scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

4.10.06

if i was going to pour one for my homies

which is better: to get it started early (so you're not surprised when your one friend is smushed by a minivan somewhere outside of Portland, or when your other friend gets mono which you never knew you could die of, or when your other friend jumps off a bridge, or when your other friend gets cancer, or when your other friend does too much coke, or when your other friend, or when your other, or when your ... ) so that you know where your head is going to go, and how long it is going to stay there, and where it is going to end up finally, or to be blindsided by it all when it inevitably happens to everyone? is it about even - to be able to deal with crisis and have a clear head through it, but to lose out on all those years of blind invulnerability? and is it even an ethical question to be asking? of course it's nicer if none of your people die young.

but i can breathe. and i remember i used to keep that anniversary more faithfully than anything, that horrid, creeping, sacred day. but when you tell someone that doesn't already know that it will get better, that next year it will be a little bit easier, and easier again after that, and then one day fifteen or twenty years on you'll just blink and look sort of distant. there's nothing that can be done. And it's an awful knowledge, knowing that you're going to get over it. Like resilience is a pathology. Like survival could be a sin. and somewhere sometimes you hate yourself for it, because it ought to change everything, and it does, for a while. For a while.

and i can also go up to it, like a well or a dark little cave, and go in and wallow in dank misery. (even now, always, april is just around the corner.) and sometimes that's good. Healthy. Normal. but you can't help but learn the way out again.

and now, i can have grapes (i can finally have grapes, i always bought them and then couldn't eat them and they'd stay in the bottom drawer of the fridge for weeks and bleed grape juice over the plastic and get all sticky) and herbal tea and tomatoey pesto, i can go for walks in piney woods and stay up late at night, i can stand to laugh and hope and sit in the sun, and i can almost believe that i can have something that can't be taken away, because even if it is, then i still have it. Almost.

Almost.

scrawled @ 15:58