decide to go outside for a walk. I just need to move, feel the cold on my face. I end up wandering down behind our building to sit by the play park and smoke a cigarette. I wish I had some weed.
It’s an ugly time of year. The grass is brown. The trees are nearly all bare. There’s practically no colour anywhere. Some young boys are standing at the top of the plastic cylinder slides taking turns pissing down the orange tubes. An old Indian lady, all gracious and sparkling in her sari that swells from underneath a thick ski jacket, sits on another bench with what I guess is her grandchild. There’s pumping, vibrating music pulsing from a black car in the corner of the parking lot, windows tinted, motor running.
And then there’s me, sitting in the middle of this scene, feeling scattered and so very small. I bring my feet up to rest on the bench and hold my knees tight.
I sit here for the longest time. People come and go. The sari lady eventually gets up and strolls the kid away. The black car tears off around the building. And I keep sitting here, not really thinking about much, other than how sorry I feel for myself.
Then, after the self-pity and my fifth cigarette, I finally get to the truth. I’m surprised about what is really making me upset. Because I realize that what kills me, what absolutely rips my soul apart, is not actually that I’ll never see Michael again. It’s the realization that Michael, even the mere thought of him, was what was helping me get by in this pathetic life.
And without Michael, without the dream of him, I have nothing.
Michael saved me.
He was like this unexpected gasp of breath above water before I submerged again. A second chance. But I’m beginning to think it wasn’t a good thing. I’m beginning to think he just prolonged the slow dying. It would have been better to just let me drown.
I go sit on a swing beside some little girl who’s swinging high, kicking her legs up and up, trying to fly like a bird. I think of Bradley and how I’d push him on a swing set just like that for hours. “Higher! Higher! Higher!” he’d shout. How I wish I was that young again.
It’s hard to explain the presence of an absence. I wasn’t aware that the idea of Michael was colouring everything for me, making life richer and more beautiful. It’s only now that he’s gone from my mind and I’m left to face the stark, bare, chilling reality that I see it for real …
My fucking ugly life.
I don’t go home until after eleven ’cause I know I just end up fighting with my mom when I’m so upset. So I sit in the park and then go walking around the streets, thinking about stuff. At some point I feel calm enough to go to sleep, because I’ve made a decision about my life: I’m not giving up. I’m giving in. There’s a difference. I give in to the destiny I’m being pushed toward. There’s no point in changing. I give in to my shitty life with my shitty friends and my shitty future. But it’s not a surrender; it’s more like I’m stopping the resistance. Why fight it if you always lose in the end? Why believe in that little bit of hope? There are only so many times you can get knocked down before lying on the ground becomes more enticing than the fight.
Why was the Lady of Shalott cursed, anyway? They don’t say what she did to deserve it. It’s just a given that she’s doomed to this life of solitude, and the story goes on from there. No one questions why. Sisyphus’s mistake was clear: he didn’t obey the gods. But it seems the Lady was just born into it. Like me.
Thirty-Two
Jasmyn arranges it so that I bump into Fortune again at one of her friends’ parties. We see each other the moment I walk in the door. He’s sitting on the couch, his arm up around some fat blond girl whose tits are hanging out of her shirt. He nods coolly in my direction, like I’m almost a stranger, and then turns back to the boobs.
I’m so pissed off and tell Jasmyn I’m not staying.
“Take it easy,” she coaches. “He’ll come to you. He likes you. Markus told me so. Just chill. Here.” She passes me a beer