finds the sweet spot and ends you.

Back to the bed, trailing blood and reflective glass. The invention of mirrors was a terrible mistake. You lay down again, in a pool of your own diseased perspiration. When you turn in on yourself again, it is a hallucinated memory, identical to the event itself but for the way the horizon wavers.

The two of you sat on the balcony, watching the advance of the thundercloud. Miles high, formed of a soft black so deep it absorbed sight itself. You couldn’t look away, not even toward the blades of lightning. The old farmer you had met, master of forested land, a hater of clothing and lover of wisdom—she told you he had sensed darkness around you. You had been in his salty, brow-furrowed presence for all of ten minutes, yet you trusted his impressions. You were unnerved, but far from surprised.

You would hate the thing that’s making you feel this way, but you know enough basic biology to realize that your enemy is a godless molecule—it injects its lying poison and transforms your little bits into suicidal factories, wreaking havoc and making your bones ache not because it hates you, not because it dreams of finishing you off, but simply because that’s what the stuff does.

When you are awake again your wits have returned, and are shocked at what you’ve done in their absence. Sweat and blood are the mediums of the morning. When they are gone it is you and gauze and the brutal heat of sun filtered through a dusty window. The limbs of dead flies bristle in the light. While you were locked away in your opium den, dozing and dying and calling out for divine intervention, the world gave birth to spring.

My predicament often leads me to wonder what it means to be religious. I have known a great many people who attend church every Sunday yet are not haunted by God in the same way that I am. For them, God is a familiar certainty. They know exactly what He, for it is almost always a he, wants and expects of them.  Similarly, I have known a great deal of supposed atheists who are unmistakably haunted as I am. Their every heartbeat seems to me an act of devotion. And yet they are not religious?

The modern notion of ‘spiritual but not religious’ is even more troubling. I am admittedly a heretic, but that does not bother me. The line between heretics and saints has always been delightfully blurred. But if a single tradition will not have me, should I claim instead to merely be spiritual? Is that what I am? It seems like such a cop out, a lazy abstention, a way of ignoring but not dismissing. I cannot call myself by such a name because God’s engagement with me is not casual; it is all consuming. I cannot devote a single day each week to God; God demands them all.

It is perhaps inaccurate to say that I desire God. To say that I desire implies that there is an object of my desire. I desire, but I know not what. I love, but I know not who. I weep, but I know not why. I am passionate for God-knows-what.  I am praying for a prayer.

I sometimes think things would be easier for me if I were to let my hair grow wild and roam naked in a desert eating locusts. Then perhaps my exteriority could reveal some of the fervor, the passion, the turmoil that so permeates my interiority. Those who are similarly persecuted would be able to recognize our kinship and we could find solace in keening together, lifting our shared lament to the night sky. Yet as it is, I am so fundamentally undistinguishable. So well adjusted. So prone to laughter. So blonde. My intelligence, or depth, or what have you always seems to catch people by surprise. When men approach me at bars and strike up a conversation, I often see flashes of shock cross their faces. Some are disappointed-they realize I will not be an easy lay and move on-and others are intrigued-these boobs come with brains too?!- but they are surprised all the same. A mind cannot be seen across a crowded room, and neither can a soul. Thus it has always been that my interactions with those who share my specter have arisen entirely out of chance, as happened last December.

I can still hear it now. I never went in for afterglow or candlelight on the mistletoe, but now when you turn the lamp down low I’m beginning to see the light.

There is a peculiar tradition at Washington and Lee University known as Christmas weekend. A two night date function, it, like all great W&L traditions, involves a curious juxtaposition of formal wear and debaucherous behavior, a haze of bourbon and bowties. One such night from my junior year is particularly vivid, although it began ordinarily enough. It seemed to be simply another evening of pearls and perfume perhaps notable only for my silly insistence on wearing my father’s old bomber jacket over my cocktail dress; something about the contrast between the earthy leather and the white silk amused me. I remember that a faint dusting of snow made everything shimmer, and the lyrics to an old standard, “I’m beginning to see the light,” kept playing over and over in my head. My date was sweet and familiar, a close enough friend that we were content to drift in and out of each other’s presence. So when he was called away on official fraternity business I wasn’t distressed; I simply found my way to a seat at the bar. There was the usual discussion of hometowns and home teams, friends, finals, and plans for New Years Eve. By chance, something prompted me to make an offhanded remark about the number zero. I have long since forgotten what I said, perhaps it was a joking question about how nothing could be something?, but that is where my evening changed.

I watched as the boy suddenly became alert and cocked his head to the side, a curious look in his eyes. He matched my query with another and an imperceptible spark of recognition flashed between us.  Those around us attempted to continue the usual witty but superficial cocktail banter, but the two of us kept steering the conversation back to laughably serious quandaries. Our comments were directed at the group, but we were acutely aware of each other’s presence, searching each other for signs of recognition. It was a sort of mutual test; every seemingly innocent comment about nothingness begged the question: You too?

One by one, the others who had congregated at the bar would wander off, yawning or shaking their heads and muttering “I’m too drunk for this.” Yet we continued on, our conversation comically frantic as we discussed the paradoxes that stirred our souls. We discussed Heidegger, and Plato, and Euripides, and Calvin, and Caputo. Discussions of such thinkers are not unheard of at cocktail parties, but this was different. It was sincere. There was no smugness, no namedropping, no blasé well obviouslys. It was an earnest and exuberant search, not really for solutions, just for someone who could see the conundrums.  We spoke of salvation, of damnation, of living, of dying, of loving, of language, and of thinking. And it was exhilarating.

I should perhaps mention that this was by no means a romantic encounter; he was four years younger and happily dating a girl who was only absent because of an athletic commitment. But that is not to say it was not intimate, for it was profoundly so. I stayed at the corner of the bar until four, my soul naked before a boy I had met mere hours before. And in truth, our parting was as clumsy and awkward as any morning after. When I stood to leave I said the words usually appropriate at the end of first meetings: it was nice to meet you. But we both knew it was all wrong for the occasion. Stilted and overly formal. So I tried again: it was nice to be known by you.

I walked home alone that morning in a haze brought on by too much whiskey and too little sleep, knowing well that our chance encounter would never be repeated. How could it be? In truth, I have seen him around campus many times since, and his has always cocked his head to the side and curiously smiled. But what can you say in a lunch line to someone you barely know yet have exposed yourself to fully?

And yet I somehow feel our one encounter was enough. I remember that during a rare lull in our conversation he remarked that it was like we both saw an extra color that no one around us could perceive. As he explained, flowers have ultra-violet light patters on their petals, imperceptible to the human eye, but which catch the attention of honeybees. He tilted his head slightly, looked towards the heavens, and ruminated that we are perhaps like those honeybees. We were not crazy, we just had never been around a fellow bee before, someone who saw the patterns. I may not know whom I love when I love my God, but I at least know that I am not alone in not knowing. And yet wanting to so very desperately.

I wonder though, when did it start? Looking back, I remember my second birthday, the inexplicable outpouring of cake, and gifts, and love, but I also remember much that I cannot date from long before then. Some memories are accompanied by words, but I have others from before I knew what words were.  I hear it is unusual to remember thoughts from infancy, and I think this is a blessing. Oh, how I ache when I recall that deep oceanic feeling, the synchronicity of heartbeats, and the security of being physically connected to my entire universe.

Eli Wiesel ruminates that the instant an infant is born it “is still loved, but not as before. Neither boy nor girl will ever again be loved as they were one minute earlier.” I understand this well, and I wish so desperately that it were not so. I wish that it were possible to become a self without that initial bloody schism and the countless bloodless ones that follow. Is it really worth it; is it worth sacrificing union on the altar of our selfhood? Perhaps all that can be said of my own opinion on the matter is that I never chose to leave the womb. I was nearly three weeks late and showing no sign of budging when the doctors decided to induce labor and extract me by artificial means.

Then as a child I was what my mother describes as almost too empathetic to function. Apparently, I never had to be taught to share or be considerate of others’ feelings. Instead I ascribed feelings to everything around me. I carried on long conversations with the birds and the trees. I shed tears over the mosquitoes I could not stop myself from swatting. After rainstorms, I spent hours picking earthworms off my driveway so that they would not die a senseless death under my father’s tires.

Perhaps most strange of all, I felt deeply for objects most people would consider inanimate. For instance, there was this mattress. When my mother was young and struggling she purchased it at a hotel sale. She later passed it on to me, and it was the first big-girl bed I ever had. After a long and exhausting day of playing dead man walking with my neighborhood friends I returned home and found this mattress unceremoniously discarded at the street, sprawled and contorted into a pitiful heap. I sprinted to my room and found a sterile new mattress waiting for me upon my bed. I was confused, and deeply wounded. My parents later found me with the garbage; unable to drag the mattress farther than a foot or two, I had thrown myself over its ratted, pee-stained body and proceeded to sob uncontrollably. It had been nothing but loyal and supportive, faithfully carrying out its sole mission in life without complaint. And yet we rewarded it by throwing it in the trash? You don’t discard someone who loves you. You shouldn’t treat anyone like that. How could they? ‘ Reason’ did not work on me, and I stayed there until I was so exhausted that I fell asleep on my dear friend one last time and my daddy tenderly wiped my tears and carried me to my new bed. When I awoke the next morning, disoriented, I panicked and pressed my nose to the window. It was too late. The garbage man had already come.

Although I barely remember it, my mother tells me she felt intensely ashamed before me at my fifth birthday party when a similar incident occurred. For as a child, I deeply loved dolls. They were thoroughly real to me, and I cared for them with profuse and genuine affection. For this birthday, my mama had agreed to order me an extra special new one from a catalogue that I had already decided to name Hazel. But when I tore through the paper wrappings and cardboard box, she was appalled at the utter lack of resemblance between the glossy catalogue picture and the mangy monstrosity in my arms. She immediately swooped in, grabbed the doll, and assured me in comforting tones that she’d return it and by me a nice, beautiful doll instead. At this, I am said to have burst into tears and looked up at my mother in shock. She recalls that it was as if I no longer recognized her. And then in my childhood innocence and sincerity I asked: Would you have sent me back if I had been ugly? Isn’t everyone beautiful to God?  What could she have said in return? And so it was that I was allowed to keep my Hazel. I kept her close, whispering to her each morning and night that she was beautiful.

Reflecting back, my mother insists I was a living embodiment of the golden rule. She claims I always seemed to do onto others as I would have them do onto myself, even if those others were a potato and a couch cushion.  I’m not so sure. The more I reflect back upon my early years, the more certain I am that I simply took far longer than most children to comprehend the unbreachable rupture between myself and others. My supposed kindnesses were selfish acts of the most fundamental kind; I was doing onto myself as I would have myself do onto myself.

Yet things did not become easier once I finally discerned that the universe is shattered. About a month into college, after an evening spent eating Chunky Monkey from the carton and laughing ourselves sick I look over at my roommate and sigh. I will never be whole again. While I’m here, I am always missing the people back there. But when I go back there, I’ll just miss the people here.  She throws a pillow at me and tells me to stop being so melodramatic . But in truth, I have never been whole. For when you are raised travelling between two places, loving people in each, it splits your very soul.

My father, a pilot, has to leave my mother alone with me because I am born so many weeks late, at a serendipitously precise time of 7:47 in the evening. It is too much for her, so she takes me to stay with her mother. Thus I ride on an airplane for the first time when I am just over a week old. But really, it is not my first time. My mother was a flight-attendant until she grew too big to fit down the aisles, and I was up in the air with her then. I am a child of the air; I am most at home when I am 32,000 feet above the ground.  But strangely, I do not become consciously aware of it until a college professor provides me with the space to reflect.

For on the first day of Nature and Place we are warned that we will have to write a term paper on a sacred space. Any sacred space. While gazing out the window I see the dissipating remnant of a contrail and I realize what sacred space I wish to choose. So I speak with the professor after class.  He seems almost amused but gives me permission. I struggle with the project for a few weeks on my own before slinking dejectedly back to his office. As always, this man provides graceful guidance and hands me something I never would have expected. I am writing a research paper, and yet he gives me novels. Novels! Novels with names like Up in the Air, Aloft, and Never Land. And then he tells me to do something I never could have conceived. Write it in the first person. Write it as fiction. And so, I stop struggling. I stop trying to make my inner musings conform to some scholarly model of what a term paper should be and simply record the quotes that stir me and the musings which drift through my mind. I stumble upon paintings and poems about airplanes and I allow myself to ponder them too.

And then it takes shape on its own. It begins and ends in the first person, a fictionalized account of what I am thinking as I look down from the window of an airplane, marveling that I am more at home there than I will ever be on earth. In it, I do not so much explain the meaning of quotes from great authors as explain what meaning they hold for me. An Inquiry into the Essence of Airplanes.  It is a grossly imperfect little creature, but one that I have conceived and labored and birthed and every one of its flaw is an echo of my own. My professor, a man who always seems to intuit my thoughts and feelings before I am even aware that I have thought or felt them, gives simple advice. This means something to you. Home. Pursue it.  And then he warns me that my thesis must be different. There is a set format that such essays must follow.

It doesn’t matter though. After that term paper, I write in an entirely new way. Though the language I use for my thesis is scholarly and objective in form, its content is saturated with the wanderings of my soul. I write of nostalgia, of the all-too-human ache to be at home upon the earth. I write in long stretches and time slips away from me. Often when I emerge I am faintly surprised to discover that while I was buried in a windowless room deep within one of Lexington’s hillsides, the sun has decided to rise. I am afraid of how the department will react, but while this paper too is hopelessly flawed, they receive it tenderly. I am blessed.

I cannot reflect upon such currents in my life without remarking that while the clouds may be profoundly beautiful and worth craning one’s neck to see, I have found that doing so while continuing to walk makes you very liable to trip. And so the girls, the women, I have flocked to have always seemed to have both their gaze and their feet planted firmly upon the earth.  I deeply appreciate the sort of friends that some might describe as bossy.  The sort of girls who will rip a book out of my hands and playfully beat me with it when I attempt to read at parties, the sort of girls who will make plans for me ask are you really wearing that?! and then drag me to them, the sort of girls who tell me my music is making everyone in the room sleepy or suicidal and turn on the radio instead. The sort of girls who remind me to turn the oven off. Such friends keep me sane.

And yet, when I am around them for too long I cannot help but feel like someone has amputated one of my limbs. I can function yes, but I am left with an oozing, bloody stump. I have to bury the part of myself that no one else cares for, and it is never easy. During one lunch date, a dear friend threatened to overturn her mac and cheese upon my head if I mentioned any dead white men. I started counting, and I physically had to bite my tongue at least seven times.

For many people the academy is the graveyard in which one buries ones selfhood. All remaining remnants of a subjective conscience are entombed for the sake of objective truth and impersonal investigation. This is not true for me. There are vital parts of my selfhood that I can only unbury and visit with when I am deep at work on a term paper. Such papers are my spirituals, their apparent meaning obvious but their covert meaning also plain to those who care to look. When asked to write a five page paper on Job, it is inevitably woven with my soul.

Yet as a child, I never particularly excelled at school. My kindergarten teacher told my parents I was destined to be average at best all of my life. In a sense, I just never cared; my teachers never seemed to tell me anything I couldn’t find out far more easily in a book. In second grade, my teacher allowed us to sit quietly in the library if we had finished our homework early; I started filling my worksheets with nonsense so that I could leave as soon as possible and read books instead.

A sixth grade teacher changed everything. I met him for the first time at a school picnic while climbing a tree.  My mother called up to me have you met your teacher yet?  and as I stared down at that man I’m sure my response was what most people would consider rude. I have been told that my face always betrays my true feelings; at that moment it was surely showing nothing but incredulity. What was this thing? Where was his orange lipstick? His obnoxiously cheery brooch?  His condescending stare? His sensible shoes? How could that be a teacher? He just raised an eyebrow and slightly smiled. Nice to meet you.

As the year unfolded, I never could comprehend him. He was this maddening paradox and though I was utterly devoted to him he was entirely beyond my grasp.  He wasn’t just our teacher, he was the school headmaster. He rode to school on a motorcycle. His ears were pierced.  He was a pastor, but also a particle physicist. He introduced us to Shakespeare, and to allegory, and to quarks. He was achingly wise.

For the first time in my life, I had met a teacher who seemed to know something that I could not find in a book. This revelation made me frantic; my desire could not be quenched during class. Fortunately, this man allowed us to pursue an unlimited amount of extra credit. All we had to do was be willing to write short papers on anything and then spend part of our lunch in the headmaster’s office discussing them.

When I’d go to his office he would always treat my quandaries and assertions with such gentleness and such care. Yet he was not afraid to challenge me, to leave me wondering how I could have ever been so misguided. And as young as I was, he always spoke to me as if I were a real person. We once spent an eternity discussing who that Jesus of Nazareth might have been; he taught me that school could be a place for questions, not just answers. I received a 116% in 6th grade Social Studies. It was not enough. At the end of the year, he left us and our privileged world of morning meditations and immersion weeks to teach in the inner city. School became flat once more.

It was alright though. I learned how to stifle those questions and get by. I learned how to blend. I will seem just like any other cheerleader on the squad; I will be on homecoming court. My teachers tell my parents I am a gifted writer and they are confused when I tell them I hate writing. It is such a labor. But gradually it becomes easier and easier for me to shut off my heart and argue whatever I think my teachers or an abstract grading board want to hear. The papers I write are empty rhetorical exercises; I transform myself into a machine.  And oh how it works!  I become the first female in my high school’s history to score a 5 on the AP US History exam.  Those essays I wrote seem so foreign to me now.

But what is not foreign to me? What or where is my home? I should perhaps know by now; growing up in a family filled with aviators has allowed me to glimpse the world. We never vacationed like normal families, making plans to spend leisurely weeks inhabiting a place. Instead we’d go where we could when we could, often at a moment’s notice. I’d come home from school and discover suitcases stacked in the doorway.  An evening in Paris. A weekend in Beijing. Dinner in DC. We always pack light.

We float in and out of these places, never substantiating our presence or thinking for a moment that we could grow roots. Yet there is one place that always draws me back. One thing. A tree; a wizened and glorious old banyan tree stretching towards the sea from the open-air courtyard of the oldest hotel on Waikiki beach. My love for this tree is incomprehensible and inexplicable even to me; there are countless trees on the Hawaiian Islands, so many other fish in the sea! And Waikiki usually frustrates me; I hate the bustle and the brand names and prefer to get deliciously lost and eat confusing fruit on some other beach on some other island. Yet I am tangled up in this tree and it in me. Years may pass, but my banyan inevitably pulls me back. And there, on ground that belongs to a corporation in a courtyard millions have passed through, I am curiously home.

Of all the times that I have napped in its shade one meeting remains so vivid that it stings to remember. I have just had foot surgery, but lying on a beach sounds infinitely preferable to lying on the couch for yet another day. And so when daddy invites us to come to work with him we pack quickly and lightly. We stow away on his airplane, ride the bus with his crew, and slip into his hotel room. Us three are an endless ocean of laughter as I attempt to wade through the sand on crutches and then flop about all gangly and contorted as I try to submerge as much of my body as I can without wetting my cast. Our progress is slow, but we traverse down the beach until we reach my tree and I am overcome.

It is lovely. So lovely that when the captain departs my mother and I stay behind to soak up what we can of the last rays of summer. Our last night we wander aimlessly through the streets and discover that gravity has pulled us back to the courtyard that houses and is housed by the wide canopy of my tree. So we linger and watch the sun languorously set over the ocean. And it is so achingly beautiful that we stay as the moon and the candles are lit. I remember the faintness of plumeria, the comforting reverberation of acoustic guitars, and the maddening tangles of my salty hair.

As the waves continue to visit us, we sit and we reminisce and we are so open and so bare. We are variations on a theme us two, and it seems that for every incommensurable difference there is something vital that resonates and is amplified until it becomes too powerful and we must cast it out over the sea. And though I have long since forgotten what lead her to say it, I will never forget her uncharacteristically poetic words. I am a wanderer. I am never happy unless I am wandering. But you…you are a wanderer who longs for roots. How can you ever be happy?

The truth of her words burns my throat and makes my mascara run so I reach for my crutches and attempt to navigate my way to the nearest mirror. It is a mess of stopping and starting and turning as I duck to keep from running into the tangled masses of roots which my tree is dropping from the sky to the earth. And then I realize how much I want to be this tree, how much I am this tree. It soars and it travels, potentially someday for miles, but it is paradoxically also rooted firmly in the earth.  It is living a life of both and. It is whole in its division. It is a marvelous contradiction.

Sometimes, when you head west in an airplane at just the right speed at just the right time, twilight stretches. Time becomes a meaningless concept and space is only an endless expanse of hazy purple. You can miraculously inhabit that moment of liminality. And it is beautiful. Periwinkle. Yet when I think of blue I think of the struggle to put on a particular play, hoping against hope that it will sing. The struggle remains particularly sharp, not yet dulled by the flow of memory.

I have been rehearsing endlessly and the result is technical perfection. We know our lines, know our blocking, know exactly which spot in the audience to stare at if we want it to look precisely as if we are examining a painting two feet from our eyes. I can even make myself cry. And yet, it means nothing. It is sound not music. My fellow actor and I were cast reluctantly; instead of the bawdy comedies or the political satire we were shanghaied into taking part in the token drama, a piece that seemed overdone and melodramatic on the page. He swallows a few times, smiles apathetically, but decides to accept the part anyway. And so we are strangers in an art gallery, transfixed by the work of Rothko. As he and I speak of color blocks and portals the audience is supposed to gradually realize that I am an image of his dead mother conjured forth by his experience of the artwork. And then, I mysteriously disappear back inside a painting. Yet our rendition is entirely flat.

But one day our student director opens rehearsal with a proclamation. I chose this one act because I know what it feels like to lose a parent. Both of them, actually. My mother and father were murdered by my brother while I was away at college. He wrapped their dead bodies up in sheets and threw a party. Google it. And then she tells my cast mate that he needs to know what such helplessness and bewilderment feels like-but she makes him explicitly promise never to discuss anything she tells him with anyone, especially me.  I watch his Adam’s apple bob as he follows her.

And so I am left alone on an empty stage for nearly an hour while they speak in private. I feel abandoned, confused, and morbidly curious. For lack of anything better to do, I run lines in my head and mark the blocking, hoping to impress her with my perfection. But when they return, she does not take her usual place in the audience. Instead she whispers.  Follow me.  She leads us out of the theater and down the hallway into an actual art gallery. She moves a bench and places it in front of a painting. It is a huge abstract canvas, impossibly blue. And then, she leaves.

We look at each other, and I can tell he is as lost and confused as I am. We gather we are supposed to perform, but to this wall? There is no one to watch us. We begin, and it is odd. The room is so oppressively empty; it echoes our words back to us.  But as we continue, as we stare into that blue swamp, we are transformed. It is no longer a performance but a reality in which we are entangled. I lose myself in the blue, and this time the tears I cry are authentic and desperate.  Being lost to a child seems impossibly worse than losing a child. I am helpless to alleviate the pain in his eyes.

When we finish, we are silent. The whole gallery is eerily silent and hushed. Neither of us is capable of breaking such a silence, so we just sit. In front of the bench, still swimming in that blue. And out of urgent desperation we lean on each other’s shoulders, seeking any comfort we can find. Finally, our director returns and breaks the silence with a somber how’d it go? I am honest with her. For the first time, I don’t care if we ever perform. This doesn’t need outside validation. Too much of my soul is wrapped up inside it.

Yet three days later, perform we must. But we do not so much perform for the audience as we perform with them. As we walk through this art gallery together, a charged hush falls over the audience. We are all stitched together in this silence, and the tears I cry onstage are reflected back in the gazes directed towards me. By the time I walk through the painting, the audiences’ gasps and sobs are audible. And when I leave the stage, more tears await me. But these tears are not contemplative. They are urgent. The director grasps me tightly and words pour out at a furious and almost nonsensical pace. Do you know why I cast you? It was your voice. It was so rich but so fragile and it sounded like it could forgive. We Jews are bitter. We hold on to our resentment. But you have a Christian voice. And I just needed to know that my mom was as lost as I am but that she could forgive. She continues to ramble. Thank you seems inappropriate and inadequate so I just hold her and let her sob.

While it usually lacks such moments, I love the game of badminton almost as much as I love theater. When played correctly, it is a dizzying blur. Few things are as satisfying as suddenly stopping that whirlwind with a well placed smash at an opponent’s feet. I’ve tried other racquet sports of course, but it is never the same. My badminton racquet is an extension of my arm and it knows exactly where to hit a birdie to make it go fast and low and deep. I am what coaches call a power hitter and my serve is killer, always flying just higher than where an opponent can reach but somehow still landing precisely within the line.

It has been years since I have picked up a racquet. There is nowhere to play and no one to play against. I’ve tried a few times, at graduation parties or backyard picnics, but it lacks any sense of satisfaction and only leaves me frustrated and desiring more.  It is just too painful. So I try to make myself into a tennis player. I make my arm move in a way that is deceptively different.  I angle my body in this foreign way and I tell myself that it is fun. And look! There is never a shortage of courts or opponents! But I always relapse. My body moves in the way it moves, and the strange racquet is rejected like a tissue from an unmatched donor.

And so it is that theater is my release.  Oh callbacks! You are so close but so far.  We all report to the auditorium after school and the director calls out names pair by pair. I have been through the process many times before, but it is always excruciating. This time is no exception. It seems as though hours have passed before my name is called. We have a few seconds to look over the scripts we are handed, and then we are prodded onstage.

The afternoon has been monotonous and repetitive, but we are electric.  The scene is violent-she is my elderly mother and I am beating her- but we commit to it fully. I barely recognize the savage voice that is coming from inside me, and the audience of our peers, usually so unresponsive, is suddenly wide-eyed and alert.  They are stunned.

I get the part and I am overwhelmingly grateful. I have been in many plays at this high school before, but I always play the same two parts. Vapid sluts or kind mothers. The Madonna or the whore. Having my father see me onstage in various stages of undress has become so strangely ordinary that I no longer warn him. But this role…this role is different. I wear overalls, I wield a gun, and I shoot  a man in cold blood.  I know I can act the hell out of it, and I am ecstatic that the director has finally seen it too.

But then, about a week into rehearsals, I develop a cold. I blow my nose, and when I go to throw my tissue away I see my name on the corner of a slip of paper. Ever curious, I grab it. It is the director’s notes from the original auditions; he has made a list of who he wants to see read for each part. My name is on the list twice. Once as the protective mother of a handicapped child, and once as the town whore. It sucker-punches me in the gut; I was called onstage merely to read opposite the girl he wanted to play the elderly mother. He never thought I could actually do it.

He is not the first though. He is only one in a seemingly endless stream of boys who will look straight at me but see only the image which they have projected upon me. I have dealt with it all of my life, and I sense many others have too. I recall a day from my childhood.

I want so very badly to sit by my friends so that we can French braid each other’s hair on the way to the museum. But I am incapable. I know I’ll feel the familiar tug and inevitably be dragged away, so I preemptively slide into the screamingly empty spot next to him. I’ve noticed that he usually has a sketchpad with him at recess, so I ask him what he spends so much time sketching. Beasts. Bones. Birds. His voice is now, as always, uncannily formal. I ask him to show me and he opens his backpack.  They are anatomical works of astonishing mathematical precision.

I am the sort of ‘artist’ who works blindly and haphazardly. Sometimes I end up with a mess, but other times I create something better than anything I could ever envision. I am a junkie for surprise and I crave the inexplicable. Back then, I’d dip my brush in every color of paint and see what happened, while in high school I’d let light leak into my camera. Or expose the wrong side of the paper and watch the ghosts appear. Almost weekly my teacher would smile then sigh.  This is art. I can’t give you higher than a C though. The rubric…

So I am transfixed. I know even as a twelve year old that I will never be able to achieve such exactitude in anything. It is mesmerizing and I tell him so, but I can’t comprehend it. Do you ever draw anything that isn’t real? Now he can’t comprehend me. I try again. Isn’t it boring to draw things the way they are? He is still confused.

On Valentine’s day, I receive an anonymous drawing of a Pegasus. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that it has the anatomically correct wings of an eagle attached to the anatomically correct body of a horse. I suspect I am right though; a few years later he found me on the internet and professed his eternal love. Not understanding that such things have no need for reason or explanation, he offered one both juvenile and clichéd. You’re the only person that makes me feel alive. When you’re around, I feel as though I can do anything. I try as tenderly as I can to show him that he is not in love with me; I am nothing but a mirror in which he has spotted a flattering reflection of himself. But he does not understand, nor do the others. The boy with the guilty smile insists I am his muse and is constantly flooding my inbox with songs.  The boy with the oversized suits wears black for a year and posts melodramatic poetry on the internet. Yet I am still unprepared for the bizarre tribute I recently received from yet another boy, this one 22 years of age.

I have heard many people complain that he is pompous and annoying, but I have always enjoyed the company of the boy with the furrowed eyebrows. Although our interaction is infrequent and primarily takes place between the hours of midnight and two am, he is always willing to discuss the TV show Mad Men like the work of literature that it is, or analyze a passage of Salinger after we discovered that we’d coincidentally endeavored to read his complete works over the same school break. I was desperate for someone to marvel at Franny and Zooey with, so it seemed like such a mercy.

This acquaintance, an English major, decided to publish a novel. Wanting to support him, I purchased a copy of his book from him as soon as it came out. However, I was excruciatingly busy and it sat on my nightstand until his fraternity brothers started winking at me and making pointed references to Daisy Buchanan that prompted me to open my copy. He had signed the first page, calling me an “artist, intellectual, and great wit.” As I read, I was horrified to discover a version of myself both foreign and familiar. I am Valerie Carter; I am from St. Louis rather than St. Charles, and the narrator with the furrowed eyebrows occasionally runs into me late at night and discusses “Breaking Bad” rather than “Mad Men.”

I struggle to inhale as I realize his brothers were right. Anyone who knows me knows that of all Fitzgerald’s heroines I am Clara.  But this version of me is all Daisy. From a distance I seem to have some depth, but up close I am just as shallow and sloppy as every other girl at this country club of a liberal arts college. And I am not so much a “great wit” as an object of fetish.  At one point, the narrator discusses, or perhaps dissects, me with his fraternity brothers while they play X-box. My appearance is numerically ranked, and I am noted for being “a little uptight” and repeatedly rejecting their sloppy physical advances. Or is it “a little slutty?” They can’t seem to decide.

Yet all illusions of purity are dispelled when I lure the narrator out to a party. I am wearing a Santa hat and pigtails. Pigtails. If there has ever been a demeaning hairstyle, it is pigtails on a woman grown. And oh how I am demeaned. Although on the page, it is I doing the defiling. A great deal happens on the dance floor, and perhaps all that can or should be said is that the night ends with him cleaning my vomit from his pillow. As I set down the book, I feel as hollow and confused as I would have if the encounter were real. My eyebrows furrow and I beg him. Write fact. Or write fiction. But not this.

This horrifying mirror which he has held up makes me think back to my sophomore year, which I spent living in the curious petri dish of insecurity and competition that they call a sorority house. The rooms each had two identical closets, and because of the asymmetrical way we chose to arrange our furniture, no one could ever tell which closet was whose. Occasionally someone would begin to ask, but they always stopped short as they turned the handle; the difference was overwhelming. If it was her closet they happened to open, they are confronted with an explosion of color and patterns and bows-like the ones I wore in kindergarten-and the smell of peonies. But if it were my closet that they opened, they are greeted by the tawny smell of leather and wool which permeates what she calls my grandpa clothes. Old sweaters I stole from my dad. Rugbies from the men’s section.  Tweed. All in colors like hunter, navy, and chestnut.

Whenever I came home that year my mother would hold up delicate lavender or rose colored clothing and beg me to please wear something feminine for once. I always tried, but I would feel inexplicably itchy and short of breath. It wasn’t till my junior year that I realized why.

The boys and I are sitting on the front porch of their fraternity house, watching the parade of drunks and sharing embarrassing stories. As the evening settles one of them looks over at me and offers an odd compliment.  You’re such a dude. And then he stops and considers his words, wondering if they weren’t quite right. I mean, you’re not a girl girl. And he realizes this is worse and gets endlessly frustrated. I laugh and playfully punch him but I am confused by his words and slowly mull them over. What does he mean, a dude?

I know he did not mean to imply that I am masculine; I have never been the sort of girl who drinks beer and belches or watches normal sports like football. But what am I if not masculine? Something androgynous? A Lady Macbeth, unsexed here for all the world to see? I slowly realize: he was not trying to make a statement about my gender at all. In fact, the opposite is true; he was trying to say that our interaction was not defined by our genders, that he sees me as a person.  I find this revelation so pathetically sad.

But then it hits me; this is why I feel so uncomfortable in pastels. It is not that I am uncomfortable or ashamed of my own femininity. It is that in this strange microcosm where girls starve themselves into pre-pubescence and admit to me openly that they’re looking for a man like their daddy to support them so that they never have to hold a job, being feminine could cause me to be seen as something dependent, something inferior. It is not that I want to be a man; it is that I want to be an equal. I want to be respected as a person, and so I have subconsciously done all I can to escape the scarlet letter of my body. I have given up the possibility of being known by them in that one way for the chance to be known by them in every other. And then I am so enraged at myself for allowing this to happen that I pull on stilettos, as much a weapon as their medieval counterpart, stomp off into the night and demand to be respected. Not for my soul despite my body, but because they are one and the same.

Yet as bold as I was that night, I am guarded more often than not. Chinks appear in my armor only occasionally. I remember a night from my junior year of high school.  Some tiny travesty has just occurred and I have had more than I can handle. I burst out the stage door and, thinking that I am alone, attempt to catch my breath in the icy evening air. Shit. Such a commonplace word, but she is alarmed because she has never heard me utter it. Are you alright? And I am too shocked to answer. Not because of her presence, but because she seems to care. I don’t know how to react to someone else’s love and concern for me. It is so foreign and wrong.  I know how to give, but am utterly ignorant when it comes to receiving.  She freely offers a hug and I am awkward and uncomfortable; I feel exposed, as if I have forgotten to put on pants. But then it all pours out: the mess Katrina has made of my family and my utter inability to do what is expected of me, what I want to do, in a twenty-four hour day. I am drowning. And then she wipes my tears and laughs, a tender and kind laugh. She lists the people and the causes and the art for which I have poured out all of my time and my self and tells me it is not selfish to take time for myself, that I am more than what I give to others. And suddenly, hearing it from her, I realize that acting in three plays at once really is preposterous. This outpouring will never fill me up. And yet I am terrified of what will happen if I slow down.

Yet gradually, I learn to linger. That summer, I almost learn to be reckless.

Say it. I can’t. Just say it. It is midnight and we have driven far into the country for our monthly bad-ass day. Such days started when she noticed that I instinctively turn my blinker on even when no one is around and I am turning into my own driveway. She says I need to learn how to flirt with sin. And despite my insistence that I might not believe such a thing exists she, the rationalist, insists that it does. So she drags me out and makes me jaywalk on deserted streets, or drive with only one hand on the wheel, or scream FUCK! when no one is around to hear. Fuuuuujibit. Foooooklestein. Fuuuuhicantdoit. She starts to threaten me I’ll drive off and leave you when I interrupt. FUCKaaaaaaaahijustdidit! We scream and run down the valley to the reservoir where we collapse in a fit of giggles and spend the rest of the night saying prayers for the passing cars. I am the one who insists upon the prayers.

So often we dig up dinosaur bones and catch fireflies and then snuggle up and read stories and say prayers and then they drift off to sleep and I drift seamlessly out of their lives. But it is not always so gentle. Nothing has the capacity to break my heart quite like caring for other people’s children. Sometimes I want to scream at parents whose absence hangs thick in the air. Money and love are not equivalent currencies! My affection will never have the same worth as yours! She just wants you to love her enough to say no and mean it! But I am the nanny and I am paid to tend silence and so I cannot. My heart throbs for these children who have everything but nothing.

But there are also the children who have even less. Because the old teacher quit and there is no one else I am wrangled from an endless stack of paperwork and become their art teacher for a summer. I know nothing about art but everything about the raw yearning in their eyes and so I tell them of the many ways in which they are miraculous. There is no finger painting, no macaroni portrait, no popsicle stick Jesus in which I cannot find remarkable beauty.  I hold them up in front of the class. The lines! The color! The cleverness! The innovation! I wax and expound until I can see in their eyes that that they know I am not speaking about the mass of glue and paper.

For liability reasons, we are not allowed to touch them. Even when they lunge at each other and scream words too violent for such tiny vocal cords we are only supposed to pry them off one another if death seems imminent. That’s what security guards are for. But when a fragile little girl who is away from home for the very first time and misses her mommy slips and skins her knee and then looks up at you with tears welling in her eyes, or is so very proud that she finally did it that she comes running to you expectantly, you hug her. I hug her and I do not regret it. And I wish so badly that it could be enough.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I am nine, a mere child like the ones I now teach, when my mother decides to take me to an Ash Wednesday service on a whim. It is poorly attended, and I suppose it continues only out of a sense of obligation to tradition. We somberly process forward for the imposition of the ashes. It is a messy business, vulgar even.  For those around me, it is a labored effort. Something morbid to shudder through so that the polite domesticity of Easter can arrive. For me it is a revelation. This Lutheran church’s mantra is mere symbolism, yet here it has lapsed into a genuine ritual. It has lapsed into holiness. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Grave words, but I feel impossibly light.

When we arrive back home, I do not know what to do with the ashes but intuit that asking is somehow inappropriate. Rinsing them away in the shower with tropical burst body wash just seems crude. So I save them. I carefully press a tissue to my forehead and then tuck it away in a pirate treasure chest underneath my bed.

I have never missed one since, but I love the Ash Wednesday service most of all when everyone else is too tired or too busy and I am left to go alone. I find a pew of my own in a near-empty church and there is no pre-service chatter, no pandering sermon with lame jokes and sports metaphors, no donuts. Just profound silence. And I am gloriously free to slip away from myself as we chant the psalms and raise our hymns to God.

And yet, a dear friend thinks that silence is cause for despair. One night, the boy with the untamable hair decides to explain to me why, as much as he’d like to, he can never be religious. He shows me a movie that proves God does not exist. And then he looks over at me, in genuine sincerity, and apologizes for shattering my faith. I try so very hard not to, but I laugh. And once I start, I cannot stop.  I laugh so long and so hard and with so many tears streaming down my face that he is afraid I will fall off of my lofted bed and out the window. He is so very confused. I struggle to explain myself between my staccato exhalations. You….have no idea….how much I…wish…it were that simple…And then I collapse into another fit of giggles.

You can kill it, but it cannot die. It will be there, rearranging the furniture as you sleep. A glint in the corner of your eye that you almost thought you saw, an echo of a voice you nearly heard.

He does not understand, so I wait until I can breathe deeply once more and then try again. Have you ever read the Nicene Creed?  If you disprove a point the whole thing doesn’t topple. It doesn’t even begin to contain it, and if you were to recite its complete opposite it would be neither more nor less true. Neither of us is convinced, but we let it dissipate and join the crowd waiting for Trav.

There is another time.  We four play volleyball by moonlight and turn cartwheels across the lawn. Another boy tries to put the intensity of our bond into words but he can only shout. These people. THESE PEOPLE. We laugh because it makes no sense but we know exactly what he means. He has mysteriously gone missing lately, but tonight he is all ours. They suspect he has a secret girlfriend. I sense otherwise, but I do not press him nor do I share my thoughts with the others.  He has been drinking all evening, and in his sloppiness he spills rum across the floor. But instead of wiping it up, he spells out our names in continuous cursive and pulls out a match. For a brief moment, there is an ecstatic expression of our unity blazing before us.  And then it is exactly as before.

Later that night, we are all frolicking across a field. Or they are; his arm is around me and I’m guiding him home. When they are far ahead of us he leans over and whispers in my ear. I love you. And I smile and answer back. I know.  And then he pauses. I’m gay. And I answer once more. I know. And then his words start tumbling out. But you can’t tell anyone else. Not here!  Not yet! So I kiss him tenderly on the forehead and put him to bed and whisper that he is beautiful and loved.

Gradually he shares his secret. First with These People and then with others. But things are not the same. She is different around him, around us. I see something I do not recognize in her eyes. So I tell her and she tells me. We all know he’s going to burn in hell. Why are you encouraging it? And suddenly it is cemented. I do not recognize this girl. A chasm has opened between us. I am helpless and confused. Isn’t everyone beautiful to God? But I am older now, so I do not cry.

Instead I read. All spring and all summer. Books that get strange looks in waiting rooms and on airplanes. But I do not care. I need to understand her and I need to understand myself. So I stifle my heart and I think from my head.  Yet the heart can only be silenced for so long, and in the fall it bleeds upon my schoolwork. I write of the early church fathers and the way their rhetoric surrounding homosexuality changed drastically over time. I write of Pagan family values. I write of Paul. They are well-reasoned, methodically executed papers that remain faithful to the primary texts they address. And yet their origin is fourteen inches south of my brain.

What will I do without class, without a place to get this off of my heart?

I am turning 22 and it is the very last real day of college classes, the very last time that I will sit in a circle and have a conversation about an author I never would have thought to pick up on my own. And like so many other times in my life, I cannot keep myself from crying. I thought I was ready to graduate, but at this moment leaving seems unbearable; I am terrified that the big wide world will have no more circles, that it will be flat and utterly devoid of wisdom. In truth, if a demon were to steal into my loneliest loneliness I would gladly accept his offer and stay drinking green tea and listening to the words of the others for eternity. I trust them. I respect them. I am moved by their observations. And so when we all stand to leave l wonder if or how things will ever be okay again. The tears keep flowing.

But as we climb into my car and prepare to head down the mountain, I realize I have received a message from my father: a hazy photo of my banyan tree that he took that morning. I cry harder, but these tears are different.

Everything is going to be alright.

I met the boy with the untamable hair one night when I was taking out the trash from my freshman dorm room. Instead of hauling bags down three flights of stairs, I’d usually launch them out of the boy’s bathroom window to the dumpster directly below. Chance was our friend; we likely never would have spoken if I had not been wearing an old Sufjan concert tee when I walked past his friend’s door. He made some mindless comment about the shirt, and I was immediately intrigued because he recognized that Come on Feel the Illinoise was both a joke and an album title, instead of asking if I had family at the University of Illinois or something?  This then lead to a rousing conversation about banjos and I confessed to him my secret dream of starting a band just so I could name it Jazz Killed the Banjo. Because they say it did, you know.

We cleave to each other in a way it seems only freshman, suddenly cut loose from everything they have known and loved, ever can. We are so alike, yet so decisively different. We perplex each other; we agree on everything except conclusions. We are constantly having something between a conversation and an argument.  He is my best friend in exactly the way fourth graders use the term, but our freshman year is also dappled with brief forays into more.

In late August I flew into D.C. just for the day, wonderfully free from even carry-on baggage. I took the metro to the Smithsonian to meet him, and we spent a jubilous afternoon wandering aimlessly. I show him my favorite horse on the carousel, a vibrant turquoise seahorse-out- of-water that clashes with all the other stallions. He shows me the dinosaur bones that transfixed him on 3rd grade fieldtrips. I take him to the propellers that bored me to tears on our annual family pilgrimages to the Air and Space museum, and he shows me the modern art which my mechanically-minded parents would never have thought to visit. As the sun sets, we make predictions for the coming school year and tease each other about the embarrassing speeches we intend to make at each other’s weddings. He sees me to the metro station.

It is the last time I ever see him. Two weeks later, when everyone else has returned to Lexington but I am still at home, squeezing what I can from the last moments of summer, my phone rings. It is one of our mutual friends. He never moved in, and hasn’t returned anyone’s phone calls. Surely I have heard from him?

Years later it is two in the morning and I am suddenly sobbing uncontrollably in my bed. My throat is so swollen that I am incapable of forming words. I know only that I am utterly incapable of staying in the relationship I am in, but also of ending it and hurting the sweet and vulnerable boy that I saw too much in. This boy with senator hair is long graduated and lives several states away, but somehow the distance is not enough to keep me from feeling suffocated. And so, in my paralysis I send a desperate and ridiculous plea to a boy with ridiculous hair whom I have not seen since or spoken with since that August day several years earlier. Am I incapable of loving anyone?

My phone rings instantaneously, a baffling miracle, and for a moment all is forgiven. He allows me to sob, not hurrying my explanation, and then with his characteristic thoughtfulness and deliberation offers an answer or something like it. You’ve always loved everyone. You’ve only ever been in love with God.

And with that, he said goodnight.

“The woman I’m thinking of
She loved me all up
But I’m so down today”

“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.”

“. . . You shall leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first.”

Happy birthday to Dante and Virgil Pierce-Litton, who, in the measure of human time, are now four years old. In the world of cats, they are nearly thirty-five years old.
Meow meow. Purr purr.
I love you both.

•     •     •

I recently got a haircut. I went to Birds Barbershop, which is a place that would have to admit is nauseatingly trendy if I didn’t like it so much. I like it because they give you free beer while you wait and the stylists all have tattoos and they’re using playing Arabia Mountain over the PA system. So I let the whole trendy thing slide. I have made peace with it.

Jessica did my hair. She was very friendly and had a bit of an “I don’t put up with any bullshit” attitude. I liked that. She did a phenomenal job on my hair, despite my vague instructions (“Make it hot”).

I ended up with an asymmetrical Adolf Hitler cut. We worked on it together, Jessica and I. She would say, “Like this?” and I would say, “Just a little more off the sides, Jessica.” I told her to make it uneven on purpose. She laughed. She liked that. So now there’s a little spike of hair at my part, and big swooping bangs on the right.

She asked me if I wanted girls to like me. I shrugged. “You’ve got the mustache going,” she said, “and the maroon corduroy pants.”

“Yes,” I said, “and this haircut will be the last step. I will finally—finally—look like someone’s dad twenty years ago.”

Jessica told me I had “dark-ass hair”—and that it seemed even darker because I’m pale as death. She said she had to dye her hair to get it that dark. Her hair was black.

I told her I had no idea why my hair was so dark, because my father has dirty blond hair, and my mother has lighter brown hair. I joked that maybe my father was some other guy.

“What do you do, Ryan?” she said.

“Oh, me?” I paused. For the first time in a year, I didn’t have to say “I stay at home and do nothing. Sometimes I go places with no money.” I actually did have a job.

I opened my mouth again: “I’m an editor at a publishing company. We put out science journals—vaccines, cancer research, stuff like that.”

“Whoa,” said Jessica. “That’s some heavy shit.”

Before I could say “Not really”, she brushed the hair off the back of my neck and handed me another beer.

•     •     •

Welcome, friends, to Issue 012 of The Starsailor Newsletter. Issue 012 was originally going to be a collection of small vignettes that I had neglected to tell in earlier issues. I was going to do this because I wanted to remember a lot of what had happened to me in the last six months, and because there were some real gems in there. That and not a lot was going on—I was staying at home reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and listening to Delta Spirit’s new album.

And then I had some newer, fresher stories to tell, all of a sudden. I will save my older stories for another time—perhaps Issue 013 or 014.

This will be a short(er) Newsletter, because I need to get to work on Issue 013. That and I feel like talking about “the cat issue” one last time. I’m sorry. I just really miss those little boys.

•     •     •

The title for this week’s issue, “I Wonder If He Remembers Me”, refers to my son, Dante Allan Poe Pierce-Litton, and if he remembers my existence. I do wonder this a lot. I wonder it about fifteen-to-thirty times a day.

I have researched how well a cat’s memory works, but have come up with very few answers. And anyway I am more likely to dismiss evidence that refutes the answer I want to hear, which is that yes, he does remember me.

And it’s not as though I don’t want his brother, Virgil Wilkes Booth Pierce-Litton, to remember me. I love Virgil just as much as I love Dante.

But Dante and I were buddies. He loves me so much, because of the way I smell and because I’m the only human he knows who can speak his language. See, Dante doesn’t meow unless he’s very hungry—he usually chirrups. Rrrrrrlllllllll. I can rapidly flick the tip of my tongue against the roof of my mouth and create the very same sound. He loves it. I must be saying something very interesting to him when I do that.

Whenever I would go out of town, Madeleine would tell me he got very sad. He would hide under my bed and only come out to eat (which is Dante’s very favorite thing to do). When I got home, he was always so happy. He would rub against my leg and purr and smell my shirt and my bag, wondering where I had been.

And when I eventually took my pants off, I would place them on the floor so he could crawl into one of the legs. He loved my pants.

I sure do miss ol’ Dante and Virgil.

•     •     •

I tried to write an essay about them just after midnight—minutes after their fourth birthday ended. I got extremely upset about six hundred words in. I don’t think I’ll finish it. It made me cry too much.

This is what I wrote:

Dante & Virgil:
An Essay on Cat Ownership

Yesterday would have been Dante and Virgil’s fourth birthday. Dante and Virgil are my cats. In cat years, they would be somewhere between thirty and thirty-five years old.

I haven’t seen them in almost seven months. And as you might imagine, those seven months—that’s much longer for them. To Dante and Virgil, seven months equates to years of their lives.

I don’t even know if they remember that I’m their father anymore. Or that I exist. That thought alone keeps me awake at night. It makes cry harder than anything I can think of.

•     •     •

I talk and think and write about them often. I would say that their little faces occupy a great deal of my idle time. I sure do seem to have a lot of idle time these days.

I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do anymore. I’ve been waiting for an awfully long time. Why am I waiting again? I sometimes wonder that. Their mother doesn’t want to see me. She took them out of my apartment while I was in San Francisco. I came home and they were gone. There was a note taped to my desk.

It said, among a lot of other things, this:

(I need to flatten out this note . . . it is badly crumpled. I have read and re-read it so many times—and each time I do, I ball it up and toss it at the wall.)

So, ahem:

“I hope you are not too surprised that I’ve taken custody of [Dante and Virgil].”

(I was very surprised. I was devastated.)

“I’m sorry it had to happen this way. I did not take them away out of anger or spite, and it was not a decision I made at all lightly. I want to do what is best for them, regardless of what either of us might want.”

(I’ve always taken issue with this line for several reasons. I won’t explain them here.)

“. . . I was left with only two options. I could either totally give up the cats to you, or find a way to take care of them myself. I believe it is in their best interest to live with me right now for several reasons . . .”

She goes on to say, in so many words, that I’m insane, and incapable of taking care of two cats.

I don’t know about the first part, but the second part is patently untrue. I was very good at taking care of my cats.

(I have folded the note into two halves and placed it neatly in my journal. I’m too sad to do any paper-crumpling tonight.)

•     •     •

I found Dante and Virgil way back in March 2008. They were from a litter of four. When the woman asked me which two I wanted, I said, “The grey one and the orange one.”

She said, “My granddaughter is going to be so mad that I gave away the little orange one.”

They were born in a little row home on East Lombard Street. On the day they came home with me, they were seven weeks old. They were tiny as they could be. I could fit Dante, who was the runt, in the palm of my hand.

They were forty dollars each. They smelled awful.

I was given the orange one. “You’re Virgil,” I said. Madeleine was given the grey one. “You’re Dante,” I said.

I held Virgil up my chest, and he hung on with his little kitten claws. His whole body was shaking. He’d never been outside before. He was very scared.

We took them back to the car and put them in a cardboard box, which had a towel folded at the base for them to sleep on. There was a little saucer with water in it.

We drove them home.

•     •     •

Very quickly, I would like to explain the origin of Dante and Virgil’s names (if it wasn’t obvious):

Dante Allan Poe Pierce-Litton is named after two poets. The first is Dante Alighieri, famous Italian poet and author of the Divine Comedy. His middle names, of course, come from Edgar Allan Poe, who, if you’ll remember, wrote scary stories and poems about a hundred and fifty years ago.

Why Dante? Because I really do love the Divine Comedy. And it’s just so fitting. I knew he was born a Dante as soon as I looked into his little blue baby kitten eyes. He could have had no other name.

And Allan Poe because Dante is from Baltimore, and Poe was a famous resident. Also, Dante is a very moody cat. He’s quite dark. He sits on windowsills during rainstorms for hours, pondering the depths of the gloom.

Virgil Wilkes Booth Pierce-Litton is named after a poet and an actor/assassin. Virgil comes from Publius Vergilius Maro, who lived between 70 and 19 BC. You’ve probably heard of him because he wrote the epic Aeneid. In the Divine Comedy, Virgil acts as Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory.

Wilkes Booth is from John Wilkes Booth, a famous Marylander, theater actor and murderer of Abraham Lincoln. (Maybe I shouldn’t have named my cat after John Wilkes Booth.)

They’re both Pierce-Littons because their mother’s name is Madeleine Pierce, and their father’s name is Ryan, uh, [Starsailor].

When I announced to my family what I had named my cats, my grandmother turned to me and said, “Oh, you would.”

Another time, when I was having my wisdom teeth taken out—and just before I was injected with a needle that would make me fall asleep instantly—the dentist-surgeon asked me if I had any pets. “Yes sir,” I said, “two cats—both boys.”

“And what are their names?”

“Dante and Virgil.”

“That from something? What’s that from?”

“Uh, the Divine Comedy.”

“Oh. What’s that?”

I passed out.

•     •     •

So I got very sad when I wrote that little essay about my cats. I had begun writing it for therapeutic purposes. I wanted to write it and throw it away, or put it on my website and forget about it, or whatever, so I wouldn’t have to feel bad anymore.

It was a technique my psychologist had taught me last summer. He said, “If you ever feel like you’re so sad that you can’t function, write me an email with all of the shit you need to get out of your brain. Then I’ll delete it—and not even read it—because it doesn’t need to exist anywhere.”

Quoth Tim Rogers: “What you do is, you take these things and you show them the dumpster out back, then you send them to heaven.”

I tried. I really did. It took me about fifteen minutes to get so miserable I couldn’t stand to look at my stupid face in the reflection of my laptop screen anymore. That stupid haircut. That stupid mustache.

If I had continued to write it, there would have been a part where I talked about wanting to get hit by a bus—that’s how sad I was.

Not walk in front of a bus, or anything like that. It would just . . . happen. And then I would never again have to get on my hands and knees, like I do every night, and plead to whomever controls the cosmos to please, please, please let me have my children back. I would just be an unthinking pile of ex-human being.

How’s that for melodramatic!

Instead I began writing a very long email to Madeleine. I named it “Happy birthday Dante and Virgil!”

In three thousand words (a lean email by my standards), I apologized for the voicemail I had left the day before, on their birthday (more on that in a bit), and said that I simply wanted to send my well-wishes to my little babies, whom I not allowed to be around right now.

By the time I finished writing it, I felt like a million bucks. It had been an earnest and sincere bundle of paragraphs. I had written it from the very bottom of my badly damaged heart. I had said, sweetly, that I had been a broken man, but that I wasn’t any longer. I told her I turned to writing instead of self-mutilation. I told her I had a job, by God, and I biked to work every day. I told her about the button-down shirts and the cheese danishes and the giant iMac on my desk at work. For heaven’s sake, I told her about the mustache. I said, listen, gosh darn it, I’m a real adult now! I had the means to take take of my cats now, I said, so give me a chance.

“I’m so, so, so sorry. I don’t know how else to say it: I’m sorry. I never should have done any of the things I did. I did them because I was stupid and sad*. I’m not stupid and sad* anymore.”

(*Note: Sad, here, being the “I can’t get up in the morning/feed myself/I want to die constantly” sad that I had been for a year leading up to her departure. When I get sad now, it’s because I want my best friend and my cats back. It’s not I-can’t-exist sad. Mostly.)

I was very gentle with my words. In fact I was downright cheerful. And I meant every word! There was a big smile on my face the whole time. I was telling the God-honest truth: I’m way better than I used to be, and I deserve to see the kittens that I had raised and loved and treated like little princes.

I told her that when she was ready to speak with me again, a single letter would suffice. And not a letter as in a written letter. I told her to email or text or call me and utter any letter from the alphabet she wanted. “H,” I said. “Say, ‘H’”. I told her I would eat half a chocolate cake. I would throw a party. I would “jump over the damn moon, for God’s sake.”

“You don’t know what that one letter would do for me,” I said. “It would change my whole life.”

I will, of course, not get a reply for an indeterminable amount of time.

But I still tried my best.

•     •     •

When I was putting away the crumpled note she had written me on the day she took our cats away, something slipped out of the journal where I keep it. It was a postcard she had given to me on my twenty-third birthday.

It became my P.P.S. to the letter I had been writing her.

The postcard, and my P.P.S., said this:

“You’re a 23-year-old man now. When I met you, you were an 18-year-old boy. We’ve been through a lot since then and done a lot of changing together. I’m grateful I’ve had you to go through this whole ‘growing up’ thing with. Thanks for all the kind things you’ve done for me and all the good times we’ve had together (so far!). I’m sure things will only get better from here. Love you! (~★~Friendz4eva~★~) <3 Madeleine”.

And to the right of this she had written this in cursive, posing as Dante:

“I hope you enjoy your special day.
Your favorite son, Dante-Pierce Litton”

Dante, of course, is a super genius. He’s the smartest cat I’ve ever known. The idea was that Dante was scholarly and intelligent. I laughed when I read that again.

And below that, in messy child’s handwriting, this:

“HaPpy BiRthdaY pEp-pEp!!!! P.S. I peed on ur stuff
Love, ViRGIL”

Virgil was always more of a baby. And from time to time he would urinate on my wall if I didn’t pay attention to him fast enough.

Madeleine was making little jokes about our two boys.

•     •     •

She had said, “I’m sure things will only get better from here.”

When I transcribed the postcard, I really did hope for that. I closed my eyes and let my mind wash over the words. I leaned back in my chair and felt a heaviness in my chest. I sat there in silence for maybe ten minutes. Then I opened my eyes.

I leaned forward again and wrote the last line of the email: “Friends forever. I believe in that.”

I clicked “send”.

•     •     •

As I have said, I left her a voicemail. It was stupid of me.

It was March 7th. Somewhere on the other side of the country, two cats that I loved more than anything else in this world were turning four years old. There would be no fanfare for me. There would only be another empty afternoon, sitting and waiting in my room for a phone call or a letter or an email, saying, “You’re perfectly welcome to have the things you love so dearly back, if you’d like.”

I put on some headphones and walked down to Speedway Grocery. Jason passed me as I walked down the street. He pulled over. “Where are you going?”

“I’m, uh. I’m buying beer.”

“Do you want a ride?”

“I need to walk.”

“OK.” He drove off.

When I got there, I bought a twelve-pack of Lone Star. The man at the counter eyed me with a sort of grandfatherly curiosity. “How old are you, son?”

“Uh.” I forgot my own age for a moment. “I’m twenty-four.”

“Ah. Hm.”

“I look a lot younger, don’t I?”

“It’s your haircut, I think.” He was talking about the Adolf Hitler haircut. The mustache wasn’t working to counterbalance the youthful swoop of my hair.

“Yeah. Well. I’m twenty-four, unfortunately.”

“Not a bad age.” He handed me my receipt. I walked out the door and put my headphones back on.

•     •     •

An aside:

Longtime readers, I’m sure, will groan at this part of the story.

“Oh,” they’ll say. “He’s sad about his cats, and so he bought Lone Star beer and will go home and wallow in a drunken state of despair.”

Well—yes. Give me a break!

See: I have a disease in my brain, and it makes me sad about 70% of the time, ranging from mild to severe. Sometimes I feel so low I can’t even function. Other times I just feel melancholy or wistful. Nothing really has to be wrong in order to trigger these low moods. I was born sad. I’ll probably die sad, too.

They say babies born in January are, statistically, more likely to feel like a pile of dog shit a lot of the time. They’re more likely to fail.

So there’s that, too.

There is nothing on this planet that makes me feel worse than thinking about the life I once had, and how all of it is gone—including my dear baby cats.

Sometimes you just need a beer and a chair and a guitar and room to yourself.

•     •     •

I downed my first Lone Star pretty quickly. I stood in the kitchen talking to Jason about how I could bear this wait no longer. He did a damn good job putting up with me. He said, “I almost feel like crying, too.”

I grabbed another beer and sat on the stairs leading up to the front door. Joggers and cyclists passed by me, but no one paid me any mind. I watched them with bloodshot eyes.

When I’d had enough of the warm afternoon, I went into my room and let down the blankets hung over my windows. I turned on my desk lamp and sat down with my guitar. I played “Goodnight Irene” and “Bleeding Bells” and “Out On the Weekend”. It was sloppy and mostly bad. I was getting progressively more drunk.

By the time Chantal showed up, I was completely oblivious as to what was going on around me. I told her, probably, that I was feeling about as rotten as human being could feel. I strummed the chorus to “Goodnight Irene” and almost started to sing, but didn’t. Instead I slithered my hands around the fretboard and looked at her with a far-gone vacant expression.

“Your eyes have lost their sharpness,” said Chantal. She says that every time I’ve drunk too much. She seemed annoyed and concerned.

I slurred a few sentences about the various feelings I had that were exploiting weaknesses in my ailing mind, and she sat up and said she had to go.

“Stop drinking, Ryan.”

And then I was alone again.

•     •     •

An aside:

“As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.”
—John Lennon

•     •     •

It stopped being “fun”—if it ever had been—about twenty minutes later. I opened a beer and took a small sip and felt as though I’d had enough for one lifetime. I put the open can in the refrigerator and stumbled back into my bedroom.

I managed to peel my clothes off myself. I crawled into bed and flicked off the light. My skin was cold and damp and horrible. I had a massive headache and felt as though a snake had crawled into my stomach, and was eating me from the inside-out.

With work in the morning, I knew I had precious little time to manage the fast-approaching hangover, which, oddly enough, began to set in just hours after I’d stopped drinking. I felt it throughout my entire body—knew that it was not simply “drunk-sick”, but a full-on hangover.

I would fall asleep for ten minutes, wake up, stand up, walk into the kitchen and pour water into my mouth directly from the pitcher, and then climb into bed again. My body could not find the proper temperature to acclimate itself to. My skin would crawl with searing fire and then ache with piercing cold.

Eventually I jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom, where I drew a hot bath, for I was deeply chilled at that moment. As the bathtub filled, I knelt before the toilet and stuck my finger down my throat. I sloshed it around until I hit the magic button, and a torrent of red liquid came pouring out of my mouth and nose. I sat for a moment and wondered what red thing I had eaten, and could find no answer. In fact I couldn’t remember having eaten anything that day. I shrugged. My stomach was still sick with alcohol, and my skin was still cool and rubbery. So I put my finger in my mouth again. The next blast was entirely clear. I sat erect and smoothed my mustache with my left hand. I was instantly relieved of all my terrible drunk afflictions.

“Woman—” I said aloud, for no one else was home to hear me talk to myself, “it’s not your fault or anything—it’s mine—but you’ve got me feeling awfully rotten today.”

I climbed over the side of the bathtub and dunked my head underwater. I thought, much as I always do when I’m momentarily feeling bad in a hot bath, of the famous Sylvia Plath quote. She was right: there isn’t much a hot bath can’t cure. So I let myself be cured.

•     •     •

I dried myself and put on a robe and sat down at my desk. I was still a little drunk. I found Madeleine’s name in my phone and called her without a moment of hesitation. I wanted to hear my best friend’s voice. I wanted her to pick up and be so happy to talk to me. After a few rings, I got a standard robotic voicemail message. Shucks.

There were several minutes where I talked about a lot of things that I can’t seem to recall. Something pathetic about wanting to see Dante and Virgil on their birthday and something about God and something about Christmas presents and something about being “so, so sorry.” My liver and heart were flayed wide open.

“Tell Dante and Virgil,” I said, just before I hung up, “that their dad loves them very much, and that he hopes they remember who he is.”

•     •     •

Before I went to sleep, I got down on my knees and looked up at the ceiling. I let old memories play out on the vast empty canvas. I thought of my little boys, and how happy they’d always made me, even when there was no other happiness in my life to be found.

And now they were gone. And now they were four. And now I was twenty-four. It had been seven months. The last time I had seen them was just before I left for California in August.

“California . . .” I said aloud. I snapped my fingers. I stood up and walked over to my computer. I booked a flight two weeks from the day.

I thought, in some weird and stupid and drunk way, that maybe—maybe if I went away for a little while—they would be there when I got back. They would be there this time.

“Yes,” I said, “I need to go back to California.”

—Papa Ryan