The party had been raging for a couple of hours but Alec and I were barely making our way there. We were walking in front of the freshmen dorms when some drunk hockey dude passed us by and yelled happily “Hey Piano man!” Alec stopped, turned around, and said “No. I’m not the freaking piano man,” gesturing to his harmonica and messy hair, clearly, he was Dylan and I was Slash. I don’t know if he was drunk already but I certainly was; we made our way through the streets of Rat city and into the basement of the frat house.
We descended into the drunken chaos, with only black lights and string lights hanging from the pipes that crossed the room just below the rugged cement ceiling to offer guidance. There was that smell of a dirty bar mopped with old beer and the humidity produced by the sweat of a hundred drunken bodies swaying, bumping, and grinding on each other. I never stayed long in one place and I always kept my red solo cup half way filled, this way the excuse of going for a refill was always available, gave me a reason to stay on the move, and if some drunk idiot wanted me to chug it at least it would only half suck. “Walk as if you got somewhere to be,” Ta-nehisi would’ve said in creative writing, but it was just the opposite for me, I had nowhere to be and all I knew was that I did not want to stay. I walked between the half-conscious bodies to the keg where some young introvert pledge would pump the tap for me. I grabbed my half beer and went up the wet wooden stairs, with every step sticking slightly to the spilled beer on the wood. I went up to the rooms and recreated the same conversations with different people. I drank, I smoked, and on that particular night I believe I did a lot of drugs, or at least I hope I did.
The girl I liked was downstairs making out with one of my brothers so I pounded beers, got hammered and left. I walked back through the “Alston Crawl,” the crowd of dumb freshmen looking for parties and willing to pay get into them, I walked to my tiny room on the eighteenth floor of the student village and played rock and roll until my face was numb. I lifted my gaze from my desk to see Boston glowing in the night with the dark water of the Charles flowing like thick red blood out of the downtown heart of “Wicked Bahston”. I was craving life, yeah, I think it was life, although I would’ve been happy if death had taken the call. It was late and my troubled soul was tired. I left the dark room for the bright elevator and stumbled down Comm. Ave making my way downtown. I ran at full speed on the edge of the sidewalk, jumped and swung from the branch of one of those trees they have growing in the middle of the freaking sidewalk as if that changed anything of the urban setting, I swung letting momentum take my flying body only to fall and pound the side of my body into the ground. I turned to face the stars, yelled “Parkour!” and laughed my ass off as I stared at the cloudless sky. I stood slowly feeling my ribs hurt and turned to look at Marsh chapel standing on my left. I thought about crossing the bridge behind it to the esplanade and getting high by the Charles, but the chapel’s door was open, so I took that invitation instead.
That was the first and only time I ever went into that place. I had hated religion since I was small boy, being told what to do, and what to believe in by old nuns, but I must admit it was hard to deny the
serenity of certain places. I could’ve sworn there was music playing but there couldn’t have been, it was the middle of the night and the saner possibility was that I wasn’t sane. I sat in the last row with my back against the polished, yellow, shiny wood and rested my feet on top of the next row.
-“It’s been a while, Joe,” I said.
-“It’s Jesus,” I said, in a deeper voice worth revering, conversing with myself.
-“Whatever, man,” in my normal voice and exploded in laughter.
I stood up and stumbled my way towards the statue of Joe hanging almost naked, nailed to the cross, captured in his last dying, bleeding moment, forever asking for the redemption of our souls. I stood before the altar looking up at him straight in the eyes and spoke soberly, confessing “You know Joe? Sometimes I wish I had you.” I turned and left but as I did, I saw a red open doorway from the corner of my eye. There was a stone hallway behind it leading somewhere; It seemed like it led outside. I could see the night and I could feel a breeze of cold wind caressing my cheeks. It seemed there were tables set up and people walking past the door like a blur of colors; it seemed like some sort of party. But how could it be the exit, I thought, that was not the outside, but it was, but it wasn’t.
I went into the stone hallway to hear the music playing out there, but it wasn’t that edm house rap crap they play at parties, no, no, that was the goddamn blues that was playing out there. Loud, and raw, and real. Oh, man, that was good music, you could feel the bass slap you in he face. It wasn’t rapping fools twisting tongues about money and girls and booze. This was music. This was art. Goddamn! I could feel the dopamine in my brain, It was there and it was real and I knew that I needed to be in there, so, I went through the red doorway at the end of the hall, and as I got closer I started to see them all. There were, I mean, I must’ve been tripping because these people did, most certainly, not look like people; I thought they were monsters at first, dead men, dead women, people with their skin burnt off, skeletons walking and laughing and living, and then there were monsters, huge birds of different colors, yellow and purple, walking like humans, giant freaking birds walking like humans across a field of dark green grass with rows of old, dark, brown picnic benches to the left. There was a multitude of bodies jumping, swaying, and pounding the earth beneath them at the foot of a stage where hundreds of men and woman sat playing instruments, an orchestra, behind a band that was playing the sweetest sounds you’ve ever heard. It was everything all at once, it was smooth, intoxicating, sweet, smoky Jazz, and rough, heavy, rock, and deep, deep, blues. The screams of the guitar commanded the bodies, the voice of the singer resonated so clearly as if it was within you and yet so deeply and strongly from without as if the waves of their sounds were passing through you. It was hard to tell the beat of your heart when your whole body pulsated to the drumming of a dead man. The strings of the rows of golden oak violins were tearing through the cosmos, piercing me like rays of white, blazing fire.
-“What the hell is this place?” I muttered to myself as I walked through the red doorway, and suddenly, as the words fell out of me, the music was muffled, it had become part of the background.
-“Well that’s just it, mate,” said a raspy voice belonging to a man wearing a slim black coat falling heavily on him all the way down to his knees, it was dark and sharply, clean, like the night, and it seemed to rest on him like thick, black, wet hair, covering his dark gray three-piece.
He leaned against the wall with one foot on the ground and the other on the wall behind him. His left arm rested on a black walking stick while his coat of absolute darkness ended two inches before his wrist, showing the crisp, white end of his sleeve and black watch; it was simple, it was elegant, and it was expensive. He took a drag from his cigarette and inhaled half the stick as his gaze pierced mine; he had eyes the color of amber and they were wise, and old, and understanding. His thumb and index pulled from his lips as he inhaled with his face producing an expression of such pleasuring relief, it wasn’t ecstasy, it was satisfaction. His gaze was consuming, it was as if I was in his thought. I saw a man who had smoked half his life only to spend the next half battling lung cancer and the urges to have a square. The relief of a man who spent his life searching through fire and water, by religion and science, with surgeons and shamans, and the fool was still going to die even as he denied his impulses. It was the expression of that man on the other side, finally giving into the temptation once again, after he stumbled and crawled, weak and pumped full of cancer killing chemicals, to give Charon, the ferryman his last two coins and see the other side of the river Styx. Laying on that old beaten boat on a river of dead he finally pulled a cigarette and threw it against his lips; he lit a match and pulled as the fire ignited a hundred chemicals. It was the slowest inhalation of his cursed life, he tasted the cancer and it was goddamn glorious, it was insane, it was rebellion in his cheeks, the smoke came out of his nose and mouth and his head was lighter than a balloon, he was floating, and as he stood on that little boat to meet eternity on the shore and the thousand souls that waited there, he yelled at the top of his lungs “Well come and get it you fools.” I swore his eyes told me that story in the fraction of the second when I met them. The smoke escaped from his mouth, lingering, floating upwards around his devilish face, playing in between the curls of his perfectly trimmed pointy black beard. I looked around and everyone seemed to be feeling that same amount of pleasure; it was as if there was ecstasy in the juice.
I didn’t know what was going on, I mean, I was hammered; I barely registered what that dude had said. All I could hear was that guitar screaming, but I knew that, hell or not, there was a goddamn smile on my face. These were my people, but then, well, then it hit me.
-“What did you just say, man?” I said. My voice, once again, muffling all other sounds, anchoring me to the moment.
-“Hell, mate.” responded the man, with that hoarse voice. “Or heaven, it’s all the same. Point is, you’re dead. Dead as a doornail, mate.” He quickly added with a short cackle.
-“Holy shit” I let out instantaneously as the color faded from my face.
I stumbled towards the wooden bench that was a few feet away from me and sat at its edge. I drowned in thought but there wasn’t one I could’ve picked from the legion of thousands; there was nothing but white noise. I had lost the focus. I had lost the anchor.
-“Nothing holy about it, look around. But, don’t worry, It happens to the best of us, mate” the man laughed as he followed and sat beside me.
He turned sideways and grabbed a bottle of Glenfiddich and two glasses behind us that I had completely missed. He turned back, raised both glasses resting on his open, left hand to the level of his eyes and stared at them as if wondering what to do next. He brought them down a few inches and spat into them, only what came out wasn’t liquid but solid. He had just spat ice cubes into these glasses; He turned to look at me and winked as he poured a heavy scotch.
-“Drink up, mate, there’s no such thing as a hangover here,” he said while handing me the glass, “But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying,” he threw it back and gave the loudest laugh I had ever heard, It was as deep and as repetitive as a roar down a well, this man was clearly in love with himself.
I did not know what was going on but that laugh made me realize that either that guy was real and he was freaking nuts or I was nuts, for seeing that guy, but either way it was about time to get the hell out of there. I turned to him as if I had just cracked the DaVinci code, as if I had solved the riddle, I could not have been dead, I thought, I looked him straight in the eye and asked him:
-“How did I die?” with my chin up as if I was attempting to provoke the man.
-“Die?” the voice of a woman giggled, “Oh, love, you couldn’t be more alive,” came a sweet but firm and comforting voice from above, a voice that could never stutter, it was the voice of eloquence and confidence, “Have you been messing with our guests, Barty?”
I turned to find the owner of this voice; I turned forward to see faded blue gray jeans, white thread hanging from holes showing golden tanned skin. I looked up and there she was, wearing a faded black Zeppelin t-shirt resting on her athletic figure. Her left hand was holding a cigarette and moving as a wave from the ocean, her eyes were closed, and she was feeling the goddamn blues. Her right hand was carrying a glass of the dark brown liquor and every finger must’ve had at least one silver ring.
She had dirty blonde hair that came down to her chest and her skin looked as if she had lived, and maybe died, in the Caribbean, golden. She was rock n’ roll, and she was gorgeous, and fucking free. She was wearing a thin, yellow masquerade mask with yellow feathers flying to her sides. Her head was turned right in the direction of the blues, but then, she turned and lifted her yellow mask while giving me her hand,
-“Jenevie,” the word came out as her soft pink lips parted. “enchante.”
In that moment, when I saw her eyes, if I was dead or dying, in that second, nothing else had mattered. She had a thin black eyeliner around her eyes and her eyelashes were long and dark. She wore that mask of yellow feathers wavering with the wind, like a free bird caged by the fragility of mortality, but nothing could diminish the power of those pale blue eyes. The calm, peaceful eyes of a broken soul; that is all I ever saw when I first saw her, when I really saw her. That girl had the entire ocean in her eyes and that is all I needed to see for me to want to stay in that place, to give up one world for another, to give up one life for another. Was it worth it? I asked myself, was a girl worth my
life, my past, my present, my future? In that moment, I don’t think anything had ever been more worthwhile. I’d been running all my life to find something that would finally make me feel like I belonged, like I was understood, like I wasn’t alone, and I thought she might’ve been it.
-“Marco,” somehow, I managed to get out.
-“Marco, calme mon amour, you’re alive, love. It’s just, today, so are we,” said the French goddess.
I took a big gulp from my glass and looked around, although I must admit breaking my gaze from her eyes was as hard as believing I was alive. There wasn’t a soul that wasn’t moving to the funk of the bass, everyone was cheering, everyone was drinking, everyone was smoking, and everyone was smiling. It was a mad hatter’s party and I felt nothing more fitting than to act accordingly, and so, to calm my nerves I took another sip and swallowed half the glass. “Screw it,” I thought, what was I to do? If I was actually dead, well then at least I wouldn’t die again, and if I wasn’t, well at least the alcohol would kill the acid, if that is what I had taken.
I was so close to them, anyway, I thought, I wanted to be them. What a madness it was, people were different there, not just in their appearance, but in everything. There were monsters and also people but no one you’d consider normal, and the monsters weren’t so monstrous that you’d be scared of them but rather like the monsters you saw in your nightmares years ago and they had grown up with you, old and tired of a life they didn’t ask for. Their eyes, the same of a tired father waiting for a cold beer after a hard day of work. I looked around and saw most of the people were wearing masks and I couldn’t tell if they were monsters or not, but then again, maybe there were no monsters, only people.
I stood, poured myself another one and commanded the words out of me,
-“What the hell is going on here though”
-“Atta boy, pour me one too, mate,” said Barty.
-“Well, it’s just that, love, look,” she said as she waved her arm to show me her world, “you’re not dead, and they’re not alive. It’s simply November 2nd the day of the dead. On one side, we’ve got the living, damned to die, on the other, the dead, teased by life.” Jenevie said softly with a bit of concern and a hint of warmth, it was as if her very existence was that of seduction.
-“You see, mate,” Barty jumped in, “One day a year, today, everyone is free to roam each other’s world. You’ve ventured into death, mate. You’re welcome to leave at any time, don’t you worry.”
But I wasn’t going to leave; I had been seduced, by Jenevie’s eyes, by this such strange world. It was like stepping into a party with all the monsters from your nightmares, a Tim Burton’s movie in the flesh, a party for the dead.
I took a sip, took out a square from my pack of 27’s and lit it on the candle burning in the middle of the table. I took a drag, looked into the stars in Jenevie’s eyes and said, defeated and yet courageously:
-“Alright, let’s do it”
She pulled her hair back and let out a glorious laugh. God! everything about this girl was compelling.
-“Do what, exactly, love?” she said amused
I looked to Barty and then back to her, looking for an answer, and finally said, chuckling,
-“Well, whatever needs to be done, I guess,” and continued to laugh nervously.
-“You’re already doing it, mate, now here, pass the bottle, let me pour you a proper drink” said Barty, looking forward towards the crowd with smoke flowing steadily out from his mouth and extending his hand towards the scotch.
-“Easy Barty boy, you sure you can handle all that, old man?’ Jenevie teased him.
“Bart,” came the word, clean like a cut, “call me Bart, darling. You make me sound as if I was some,” he paused, “some,” struggling to find the correct words to describe the imagery the name Barty produced in his mind, and then in shock or disgust his head pulled back an inch and said with insult in his voice “like some trust fund brat.”
He turned to me and raising his glass he said,
-“Words are all we got, kid. Choose them wisely but most of all, choose them, always. The day they choose you, well, you might as well be in the grave, mate.”
He spoke to me with kindness in his eyes. The wrinkles in his face demanded reverence but you could tell he was wise and that he was kind, he was the man I had hoped to become one day and the man I had needed so many times before. Like the morning I had awaken with a hospital bracelet in the coldest deepest hole in the world and all my father seemed to get across the telephone lines as I sobbed was “What is wrong with you?” Yes, perhaps, I could learn a thing or two from this man, I thought.
-“Relax, Bart.” Said Jenevie accentuating the name with a slight mocking tone.
-“I’m dead, love, how much more relaxed can I get?” He said with a serious look into her eyes. “Think about it, what are words but a cry for love? It is our way to kill our loneliness. Above it all, we desire to be understood, to be loved, to be felt. But how can we achieve that? How can we” He turned to look at me with fire in his brown eyes, the look of passion. He raised his hands to chest level and with tension in his fingers as if struggling to contain a ball of energy, he raised them to the sides of his head, then down again to the center space between us, and then to the sides of my head as he continued, “How can I give you everything I’m seeing, feeling, producing, right here. All these neurons firing, all this
electricity, all this emotion, all of my self, essentially. How can I take it and give it to you, lend it to you, so you can understand me?
“It is humanity’s pale attempt to use language, words, songs, music, poetry, systems of rules, to be felt. But, it will always fall short in the ears of the wrong person. We always need more, we are always misunderstood until that one day when we meet that one person who makes us feel as if we’d never been alone, we were just a little lost, but no longer shall we have to explain ourselves to the soul of this person.”
He turned from my eyes to the sky and sat back down to rest his back against the cold wooden table; he must’ve been thinking about that person. He started pouring more scotch on his glass as he continued,
-“Only, sometimes, we never do, find that someone, that is, and sometimes we do, but then they’re taken from us.” He paused to look at his drink and then said, “But we always keep on trying, don’t we? We always keep hoping. ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ like Fitz would’ve said”
He turned back to me, took a sip, and with a soft smile, said,
-“Such is the greatest curse of humanity, we are damned to hope. We can be broken, but somehow, our spirit will always beat on.”
There was not a sound more comforting than his rough voice amongst the rest; it overpowered everything else. His tone demanded attention and he quieted the environment but like the burst of a bubble, Jenevie spoke.
-“Alright, easy there, Fitzgerald, one more verse and I might just start crying like a little girl.”
-“What is eternity for if not to speak our hearts out, darling, to solve the riddle of our souls.” Bart raised his glass up to her and swallowed the rest of the dark brown liquid. “Every once in a while there’s a man or a woman who gets the words just right. It is as if this person’s soul was speaking right to yours and you just know. You hear them, you know you need them, you feel them, and you know this person gets you. And, that, my dear friends, is why you must choose your words wisely, and if not wisely, then recklessly, but flowing with thick, dark, red rivers of passion.”
-“I warned you, Barty. I’ll be dancing, come meet me when you’re done talking your feelings out, boys,” yelled Jenevie as she ran towards the multitude of people swaying, moving and beating to the soul of the blues.
-“Fuck, man,” I began, with the heavy words struggling to come into the cool wind of the night. One by one, I managed to spit them out, “Fitzgerald. Glenfiddich. Hendrix.” I took a second and making sure my gaze wasn’t meeting his but forward towards the crowd, ashamed, I finished, “If this is it. Well,” I spoke seriously, weighing every word, not because of what Bart had said but because these were
words that had never seen the light of day, a thought that had brewed in the depths of my heart and soul for over a decade, “Well, then. I’ll probably. Finally. Bite the bullet.”
My expression was blank. I knew the curse I had just muttered, I knew the fire I had started. I should’ve been embarrassed, ashamed of such thoughts, I’d always been, society will deem you weak, label you insane, it’s probably the worst thing to be in this world, a pathetic, ungrateful, misunderstood, suicidal, lonely prick. I should’ve been embarrassed but I was past that point; I was indifferent now.
Bart stood as I spoke the last word faster than I could lift my gaze. He stood from the wooden bench and took up the entire space, suddenly the entire environment had changed. He was towering over me with eyes as dark as the bark of a tree, the space around him was dark, and gray, and cold.
-“Oh please, laddie, keep on. Don’t you dare stop on my account.”
He remained the same man with the wrinkles of the years pulling at the sides of his cocoa light brown skin, his face remained calm and serene but there was thunder in his voice now.
-“Tell us all the secrets of life and death, mate.”
I was a fool, drunken coward. I knew nothing of either one.
-“You think this is all a huge party? What’s behind the veil is nothing but a big joke, isn’t it, boy?”
His raspy voice grated my skin and diminished me. His never-wavering stare reveled my true self; I was nothing but a scared little boy.
-“You’ll never know a thing about death until you start respecting life, boy. We exist here, damned, cursed.” He took a pause and gazed at the crowds around us, he swallowed, and finished, “Incomplete.
“You long for death because you fear life, kid.”
It was true, but it had been a long time since I’d been able to control such thoughts. They were always there creeping at the back of my mind, plotting, killing me one thought at a time. They were there at every turn, every time I stopped to cross the street, telling me to step in front of the traffic. They were there every time I waited for the train, telling me to jump to the tracks. They were there every time I looked at the roof of a building, making me imagine what it would be like to jump and feel my body collapse against the solid ground. They were there every night when I was in bed staring at the ceiling fan. They were there every drunken night I came home and took off my belt, making me wonder what the leather would feel pressed so closely around my neck. They were there at the bottom of every bottle, the butt of every smoke, they were there on the grainy white powder lined against the mirror, they were there in every breath of my life.
They were always there and I’d learned to live with them, but it was harder to remain in control of my mind some days. There were days when I remembered I couldn’t recall my mother’s face, or her voice, or her laughter. There were days where I’d feel like I couldn’t talk to anyone, because all I wanted
was to talk to her, when all I wanted was her advice, but I couldn’t have it. I’d scroll down the list of contacts on my phone and feel as if there wasn’t person I could talk to. There were days where I’d feel as if I was stranded in the ocean, dying of thirst; I was alone in a world full of people. those were the days where I wanted nothing more but to die a drunken, lonesome death. Life had been so heavy, and my legs trembled with every step.
To die, I didn’t know, I didn’t know if I wanted to die but I certainly did not want to live. At least not like that, not any more, every day, running from the thoughts that weakened me. It was debilitating to keep on living by picking up the scraps of the memories I had of happiness. It was debilitating to shut those thoughts down every time. It was exhausting to have a constant battle in my mind. I’d become the prisoner of my thoughts; I was chained to my depression. So many times I’d heard the waves breaking against the shore telling me to just let go. But what was I without my pain? I wondered if there was anything else in me but that pain. And, so, I had learned to live with my demons, I gave in, and one thought at a time they chipped away the person I really was. It was a terrible way to live a life but I’d been living like that for over a decade and it simply felt as if I was past the point of no return. There was no going back. I was done for, I was waiting for that day, I was a lost cause.
He placed a hand on my shoulder and lost the tension in his face, I think he saw through me, and I think he saw my pain. He sat back down and suddenly I heard the music in the background again.
-“I think Jenevie is waiting for you, mate.” Bart said, dismissing the subject.
I left the bench slowly and walked towards Jenevie without looking back. We were a wave of sweaty, drunken, ecstatic fools doing all we could do to feel once again. There was the thumping in our ears, and the feet banging against the patches of bare earth, we could feel our bodies rocking back and forth, we could feel tears running down our cheeks, and we could feel our beaten spirit punching a hole through the veil. Sometimes all we want is to be heard, sometimes that’s all it takes to save us. We were moving, we were dancing, and we were feeling it, and it was glorious. I turned to her as she turned to me and spoke softly. I barely heard her above the sound of the bass and with the help of her moving lips, I read,
-“Always follow the crossroads, love”
She took a swig of the scotch and handed it to me. I took a swig with my head tilted back and my mouth took in the scotch as my eyes took in a thousand stars.
They were all dead and I was alive. I was drinking to stop feeling; I was drinking to forget my life, while these people were drinking to remember and to feel something again. I had stepped into Alice’s mirror; they envied my sorrows as much as I envied their drunken, numb state of mind. And so they fucking raged, every single one of them, popping pills like tic-tacs, drinking liquor like juice. What the hell was this place? I thought, was it a celebration? Was it a funeral? I had no idea what I was supposed to feel. All I had ever wanted was to forget. I drank to forget. I lived my days knowing they would end in black outs, longing for the opening of the first bottle of wine, hoping someday I’d be as numb as these
poor souls. I was much less fortunate, though, I was living my life in such a way that I was killing myself one night at a time. I was living to die while they were dying to live.
Jenevie moved to the screams of Hendrix’s guitar; she was a flame in a sea of souls, wanting to ignite the whole damn world. She was beautiful and she didn’t want anything but to live one more day.
-“Come.” she said running off towards the bridge over storrow drive.
She was calling to me, she was my siren, she was my savior. Walking to her felt like walking out of the hole I had dug for myself. I walked as if I was crawling my way out of the ocean, up and into the cold darkness of Boston. As the Charles flowed behind her I walked with the weight of the ocean bringing me down with every wave, waves angry at me for trying to redeem myself, full collisions in my brain of thoughts of insecurity. “You don’t deserve her,” the voices in my head yelled. Each wave of thought hitting me harder and harder, telling me to jump down to the beams of yellow lights racing down on Storrow, to forget her, to forget myself, to let it all fucking go and finally rest my troubled soul. Such were the demons that raged inside my head since the edge of fourteen, but her eyes, they kept me going. Each day, each thought tried to lull my spirit, they disoriented me, confused me. I had been lost in my mind for a decade, but I kept on fighting. It would have been so easy to let go, to be washed away by the waters that gave me life in the first place, to return to the river where I came from. The ocean was claiming what was hers but I refused. An unbreakable spirit fighting for what seemed to be my last breath, my dying breath, every single one of them questioning my will to survive. I reached her at the middle of the bridge and exhaled. I stood next to her and stood like the man I once used to be, with a worn out body, I stood with a broken heart and a broken soul, with a beaten spirit, but , a man, none the less. I looked at the pale blue eyes and realized I was going to have to save myself.
-“Is it not absolutely marvelous? to look at the waters? to realize that no matter how absolutely still you become they will never cease to flow? But doesn’t it make you furious too, love?”
-“Why would it make me furious?”
-“Well, you’ve been robbed.”
-“What?”
-“You’ve been robbed, love, of your choices, of your life. It is merely an illusion, a mirage. Your heart will never stop beating, your blood will never stop flowing, your thoughts will never stop rushing, not until you die. And, when that moment comes, you will fall on an ever moving ground. The clocks will keep on ticking,” she whispered as she turned towards the street and climbed on to the hand-rail. She stood on it with her arms stretched wide open as a living, breathing cross.
-“Jenevie” I muttered but she continued as the cars raced below.
-“The oceans will keep on rising. But, perhaps, we weren’t meant to stop the waters, perhaps, we weren’t meant to put out fires. Maybe, all we needed to do was let go, maybe all you can ever do is breathe, and let it all go.”
I stood and said nothing. I stood as she turned and with a soft, crooked smile on her face looked at me as if fully aware of my thoughts about her, as if grateful for the love I was offering, as if aware that I had to save myself before being with her. Although, it could’ve just been pity. She jumped back onto the bridge, took the final drops of scotch and threw the bottle back without looking. I followed the thick glass squared bottle with my eyes as it arched its way in the sky, expecting it to crash against the oncoming traffic but the bottle vanished into the cool, dark, blue sky.
We went back down the steps and walked behind Marsh chapel into what I thought was the college of arts and sciences, and it was, only inside, the whole building was one huge open room with one long table in the middle spreading from end to end. The table was made of marble and the room was so bright I could see the wrinkles in my hands. We walked down the room, saluting all kinds of people sitting at the table. Haunted by eternity, they did the only thing they could to kill the time, they drank themselves into oblivion, or rather, they drank until the one night oblivion allowed them to come out. Hendricks on the tonic for the souls in suits, Jack, coke, and coke for the rock n’ roll gods, and vodka cranberries for the sorority girls, it was either complete intoxication or the curse to forever roam the memories of the lives they once lived.
Jenevie and I sat down and drank with some strangers. I drank like they did but I was never on their level. I don’t know what I was to her but whatever it was I liked it, and for a night I thought I could fool my heart. The time passed and the talks were talked. Somehow, everything I did was a matter of laughter to them, it’s like they had been gone from life for so long they didn’t remember what it was to have breath in your lungs.
People came and people went to and from the table but as the night proceeded people started clearing out. They were going out to say their goodbyes.
-“How about we finish this one and then I take you home, love,” Jenevie whispered so close to me that I was forced to stare straight into those pale blue eyes.
It may have been a second, but it felt like an hour and as it went by we got closer to each other until, finally, our lips met. Never in my life had I had a kiss like that. Her lips were cold and yet her kiss gave me life. I could’ve kissed a thousand girls after her and still that kiss would’ve been the only worth remembering. We stopped timed with that kiss. She was a new drug, and one I wouldn’t have minded OD’ing on. I was drunk on her and the possibilities of the moments I could spend next to her, but like all moments, like all things of life, I knew it was going to die.
She pulled her lips from mine and said softly,
-“It’s getting late, love, let me take you home.”
There were tears in her eyes; she seemed broken, and yet, I knew she was the strongest woman I had ever met.
We went out through the stone hallway and the red doorway and out into Boston. The sky was no longer dark, it was pale, like her eyes, and all the way down the tracks, rising from out of Kenmore square you could see a hint of orange. The morning sun was coming to claim it all. We walked towards Alston and I saw her feeling it all. As much as many of them longed for this night, it seemed many also feared to feel once again, only for the burning sun to rip it from their insides once again.
They were in ecstasy, every sensation demanding to be felt and every soul taking every bit of it in, for it would have to last a whole year. Like acid, like an explosion of sensations, like a child, they rejoiced in the simplicity of life and were amazed by the colors of the skies. Everything was new once again. As we approached the block of my apartment and stood in front of Agganis Arena, the sun began to rise and I started to notice something strange.
-“What is going on?” I stopped and asked her.
The orange lights expressed the silhouettes of people falling from buildings, people running and collapsing on the ground, people scared, people crying, screaming, and gasping for breath. She turned to me and sighed and with tears in her eyes she said,
-“It’s one night, Marco. That’s all they get.”
-“What do you mean?” my heart cried at the sight of her sorrow
-“When the sun comes again, they have to go back. If they don’t, if the dead are caught in the world of the living by the fire of the sun they are forced to relive their deaths.”
It seemed, however, as if that wasn’t such a curse to some of them. There were some, Barty, amongst them, I saw him walking peacefully down the tracks with his arms wide open into the sun. I saw some kneel on the streets, and I saw some sit together and close their eyes. It seemed some of them wanted it, they wanted to feel it all once again and for these emotions to resonate for the year to come, until they could feel once again.
I couldn’t stand it any longer, it was as if, suddenly, I had to carry the weight of all my choices and I was crumbling under it. I was on my knees with tears rolling down my face seeing people on the ground gasping for air, seeing them bleed to death, watching them die in all kinds of ways. I had been doing it all wrong; I wanted to feel nothing at all and all these people wanted was to feel once again, even if that meant feeling the worst thing they had ever felt, that was better than nothing. They just wanted to remember there was once a time when being broken was the best damn thing they ever had. As the minutes passed and the sun got closer to our feet, I kept watching death take them one by one.
-“Marco, love, let’s go,”
Jenevie was afraid, and so was I. I was about to lose her, and I had only just found her. I hurried her back to my room, we locked the doors and closed the blinds and sat at the foot of my bed, holding each other until we passed out with only one thought in our minds, uncertainty, uncertainty was the only certain thing in the goddamn world.
I rose from bed provoked by the strength of the blazing sun penetrating my room through the blinds and my confusion was destroyed by the memory of her eyes. She wasn’t there. I ran out of my room to look for her.
-“Jenevie!” I yelled as I ran into the living room, but she wasn’t there. Nothing happened.
-“Woah, dude. Relax. What’s going on?” said Alec, struggling through a cough and filling the air with smoke.
-“She’s gone,” I said, collapsing on the couch next to him
-“Relax, dude. She’s in the bathroom, bro. Here, smoke up.” He replied, slowly, handing me the bong.
He turned forward to dip an Oreo in cold milk.
-“What?” I said, “What?” I repeated with the bong in my hand as I thought about the night I had had.
-“You were hammered last night, dude,” said Alec in the middle of a slow laugh as he scrolled down his Netflix feed.
-“What?” it appeared that was the only thing I could produce
-“Hell of a view you’ve got here, love,” came the voice of a memory as she walked into the room.
The smile of heaven, or was it hell? The eyes of an angel, or maybe the devil herself, on her face.
Boston was glowing behind us. The Charles was flowing, and the sky was clear. The buildings stood as silver daggers and it seemed everything was back to normal.
-“Hell of a view,” I repeated as I stared into her eyes, "Hell of a view."
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