Gill's Journey

I’m standing there, outside the coffee shop, and this yuppie fuck is lying on the ground, moaning and groaning. He’s reaching for his handkerchief, so I throw him mine. I sit down and feel my feet go numb. They’ve all gone home now. Looking back, all I can remember from that moment was a look the birds gave me as I watched the guy try to stand up before running off.

I’ve reached the point where I am completely self-sufficient, the moment achieved over a cup of instant coffee while looking out on my balcony late at night. I realized I won’t have anyone to turn to now and when I fuck something up it’ll be me alone to blame. That’s my role now, accepting responsibility for all the other scared fucks that run and find identity through social groups.

Things move at a slower pace these days. I’ve been holed up in my apartment for the better part of two weeks, cutting myself off purposely as a sort of experiment. I figure If I stay away long enough, I may reset in my self whatever caused my frantic outburst, gain some clarity, and be able to return stronger and cleansed. I would return and Kara would take me back.

I have streamlined my life, taken out the fuzzy niceties and focused on the sharpening: tightening loose body fat, eliminating unwanted mental thoughts. I work out at night when the rest of the lights outside the balcony are out, when I can make out the faint shapes of birds as I strengthen and tone calves, thighs and buttocks.

Each day I resist the urge to pick up a phone, even if it’s only to ask the operator if life turned out the way she had planned it. I hold back on venturing downstairs for food, relying instead on the little parcel of pills underneath my weight bench.

It’s against the American way, this life. It’s going out of your way to not see people or hear ideas, not to pay attention to anyone but the rhythmic tuning of your own brain. Attaining divine intervention through repetitive exercises: lat pulls, squats, shaving my sideburns and trimming my nose hairs. This is what takes importance; this is at the top of my to-do pile.

I scan the headlines for words that jump out at me, clip them out, and tape them to the walls so I have a word to look at while I’m on the bench press, staring at the words while I steam and sweat and build up lactic acids.

You out age cartoon characters. There’s a rule that says you cant be older than the mean age of the average cartoon character, that says you cant ever let your body or your mind grow old. We do, it’s inevitable, and so starts the tumbling snowball of denial, which grows until we hit the snow bank at the end of the line.

I don’t pick up the phone but listen to how many times the damn fool on the other end of the line will let it ring. How desperate to let a phone ring 25, 30 times. The answering machine picks up after 35 rings, so they have to let ring into near infinity before they can even leave a message. I dangle that option out there as a reward for perseverance.

“Gill could you just pick up the phone.”

“This is the last time I’m calling.”

“Mr. Peters, your dry cleaning has been ready for pick up for 3 months now, If you don’t come down to Maury’s to claim it, we will throw it away, thank you.”

In my head I still see Kara. Despite all of my attempts at shutting off my former self, she comes into my thoughts even though everything has been processed, presorted and organized. Only through dreams stunted and distorted can I remember her and when I wake up I’m on the floor.

It’s dawn. I’ve been up all night again. I can see the apartment’s lights go on as they’re getting ready for work. I can’t look at them anymore. I look at the word FRIGHTENED that was cut from Tuesday’s living section. I can see through the letters F and R and see an advertisement I haven’t noticed before. It’s magnified in my brain. I’ve avoided advertising for so long, reading only the front covers of newspapers. I didn’t want to be a consumer. I wanted to stay pure in the world of methodical symbolism.

Anything beyond simple words and phrases was too complex for me to handle. I felt weight in the persistence of words. I could physically feel force in those phrases, demanding that I leave my refuge and buy stereo equipment for half the sticker price. Whenever I feel this impulse I became dizzy and fell down, vomiting all over the floor. Afterwards I wanted words, yearned for sentences, and wanted to hear the commentary of a football game in its entirety. I wanted Perry Mason, a dozen episodes of Perry Mason. I want grandma’s soft voice telling me not to worry about nuclear war.

I can’t leave the apartment. The world is on it its ear out there. Time, space and depth have all shifted. Gravity has changed the makeup of reality since I last went outside.

But I do, somehow I open the door, and almost cry at the sight of bright light, almost laugh as I fall down the stairs. I don’t feel my legs when they snap like twigs as I reach the bottom of the staircase, can’t hear myself scream as I’m weaving in the street. Having imagined that I broke my legs, they were just so stiff, they cracked and I thought I broke them going down the stairs.

I wander through a game of stickball, there’s sunlight, leaves and branches. It’s too much like a Sunday afternoon at a buffet restaurant. I feel full, overwhelmingly full of senses, and I start to cry and don’t know why. I’m in Kara’s neighborhood, and I can’t believe I remembered where it is, where it went, thought I severed all ties.

But there’s the porch where I proposed, the dog sign, and there she is, but I can’t hear anything. I stumble, can’t hear her, but she can hear me. She’s crying now and as I try to put my arm around her, she’s shaking now, pushing me away and her lips are moving faster now and I know it’s not good. I feel faint; wish I never looked beyond the word “frightened”. Wish I hadn’t of cut myself off. I want the simplicity of the cold white tile floor, to drink bleach and milk of magnesia to clear me out and I want purity.

I want to go back there but I see the big guy coming up behind her, feel my insides explode below me and I know it’s more than a broken heart and when I wake up there’s nothing but shining light, but I’m not in heaven, it smells like sweet mothballs. I’m on the floor in a bright green gown, and every time I try to speak I vomit all over the floor. I see the lunch tray that I knocked over, when they tried to feed me and I see them running towards me.

And I don’t know how I got up and ran away from them, but there they are, gaining on me as I turn the corner of the ward and run right into two large men. I realize they’re Samoans as I feel the prick of the needle and the cool rush of medication floating, pulsing inwardly, as I’m back to staring at words again, and I have my simple life back, just like I wanted it.

As the hours as days pass, I learn just how far I took this experiment, this little vacation from reality.

It didn’t come back to me all at once; it took days to regain my hearing. Suddenly exploding out at lunchtime, hearing the sound of silverware on porcelain in the dining room and the sloppy mumbling of the other patients. It took longer before I could speak in complete sentences, when I could open my mouth and the desired sounds would come out.

Then they finally told me what happened. “Basically an extended avoidance of reality, a rapid period of physical and emotional atrophy” A stern doctor said to me with one knee resting on his cold desk. Smiling, he returned to his work, satisfied in the closure his synopsis provided. I was disappointed he didn’t compare me to Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment”. I always wanted to be compared to the Russians, such masters of suffering.

Walking down stairs was the most difficult part. My joints had atrophied to the point where taking the short flight of stairs down to the dining hall made me ache all over, each step sending waves of nausea ripping through me and the vomiting would start again.

That became my reaction of choice. Some patients cried, others stared catatonically at the ceiling. I vomited. I loved the feeling, the purging, easier than an enema. A few minutes and you were floating down a warm river of endorphins, returning to where you came from.

And I started writing again, first off as a few letters, as I struggled to drag the course pencil across paper, but gradually it began to flow again, and I wrote “FRIGHTENED” then tore it up, and then added another word on top of another word.

They say the second time you learn something you really gets a solid grasp of it. I felt like a god when I could stand up straight and walk down a flight of stairs without vomiting. I felt like a man the first time I wrote a letter to my schizophrenic roommate to stop eating the goddamn pillow stuffing.

I was getting better. I felt cleaner, my head didn’t feel as heavy as it used to. I began to help others who suffered from similar afflictions. That’s what it was, an addiction to Ativan. It was part of my sharpening, anti anxiety. When the pills ran out, I hadn’t eaten anything in days, just vitamins and juice and the Ativan.

I met her in the dayroom. Brusquely marching through the hallway, clocking in and greeting each patient, she was to be our new counselor, with whom we’d spend the next few months together. I patiently waited my place in line until I realized I had to be patient. She had a certain natural fire to her, I saw it in her eyes as my turn was next.

“You are like…” She stood there for a moment, eyes right on me, examining behind my eyes. “My son, you remind me of my son, so long ago,” she said, busying her self with the stack of papers on her desk.

“I’m here for the therapy.”

“I don’t know, I’ve heard about you.” “They say you don’t get close to anyone”

“Not in a long time.”

“I can’t help someone who fundamentally opposes hope.”

“I’m not opposed to it, I’ve just resolved to not be let down again.”

“You let yourself down! That scene at the café that brought you here, you are aware that it was you, that’s the reason why you hide, you can’t take responsibilities don’t you?” she said, gathering her things from off of the table, getting up to leave “And that is why I can’t help you, I can’t do a thing for you, until you are ready to take response--”

I jump up, somehow this doesn’t make me want to vomit “I can take responsibility! I did this and it’s my fault. Why is it so hard to say?” I ask, feeling the swelling in my upper neck. I know it’s coming, I start to break down, legs going numb, I collapse onto the floor, hearing the exaggerated reverb slap of her shoes against the floor. And I see the tail edge of her skirt disappear around the corner as the orderlies grab a bucket and wipe the bile off of my chin.

The weeks went by and I saw Mrs. Moxley on a weekly basis. The therapy groups were small and intimate usually consisted of Mrs. Moxley and myself. We worked on finding the source of my aggression. I didn’t even know I was that aggressive. We spoke about the coffee shop incident; I couldn’t see what the big deal was.

“You almost killed him, did you know that?.”

“Cmon the guy stood up, he was an asshole anyway, and he almost knocked me over”

“You weren’t even there when the ambulance arrived, you didn’t see, you were hiding.”

“Why didn’t you bring me in then? If I was so dangerous how come you didn’t pick me up until I was outside Kara’s.”

“Do you even know why we were at Kara’s? Do you know why the ambulance came?”

“I assume she called the cops.”

“You threatened to kill yourself, you were bleeding from the arms, you reached out to hug her and you were dripping blood onto her, you were whispering nonsense.”

“I don’t remember any of this.”

“Of course you don’t, you were practically in a coma, you hadn’t eaten solid food in weeks, and were edgy from the Ativan, and I’m surprised you made it as far as you did.”

“But the coffee shop, I don’t remember,”

“You were found at Kara’s with dried blood from the coffee shop”

“But that’s impossible, I showered.” I stared at my reflection in the mirror. What had I done, what part of the horrific beast of a bastard had I covered up during these last few weeks, what fucked up, sleepwalking stunt had I pulled. I vomited for I don’t know how long. I threw a plant; I think I threw a plant.

I was gone for a while after that, vanquished to one of those padded rooms. It took me a little while to convince them it was the first time I learned what had really happened that day, and that’s why I reacted that way. It was never going to get Kara back now, I knew that the moment I opened my eyes after god knows how long under sedition.

I eventually got through it. Together with the help of Mrs. Moxley we worked things out. I learned the rules of conflict. I discovered many repressed feelings, tucked away back there for years. A few months later and I was in the outpatient center, checking in once a week, but apart from that out and free and sober and not angry.

I devoured books like pretzels. And I started my recovery. Outside of the hospital, I was now free to pursue the closing chapter in my recovery. I remained optimistic despite all the triggers reality presented me. I prayed, washed, cleaned and paid bills on time. I channeled my anger into my writing. I kept a journal, a big, bulky mass of paper in the living room. It grew as I daily walking passed it with glasses of water for the plants.

The desire to vomit was replaced by an opposite force, a wish to fill my life and everything that went along with it, belly, mind, hands, and heart. I wanted it all. I used to read about this sort of living, underneath the radiator at the hospital.

As the months went by, I noticed a distinct change in my temperament. I no longer saw things as extremes. I saw the simple balance in everything. I saw the moves ahead, and simply made them. I saw an ad for an opulent apartment I could afford and I rented it. I saw a job opening that seemed to fit in with my need for humanitarian assistance and simply applied, I saw the need presented and put forth the corresponding effort with satisfying results.

But what was lost was the passion by which I had retreated into my apartment in the first place. Things slowly became predictable. I was sober, so very sober. I became tuned into the rhythmic movements of the world. I adjusted my body clock to National Public Radio. Informed at breakfast, work at day, sustenance for the evening meal and dull, classical music pieces that lulled me to sleep in the evening and a bowel movement in the morning.

And that's when it hit me. Life, by definition and practice isn't supposed to be so pre planned and stoic. It is supposed to be about the stunning irregularity about it. That all the best thinkers, poets and philosophers were insane rabid lunatics was no coincidence. What I had been striving for was a mundane, predictable life that would inevitably lead me down the path I had been trying to prevent all along. I had to get sane before I realized how much I needed insanity, had to cling at it as an identity blanket.

I decided at that moment (1:22 AM to be exact) I would call Kara, despite everything that had gone on before, I had to reach her, tell her what Id achieved, how she had to take me back. I find myself dialing the number, almost in a trance, I’m surprised that she picks up the phone as quickly as she does, and I hear the lazy radiant voice on the other end of the line. I know exactly what to say, I’ve rehearsed this for months. After a few long stretches of awkward silence, we briefly connect. She is happy to hear from me if not a little bewildered., I tell her I had to call her. It comes out smooth and sincere, exactly the way I want it to. Then I start this bizarre segue way into the leftovers of our relationship as we begin to talk about us rationally, like detached scientists on C-SPAN.

“If you took everything that was ever said that had any sense of love, and pull it out, turn it into what I could say to you now, breathe every word of it, until I was dry and devoid of love, would you feel it? Would you even know its there?” “I don’t think that’s something we could ever know.”

“But Imagine if it was, imagine if all there was left to say was what was left over from the remnants, what then?”

“Is that how you feel?”

“That is exactly how I feel.”

“I cant see how this is relevant at 1:30 in the morning, I cant see how this relates to you and I, unless you are trying to explain your perspective, which is entirely valid, but at 1:30, when I am half asleep you cant just say what you want and expect me to feel the same way, you just cant. We’ve moved on, were not the same people, not after what happened, no matter what you say. What’s happened has happened. I have Jim now and that’s all that will be, despite your hardships, despite everything you’ve said. You can’t undo this, cant live it again.”

“Well, that’s all I have to say”

“Well I guess that’s all there is between us, a million conversations like these, that wont end but have to end.”

“You know—“

“I know what you’ve been through, but that doesn’t change anything.”

“Despite all that work—“

“Despite all that work. I’m sorry. It’s over. And I’m sorry you only now just realized that, I have to go, Jim’s waking up.”

“Kara. I still love you. I never really cared until now, wasn’t human until now, wasn’t truly human as I know it.”

I’m talking to Mrs. Moxley now. It’s 2AM and I’m talking to my former therapist about the conversation, the scraping of self I just went through.

“After all that work she does that. Months of therapy, months of self-improvement, all for her, all so I could show her my potential, my abilities. And she stops right there after knowing all of this. She thinks about it for a second and realized it still doesn’t manner.”

“What troubles me is how you think you’ve done all this work for her.”

“I told her that to make myself more of a victim I guess, I don’t know why I said that.”

We talked about loss and the importance of not letting this destroy me. And it’s 5AM when I get off the phone with her, a beautiful morning in Manhattan.

The second pot of coffee was now ready, in our old apartment. We were having our typical political arguments when it struck us square in the jaws; we saw it in each other’s eyes. We could see ourselves already wrapped up with other lovers. It was the last time we made love and the way we stared at each other, I could almost hear the strings come in, like a the end of a movie you don’t want to end.

Our eyes were quivering at each other as the skyline of Manhattan rose with us, up into the regions where once we found security, and now only closed doors. We stayed in that position for hours, and when it was time to get up out of bed, and we removed ourselves from the embrace it was over. That soft look in Kara’s eyes on the last morning, the sun looked exactly the same now.

I found the first bar I could find outside my brownstone and had the first drink I'd had in 5 years. It was a gorgeous summer morning. It felt grand to have melancholy back as the star attraction at my dinner party. As I sat at the bar, feeling glum, loving the way it permeated all of my thoughts, the way it instructed me on where to go next, when to order my next drink, (Immediately, I waved down at the bartender.)

It was then that I saw him, staring at me while trying to maintain his distance. I sullenly looked down at my shoes and waited for him to pass. It was Alex. I hadn’t seen him in years, not since the coffee shop incident, when I full of rage over the then recent break up of Kara fueled the assault on that poor asshole.

I got off my stool and wandered outside the bar towards him. He was making his way through the crowd on Bleeker Street, trying to burrow away and disappear. I tapped him on the shoulder right before he turned the corner.

After an awkward introduction, we meander back to the bar and have a few rounds. As late morning turned into afternoon, the old chemistry was back. We had already discussed the whole coffee shop incident over quick gulps of beer, fresh and dark, a little nervous between each gulp as we wondered what to say to each other.

By Afternoon we were drunk and laughing and the old times came back without all of the clinical pain or vomiting, as if I’d dreamt the whole thing up. I told him about the hospital later that afternoon, as we headed down Bleeker past the coffee shop, when the whole thing came back to me. And I realized in that moment what I had gained and what I had lost. And if losing Kara meant that I’d get the rest of my old life back with bonuses, I could live with that nakedness.

Because I’d changed, through my slog of mental incapacitation I had created my own happy reality again, and that afternoon, with the warmth of an old friend and the giddiness of five pints in my system, I knew now that I’d always in my own way be free, even If I knew the limitations.