The decade began in the green room.
Green from the walls and the sheets, from the garden and the paintings, from the floor tiles and the plants. It was in this forest that I sat, a ten-year-old learning what cancer was. It was nothing but a word at first, but a word that meant many things. It meant road trips across countries to try different things, it meant long waits in hospitals, panic attacks inside of sweat lodges, it meant chemo and shamans, it meant religion and science, and in the end, well it really only meant death.
Although, I suppose the decade didn’t start then. No, it was in the months after I sat there again, five years later, listening to her crushing words, saying she’d soon be gone.
Yes, it started with the fear I felt that day. The paralyzing fear of a thing we all knew was coming but a thing that had never been given voice. It was in the long months that followed, when the fear turned to rage and then later when I thought that being numb must be better than being furious 24/7. I was boiling at the bottom of bottles with only bursts of desperation reaching the top, having fits of rage breaking my simmering state.
It was in those months when praying for recovery became praying for release, when praying to god turned into praying to angels, to saints, and eventually, without an ounce of guilt, I even offered the devil my soul. Hell, maybe he did take it, and she died anyway. All my years wasted in catholic schools and what had that fool ever done for me.
The decade of my new life began in the days when I asked her why she didn’t just take all the morphine. It was in the days when, as a boy, I asked my own mother why she didn’t just die, why she didn’t let go, since this couldn’t possibly be life. It was in the days I wondered if that was wrong.
And she said it was because she still had this, she still had me, she still had that wild forest contained inside her room.
The decade began in the days I was so angry because I had to walk home from school, because I had to cook my own food, because I had to grow up. It was in the days I was so angry I didn’t go say hi when I got home and the day she asked me why I didn’t go see her like I did every day. And why didn’t I? Well, because I was so damn stupid. And I would be lying if I said I don’t cry when I write about that day, fully aware I’ll have to live with that until my last day. And I tell myself I was sad, I was angry, I was broken, but I still cry because I could’ve been stronger. It was one day, it was one fucking day, and it still fucking haunts me.
Yes, this new life, this new decade-long life took months to form, maybe even years, but there is one particular day. It began when I stood broken at the doorway of the green room, watching my grandmother close my mother’s eyes. It began in the numbness I felt when I went to school the next day. I was new and trapped in the solitude, I mean I didn’t even tell a soul for two years but who was I gonna tell?
I say my life began in those days because somewhere along fourteen, after the fear and the rage, I felt like I had died already. I was born from the ashes of those days. And ever since, I’ve had winters last years, drunken, high, messy years.
I’ve spent years by the bottle, unable to let go, unwilling to see through the eyes of a sober man. I’ve gambled years away and, sadly I must say, I did go all in once. I suppose that’s all it takes, to be successful in the wrong affair, to be cut down by one hard day. But I’m still here. I’ve been falling and failing for a decade, but I’ve also been getting back up for a decade.
Its been ten hard cold years without you. Ten hard cold years of hills and mountains and loneliness. It’s been ten years of fighting. Fighting more than the sorrow of your absence, but the things I first used to fill the hole, the vices and the habits, and the demons I let roam in my head. It’s been ten years of having to heal with the words my pen writes, ten years of running to six cities and three countries and having my mind keep bringing me back to the broken boy that stood under that doorway, the broken boy I used to be.
It seems wild I stood in that green room a decade ago, broken, angry, and stupid. It seems wild you’ve been gone for so long, it seems ridiculous, like even a joke. And I know I’m not there yet. I know, but I’m far from the bottom where I once lived, I’m far from being too far gone.
Sorrow changes you, its just hard when you don’t know who you were before the sorrow, or when you don’t know who you could’ve been without it. I’m neither the boy who died of sorrow nor am I the man that let sorrow break him, mistakes for which I still pay.
I’m something else now.
The spear is broken but I’m still carrying it. I’m still fighting. I’m still climbing.
I spent years living in the shadows the absence of your sunshine left me in, and it took me a while, but I finally remembered the drunken song of Nietzsche:
“Night is also a sun.”
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