u/Stationary_Torment

(TWs: This one gets a little loaded, nothing too directly said, light on suicide)

Intermission: Existence pt. 2

At this point I was starting to see something.
The difference of one side of the country and the other.
The literal and the figurative.
The difference… and malfunction.

When Grandpa passed, and not yet Nana, something started happening.
People, in the house.
Hundreds.

They circle around doing shit.
I don’t remember anyone asking.

Heading back, you go home to something else.

And I started reaching again. Building. Extending. Doing.

It’s not a place.

What I noticed comes later, but yet again, the phone keeps ringing.

Travis (pt. ?)

We skipped you, just for a second. You will show up a few times, so forgive me.

I don’t know if it was you or I that died before we hit the first intermission. One of us did though.

At least something did.

We left something nameless back there. And I still don’t know what it is.

But your first time, back there… In my shower. I came in and you were curled up on the floor. The shower obstructing tears, that came out only in sounds.

It’s a weird feeling to enter a shower fully clothed. To try to lift someone up. To sit down on the floor, your head in the lap of my soaked jeans.

I wish we had talked about it, what we left back there. What died, I still don’t know.

But this isn’t that time, this is after… the us that came out of that shower, and a chunk of how you end up here more than once, without a real count.

When I had moved four hours away, from the place four years ago, and return to the roommate that drug the couch in with me, and show up in the park to release balloons for your brother.

This is how this part starts, when I ask you to come to the bar, and we drink a Guinness.

Somewhere, around the second intermission, in it.

“I don’t really drink.”
“You don’t have to, but it’s something I have to do.”

And then you left.

And the phone rings again, the same one on the line with me asking about your brother, this time, I’m told I have to come get you. The only one that can do it is me, that’s what they said, and I have no idea where that came from. Was it you? Did everyone know this about me? What I felt inside?

You jumped out a second floor window, started running.

So now, here I come in.

And we’re sitting on the bed and I’m listening. To everything. To all of it. Saying little, just asking you to stay.

Like I asked your brother to stay four years ago.

But its not my couch, it’s not my bed, I don’t live here anymore.
I already tried to get you off the shower floor years before that.
I knew I couldn’t pull you up.

Every part of this convo was necromancy, I don’t even know who was alive here, if anything was.

I left town, sat down in my kitchen and drank Guinness.
It’s what I have to do.

And we’ll return again, when I (?) drank another for whoever, whatever, it was that got left in that room.

(TWS: DV, drinking, some other stuff surely, death, no suicide though)

Nana

I always heard we’re alike. I’m starting to think, that that’s part of all of it, the stuff with your granddaughter. You, your daughter, your granddaughter, me.

Loud.
Opinionated.

You’d love to see me writing, holding a namesake you carried back from Ireland. You know he was gay too? I never told your daughter that, but I think it’s very funny.

I doubt you’d think that though, but I have part of your name, the… incredibly misspelled version, the one you liked. It fits us.

My first memories of you came, very young. Sitting in a hotel room. I loved to color, to draw. You asked to see one, then asked if you could have it, I said yes.

You handed me a dollar.
So I colored more. Chasing more dollars. Just a single scribble. Hand out, expectingly.

Weird lesson you gave me there. I think it wasn’t the one you meant me to take. I’ve spent my whole life trying to answer that very problem. Intrinsic. Extrinsic. I’ve used a million words for exactly that.

Did you know, not only that he was gay.. but miserable?
He was famous, beloved, wrote some of the most endearing gay-coded pieces of the day- they still don’t get seen as that by many people. He was a success. They paid him money.

He came home. Beat his wives. In many ways a total failure. A very angry, lost drunk.

And he wrote.

Not long after that, you weren’t really there anymore. Like background noise. Everything passing you by. The world turning and you not understanding.

There were a couple houses your daughter, my grandma, had a room for you in, my favorite was the big sunroom.

It smelled like cigarettes.

You’d sit there, staring out the windows. Your face would light up when you saw me.
And you would call me, your granddaughter’s name. And I wouldn’t correct you. Just listen. Say, yes.

I know somewhere here, is where she really started not liking me.
Every few years, your name would come up she’d say “This maybe the last summer.. last Christmas… last time”.

A broken record. Two decades of that, over and over.
When we’d get there, you treated her like her mother. And me, as if I was her. And… I imagine that was really hard.

I mean, she gave me part of your name, so I know you meant a lot to her.

But, the unresolved shit becomes weapons. She used death like a weapon.

So, sitting at my grandpa’s funeral, the one she doesn’t want me at, the one that someone else had to tell me about, on the other side of the country- we start fighting. The marathons over, the Guinness was drank, you’re no longer in the backroom of the house, smoking cigarettes staring out the window.

They put you in a home maybe a year, maybe two, earlier… I don’t know.

So I told her, I want to see Nana.
And she told me she wouldn’t take me.
She told me, I wouldn’t want to see you.

But… she didn’t want to see you think I was her again.

And I screamed at her, “This is the last chance I have, you know it”.

I didn’t get to go.

I got the call when I landed in the airport back home.

Back to back, like it never stops.

And I write.
And I know, you would have loved to see it.
But not exactly, how I say it.
That’s okay, too.

(TW: no suicide in this one... not really anyway... but EDs, drinking, and obviously death)

Grandpa

Its hard to even write to you. I was just up on your side of the country months ago, standing in front of your gravestone, but your death came right after Trevor left my couch. I began these first writings knowing you’d have a chapter, and from when I started this, to as I write yours, the timeline has only gotten muddier. Well over a decade ago, but also two months ago. Almost, like your death really started the reason I realized I had to start talking about any of it.

Which is exceptionally funny, Mr. Sparkle, for I have never known you to be one that talked all that much.

You were always the glue in the chaos. You still are.

And I never got the chance to tell you, about the specific moment I recognized it.

I came up to the house first, before your daughter and the other granddaughters got there. Grandma was cooking, and well, I kind of get the thing from her, the thing never said aloud… why everything about food sucks, and you knew exactly what was happening.

That salad was god awful though. Who makes a salad, that’s 90% not vegetables?
Did she always fry hotdogs in Crisco on the stove?
And we know that the pantry was off limits, nothing in there had an expiration past the year I was born.

You didn’t run from the house to go golfing that day, you ran from it saying you were grocery shopping.

The shock.

And you took me with you.

“He can’t buy any cookies!”, she yelled at me as we left the house.

So we walked the cookie aisle, and the cereal aisle, the snack aisle, the canned goods, up the produce aisle, wandered the meat cases…

“It’s okay, we’re gonna walk every aisle.. I’m just trying to stay away from grandma.”

Jokes aren’t jokes, and we all knew it. That, we all said aloud.

I put in celery. Pickles. Lettuce, you know the one that goes in salads?

You’d comment to me the things you liked, pick them off the shelf, tell me grandma wouldn’t let you have those. But that, Mr. Sparkle, was what was said aloud, and you showing who you are, the part we never talked about.

I hope I can be more like you. Shown without being said. Think I’m still fighting against the part of me like Grandma, the one who screams in the kitchen, tells you everything like an attack- I think she meant well… but it’s rough. I see it in me too.

I know what you did that day. But I never looked at you when we got back in the car and told you, I love you too.

Thank god your daughter came in soon after, she was on one of her diets. The food was much better when she showed up.

Your eldest son called me a few years after that, I was at work. He told me to clock out, I have a plane in less than 4 hours, and I had to drop everything right then. He was the only one to stand up to your daughter, tell her he wasn’t going to wait to tell me once you were gone.

You passed on my layover, I was stuck in fucking Texas.

They didn’t tell me, until the youngest picked me up at the airport. He was always my favorite. Still is. He was the one that made the call a few months ago. Like repeating a timeline over a decade later. We’ll get there eventually.

I hate catholic funerals.

And yours was like a week long marathon, that everyone still talks about to this day.

After the wake, one of the family “uncles” took us all to their bar. That’s when I learned to drink a Guinness after. These days, he explicitly says “as long as you’re of age”.

He laughed at me back then, said “it’s your grandpa, drink”.

Wasn’t like I hadn’t been drinking for years already, but my first drink at a bar, and Guiness was the beer I drank then, but I didn’t know the significance, we find that out later when I went back.

Your daughter was pissed.

It was always like that with us, but she didn’t want me there to begin with. And then I was. And we had a fight about 4 hours into the wake, when I couldn’t stand there anymore, and I wanted to punch the next person that said “I’m sorry for your loss”, so I stepped outside.

She’s on one. All three of us were really. Your wife, Your daughter. Me.

I was yelling at grandma that morning for yelling at me to put pantyhose on. When’s the last time you saw me in a dress? Mom was yelling at me for yelling at her, and yelling at her, because, when’s the last time anyone saw me in a dress?

And here I am in the parking lot, pulling pine needles off trees and shoving them into the top of my dress, hoping the trees will offer me some strength so I don’t start a fight with someone at the wake for simply trying to be kind, and she comes in, livid.

Not at first.

She came out for a breath too.

Maybe, I’m the person she feels okay punching when everything is too much.

She saw those pine needles and started in on me, started breaking down screaming, about how can’t I figure it out yet? How the fuck can’t I believe you were up there, watching me, you’ll always be there- remember the very twisted version of religion she got when she got sober?

So I told her, no. And I told her how this tree and these pine needles all have a part of you. How the wind has a part of you. How I carry you. How everyone has a part of you. How can she stand in front of thousands of people so personally impacted by you, and not realize that every fucking breath we take has a part of you in it, and that’s why, I don’t need to believe you’re looking down at me.

And why, I don’t care if it seems sacrilegious to have pine needles in my stupid fucking dress and no fucking pantyhose on.

Then your youngest son and I smoked a cigarette in the procession.
Then the family “uncle” sat a beer in front of me, and I drank it.
Why, to this day, when someone dies, I want to drink a Guinness.

And funny, we found out you weren’t as Irish as you told Grandma when you met her… went to the grave with you. But it came out.

And when we went back, and we’ll get there, this time I packed hose. And standing in front of your grave again, I finally said,

 

I love you too.

(TW: Suicide)

Trevor

I don’t remember how it started.
How you landed on my couch.

Did you just show up?
Did you call me?
Did I go get you?

So much of your story is lost. When I go back to sit and think of how the events play out I only remember a narration, of how it fell.

Like the start and the end are missing.

But I knew what was going on. And there you were on my couch escaping, and the space I once held onto was gone, and all I had left of it was me. And my couch. And you on it.

How many nights were you there?

In the evenings it was you and I, and whoever else, passing through not touching what was happening, just us. And you’d tell me everything. Every plan. Running. Truckers. Cities. What was next for you. Each night I sat next to you hearing it, witnessing it, asking you to just stay- right there on my couch. We’ll figure the rest out, but right now, here. My couch. Here.

I’d find out later, someone else sat with you during the mornings, my roommate, my friend, another fracture of the space we lost- the one who drug that couch in with me from the neighbors downstairs.

The plans you told her were different.

And her and I weren’t telling each other.
Her and I were breaking before you showed up.

One day I told you one hour, I’ll be back.
When I came back you were gone.

Almost as if you had never been there at all.

Then the call.

“Have you seen him?”

“Yesterday afternoon, haven’t since.”

“I saw him last night. He grabbed a gun and ran.”

 

 

It was right before Thanksgiving.
There would be four more Thanksgivings.

 

 

*ring*

“They found him, two blocks from the night I saw him last”.

 
Much of all I can remember was the day you left my couch.
It wasn’t an hour.
It wasn’t four years.
Sometimes, I wonder if that’s where time itself stopped.

(Tws: if you haven't caught on, light mentions of suicide/suicidal ideation in this one)

Pt 5:

The Nameless

This is where it gets harder. Where it gets blurry. Where the guilt fully kicks in.

I don’t remember how many calls.
Ones I answered.
Ones I didn’t.
Ones that weren’t even made.

The next four years, just consecutively.

I’d move a lot, each name a place, a person, but nothing I already knew wouldn’t be gone in some way or another.

It didn’t hurt as much, I tell myself. Nothing I could have done. No memories of bikes, cookies, a chair, a name that rings into the air and pulls you through time.

Names so divorced from feeling, that I barely remember the face.
We probably talked, I know we did.
Probably had something better said than just a note about the weather.

Must’ve happened at least a dozen times.

But what’s crying going to do about it?
It won’t bring you back.
Stop pretending.

 

 

 

 

 Pt 6:

 

 

Intermission: Existence

In the last year of the nameless, something stuck.
I started reaching, building, extending…

All I could keep saying about it was “a safe place to just exist”.

In the chaos of everything not-existing.

A short breath.
A pause.

It didn’t look like anything special at first glance.

It meant everything to me.

And probably had nothing really to do with the calls ceasing to be made…

But it felt like coincidence, that when I left the space.

They started again.

*ring*

(TW: suicide, suicidal ideation)

The Girlfriend

To the one I slipped notes to in lockers. The one we passed journals back and forth to each other. The one, where long before we knew, we knew.

Sitting on your kitchen counter eating cookies talking to “Mom”.
Reciting Clorox jingles on a feedback loop, while she complains of how “Dad” used to fix his Harley in the kitchen, bike parts and grease coating tables, a drop cloth uselessly crumpled on the floor.

She ran into school before everything happened. A blizzard, a storm, walked straight into my class, grabbed me by the wrist and told the school admin to “get fucked”.

I think everyone knew, we were tied together, in ways I think I will never be able to explain.

I still search for someone now, where nothing needs said, where we curl up under blankets just reading. Where silence is the entire conversation.

I still search for someone now, where we pass (hopefully, much better) writings to, back and forth. Where the words aren’t declarations of love, its shown in the act of vulnerability.

I still search for you.

I moved.
And Alex.
And the topic of our writings got real.

And dad knew.

And all that was left of us was phone calls.
Instant messenger.

And you told me.

Real this time.
Not light scratches, rope.
Funny how physics will fuck you.

Snap even the most carefully laid plans.

A blessing.

The prose dropped.
The fantasy fell.
Reality hit.
Blunt.

“I have to tell your mom”.

We died there, didn’t we?

A year, maybe two, we tried again.
Like a necromancer reanimating.
Like a hologram, fingers fell through, reaching.

A few more years.
The girl died too.

Still alive, different form, in ways the only thing that ever really was.

I kept searching for you… I keep searching for you.
With a different face.
In different towns.
In different states.

And you’re here.
Thousands of miles away from where it all started.
Again, not much more than 20 minutes away.

But it isn’t that you.
I’m holding something dead.
Including the name.

(TW- light mention of suicide)

Alex

Hello again. This hasn’t been the first time I have written of you. Many iterations of trying to understand, really.

Not why, I think I understood that when it happened. I would go on to understand that more and more later.

I think I try to understand, just how much your death continued and continues to shape me.

The in between of Spring and Summer.
In between Middle and High School.
In between the town we lived in and the one I was moved to.

Like the in between of two fences, passing through a small concrete divot where lawn runoff was to collect and spill out onto the street- where we’d line up tires perfectly and rush through avoiding splinters as you followed that last half a block to take me home.

The calls started coming in.

I wonder some days if the school had not yet understood they’re not supposed to say the cause. They say it creates a cycle in kids that young.

I just said okay. There was nothing else to say.

Shock? Yeah, I feel like I should’ve understood, but as I sat there the last two years shoving romanticized versions of suicide like love notes into my friends lockers, sitting in the park and reciting terrible middle school poetry to each other, covering surface level scratches on limbs with bandanas- you were there, but not like that, huh?

You were the one always smiling, always laughing, always there. I didn’t expect it to be you.

A couple weeks later, we drove the twenty minutes from the town we had moved to so I could be there.

That’s when the guilt starts dropping, the kind that everyone tells you not to have, as if you can just shake that off, as if knowing you can’t say that to yourself makes you stop feeling it.

What if I hadn’t moved?
What if I had asked you?
What if I had been there to walk home with you that day?
Why did we never have our numbers?

(Different back then, we’d just walk over… straight between two fences and knock)

I remember heading to yours a month or so back. You were riding my bike, laughing. Teasing me, “Come get it then”!

So I stuck a stick right in between the spokes. You went flying.

We laid on the asphalt of the cul-de-sac, sun trying to steal the tears spilling from our eyes, unsuccessfully as they were cascading relentlessly as our guts shook,

Laughing.

Twenty minute drive.
It finally hit me.

Curled up in the fetal position, clinging to the seat belt to keep me from falling under the glovebox, tears falling faster than they did the day you found out you couldn’t fly, the sun not even attempting to steal them…

“What’re you crying for? Tears won’t bring him back.”

In some ways, I think that’s the day my dad died too

Grandma

I didn’t have much time to get to know you. Like so many people in the family, we just weren’t around. I wish that had been different. I didn’t have a choice in the matter though, but you knew that, he was your son after all. How did you manage dealing with that? Everyone but him calls you a saint, he has a way of twisting things doesn’t he?

When we went to stay with you, you were so sick already. I don’t remember even seeing much of you while we were there. When we first arrived you would watch the three of us racing on the big wheels in the driveway, and then you faded out of my view.

Whenever I saw “Blackbeard’s Ghost” I thought of those days. I still have a few pieces of you around the house now, someone I wish I knew. The blanket you crocheted Dad when he graduated high school lives on my couch. It made me want to learn to crochet. I have a mug in my cabinet from your collection. I have THE chair. That one you reupholstered. I really want to make slipcovers for it, that way that part of you still stays. I nursed my daughter in that chair, I call it Grandma’s chair. Those late nights, awake, but not conscious, I’d think about how, even though I didn’t get to know you, that sitting here, looking down at her face, somewhere a bit of you was there to see us. She’s beautiful Grandma.

Anyway, your funeral was kind of the first one. The one where, I started internalizing my broken concepts of death, life, shit with (sorry, I’ve been told you hated cursing… but let’s be real, I’m trying to get you to roll over in that grave a bit and pay attention, it’s been awhile).

See, I had never seen Dad cry before. Watching him standing over your grave in that state made me cry too. I didn’t understand what was going on, but that it was something really big, something really sad, and, I was sad.

That’s when I heard “Stop it! You don’t even know what you’re crying about! Stop pretending!”. I didn’t look. I just ran towards your son and fell apart more. I stopped the tears, maybe I saw him shove that down? I don’t know, but I did.

 “Mom”, “Mom #2”, told me last year it was actually at my brother, it wasn’t about me. Over a quarter of a century later, I was told that “suck it up” lesson wasn’t aimed at me. But I carried it. I still do.

Funny isn’t it?

So many times you have impacted my life, but not directly.

Your sons have been freaking out lately. Hitting the ages of when you passed, when you were diagnosed. The young one (the good one, it’s okay to admit it) has been more active about it.

My Dad though? Well, I don’t really call him that anymore.

He’s off his rocker. He’s lashing out, and I’m the target on it. You know how that is though, don’t you?

Your ex-husband and I, and his wife, have been untangling the mess of lies he’s been telling us all. It’s hard. I wish you were here on the rough days of it.

For now, I’ll sit in the chair. Cover myself with your blanket. Drink some tea from that otter mug. Remind myself that in some ways you are here. Maybe I’ll watch “Blackbeard’s Ghost”. Maybe I’ll pull my car out from the driveway and just watch her ride her trike. Be thankful I’m not fading into the distance. Go get tested too.

Shadow

That’s what her name was, like so many other cats of her coloring, named by small children. She was my obsession. My play thing really. I was small, 4? 5?, when you called me to tell me.

My first memory of the idea of the death.

Curled up with my dad, memories so hazy, you told me she was ate by a fox. You said you took her to a farm, and at the farm, she was ate by a fox.

Her name became a code word. In the era of “stranger danger” of nightmares about windowless vans promising candy- you told me not to go with anyone that didn’t tell me the password, the secret name, the one you would tell them to say- “Shadow”.

How suiting.

To avoid dying or being trafficked, I should wait for someone to whisper the name of my dead cat, symbolizing the lies you told me, the lies I bought. The lie that you would even remember to have someone look after me, when you were too incapacitated to do so. That you wouldn’t just leave. That you wouldn’t come up with just as ridiculous of a lie to explain where you went.

I’m still waiting for you to go off to the farm and get ate by a fox.

For the men and white coats to take you away. It’s long over due really, we both know it.

To the egg donor: Get foxed.

Not that anyone may remember me, and also not that anyone may be looking for updates, and not that I cant promise I post regularly...

However.. I do, fractured, fragmented, experimental, "prose".

The best I can say is it is.. critical and queer theory dissolution with no explanation... I just force people into the embodiment (as best as I can)...

My main shit is over "illegibility"...

Meta meta.

I hate structure and want to impose things on you, as I understand some crazy intersectional things, without ever telling you what it is.

Anyway... my "submission to capitalistic inevitability" while keeping me "able to sleep at night" application to institutional bullshit got approved...

And I nuked the account you may have associated with those words, and am hoping to go forth, still with the same ideologies.

If you have no idea who I am, great!
If you do, great!

I will forever make these things, anti-capitalist.... to the best of my ablity. But I will probably slower post now... as I have to... bend to the bullshit of a "reality" where I hope I can do a thing... and go to bed at night.

Anyway... this site features all my finished works, as zines, that I expect nothing other than people to scatter...

And yeah... I just showed my hand more than I used to like to do....

And I'm realizing...

even illegibility is legible.

Oscillating my dears <3

Love all of you <3

(Free Download Zines)

Hot breath on the back of my neck
Wet slugs dance awkwardly on my lobes

My breath doesn’t hitch anymore
Eyes don’t twitch
Dead weight, unresponsive

Froze.

Perhaps it is the wind
On a warmer day.

Tousled river soaked locks
Slightly misplaced.

The whisper of a loving remark
Situationally deviated
Cross eyed in time.

Froze.

Sat down in the sun on the deck
I ask the rays to grace my skin
As if they can reach to the corners of my mind
Melting memories like

Otter pops

Tops chewed off between teeth that

Nibble

Too hard

Crunch

And just like that…
We collapse.