It’s a bit of an unbearable sadness, and I don’t know who to turn to, and what to express to whom, without sounding desperate.
It’s a strange thing, to think that I have to work for my own happiness, that it’s not something that I’m automatically granted, by virtue of being conscious. I can’t believe that even that has to be a struggle.
Is this what it is to have high standards? Is this something trying to force my hand to develop a better life for myself? Because I don’t think it’s going to work.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think it will.
I feel these choices coming at me to reach out to people, to allow myself to be reached out to, and I feel like I’m failing, failing, failing.
Like every hand that reaches out, I just push away. I don’t know what else to do because to receive that hand would be so painful, I’m not sure why, but that’s how it feels.
It’s strange, to have people around you reaching out to you because they love you, and you, not being able to absorb that, almost as if it’s something your body literally can’t digest, so you don’t even try to ingest it. You just avoid it, in principle, in whole.
This requires a bit of a celebration.
I am free of it. Of the guilt. It may still be a while before I fully acclimate my life to that new status, but I feel it tonight, this is meaningful.
I recognize tonight that I didn’t cause his death, that I didn’t force his hand. When he said “you saved me, I’ll never forget that”, and “we’ve got to look out for each other”, I don’t think I should have taken it as, We are the only ones who can help each other.
I’ve not written back to people, and they didn’t kill themselves, so just because he did, does not mean it’s my fault. Even if I was the only one who knew about it, even if I was the only one he divulged all this stuff to, even if, even if, even if. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault, and tonight, I know this, I feel this, even if reason or rationale or anything else fails to pull through for me. It’s not my fault. I’m free of it.
So if I’m free of it, what am I to do?
Go to New York.
I know I said I wouldn’t drink, but… I think tonight called for a toast.
What are the choices that lay before me?
A lot of things.
Self-destruction.
The embracing of every aspect of my life, and those in it.
Being honest with people and declaring exactly what it is that I’m thinking.
Not smiling if I don’t feel like smiling. No matter whom I have to sell a dress to.
He and I had come here, and we sat at this exact table, in this exact same spot.
I tried hard with him. I tried to learn, I tried to be a better person, but there was a point at which I thought, and acted, like “He’s just gonna have to take me as me. As is.” And I don’t know if he could, but I guess, in another way, I don’t know if I could.
I wanted so much to have someone set a standard for me – it’s breaking me up a bit right now, in public, in a flipping pseudo-English bar right now, no less, to admit this – but I wanted someone to set the bar for me and for me to rise to what I thought that would be. I think the whole time, it wasn’t even about that, there was no expectation that I had to be any certain way, but nonetheless, I wanted to, you know? I wanted to try. I wanted to feel the joy of going over and above the line that didn’t even exist; and for the first time in my life, there seemed to be a man that loved me unconditionally – (oh god, I’m so afraid that this feeling is only fleeting, that I’m going to relapse two Tuesdays from now and realize that he’d be alive if only I’d written to him; the precariousness of almost having saved him is epic, but I hope I never believe that again, never again, never, again).
I compare everyone to him. I can’t help it. No one was as…warm, as intelligent, as embracing, as determined, as strong, and the problem is, because he was so intent on covering up so much of himself, I think a lot of that strength came from his ability to wholly avoid and ignore….or put aside…his pain. I wish, in a sense, that things had turned out very differently, but really, they couldn’t have. They couldn’t be any other way than they are, right now.
This is the rub: the ability to consider possible worlds, other worlds, and not be able to do anything about it, to be able to think of a different outcome, and yet, for it not to be. This is a kind of hell. Not that I think it is, but actually, that it is. I cried for so long, and I cried so much, thinking that I had let him down…remembering receiving the news…thinking that it couldn’t be possible, but, that of course it was.
I don’t know how to rebound, how to bounce back from that. To know that the one person you loved more than anyone was gone….it’s the strangest thing. Because you know, having been alive, having been involved with this person, that you would have had an impact on them, but the thing is, you didn’t reach out. In time, that is. It’s a timing thing. And the motherfucker about death is, you don’t come back from it, not after a week, not by the time they found him.
I read in some Kabbalistic text that there was a way for someone to be brought back from the dead. That a rabbi had lain on top of a deceased child, and had lain, eyeball to eyeball, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, on the person, and after seven days, had brought them back to life. At Dayne’s funeral, I wanted to rip open his casket, and lay on top of him, before he was interred in his tomb. I wanted to lay on top of him, eyeball to eyeball, and see if it would work if there was even a possibility that it could be the case, that it could save him. But I knew I would look crazy.
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