To Sylvia i last read you long ago, when i was lost. then, you spoke to me through pain, yours and mine in excruciating symbiosis, and i felt known for the first time. i remember all those late nights in harvard square: cigarettes, coffee cups, black fountain pens and your poetry—fueled by you, i used my suffering as cement and words as bricks to build my darkness out on paper; those attempts at construction offered fruitful if fleeting respites from my then-reality, and for this, i thank you. today, i met you in eternal rest; you were surrounded by stone and grass and the flowers of a thousand strangers who feel they know you through your words. pens sprouted from your grave, grateful sacrifices of those who’ve loved you in a way, perhaps, you never could yourself. i am told that behind this graveyard and across the sweeping field of green beyond sits the house in which you honeymooned. i picture you young, in love and in pain, fingers softly tracing blades of tall grass as you walk and think and the war in you rages on, the sun and the weight of the world on your shoulders. i am different now from those harvard square nights, your early end no longer what i seek. if only you could’ve known you weren’t broken, as i’ve been lucky enough to discover. if only you could’ve seen through the stories those doctors fed us as they turned our bodies into psychoactive wastelands plastered to plastic mattresses, sucked dry of spirit, psychiatrized. both of us paced the locked wards of the hallowed Hospital on the Hill, our incarcerated madness separated only by time, our wearied souls patient prisoners on those same sterile halls of broken brains and forgotten dreams. you died at thirty-one, my age now. i’m found today, have found myself, though not a ‘self’ distinct or definable. perhaps a better way to put it is that i’ve melted into the world. death no longer beckons me with its promise of forever sleep, and not because i’m free from suffering or struggle— (this is far from true)—but because i’ve remembered i am human. i can’t pretend to know you, nor would i be so presumptuous as Psychiatry was with us; thus, i can only wonder what part those white-coated strangers played in calling forth your death with their electroshock and insulin-shock and pill bottles and life-long sentence of subhuman. with all of this, their so-called “care”. i can only wonder what part those white-coated strangers played in calling forth your death because they introduced me to a life not worth living, one with death as the only logical solution. whether by serendipity or something else, i made it back to the world alive, and here i am in hebden bridge on the twenty-ninth of june in the thirty-first year of my life. here I am before your grave, the sun on my shoulders.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 21:11:42 +0000
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