saturday, february 17

Has been a good day. I went to sleep last night reading Stephen King’s On Writing. I can’t tell you how long it has been since I’ve fallen asleep reading a book. Fell to slumber around nine and then woke up after midnight to turn lights off and climb into bed. Slept very well.

Jeremy was in my dream last night. Jeremy was my best friend in high school – we were companions offstage and onstage, dating, working out, going out… we were inseparable and loved eachother very much. He died right before my Sophomore year in college began – he fell from the structure of an abandoned train bridge over the Ohio river and snapped his spinal column when he hit the tracks. Part of our youth died that night. I was awakened at six in the morning to be told that my best friend was dead. I had the terrible task of calling all my friends – most of whom were already at their respective universities – and delivering the news as well as reliving the shock with them. It was a hideous five days immersed in the darkest grief I have ever encountered. Lisa, Shannon and I (high school buddies) and I were at a get together after the funeral and looking at scrap books and we all three shocked into silence and then from our guts came this untame-able and uncontrollable vomiting of emotion. It was like someone sliced my belly open and my entrails dumped in a steam pile on the floor. I still remember being a pallbearer and the cold steel of his coffin against my hand as we guided it into the church for mass. The surviving members of our high school group of friends holding hands in a circle and never ever wanting to let go ever again. It is maddening how grief envelops you – there is no sense of time or place as you slide from shock to wake to mass to burial to a scary re-entry into a less-real world. Part of me remains buried in that coffin out in the country side in Indiana. Anyway, Jeremy was in my dream last night – we were at my gym working out together and messing around and doing our usual dumb joking around and craziness. At one point I look up at him and suddenly get very very afraid and I explain to him how scared I am that he isn’t real and that I’m imagining him and everyone else is thinking I’m insane. He assured me he was very real and we kissed on the mouth and embraced. I awoke. Part of my coming to terms with my sexuality was the realization that Jeremy and I were probably in love but had neither the courage nor the vocabulary to express our affections. We never did anything overtly sexual in nature but were always hugging and playing around – there was a very physical component to our friendship whether making out with girls in the same loft during a party or attacking eachother to wrestle in the middle of a sleepover. There was also a residual thought by some that Jeremy’s death was not a complete accident – as we later found that he’d knocked a girl up at school that wasn’t his girlfriend back at home. Such a strange alignment of events surrounding his death. Jeremy appears in my dreams from time to time and once or twice a year I still have a good cry over him. Re-examining the Richard situation I’ve realized that I saw some of Jeremy’s qualities in Richard – a playfulness and lust for life and attention and love and liveliness – things that Jeremy brought out in me and Richard was able to do as well – and having Richard as a lover I was able to be literally inside those energies and feel them through my entire being. But he was a counterfeit compared to the real love and live I learned from Jer. At this point what I would tell anyone else is that those qualities are in me all the time and I can uncover and tap into them myself. And I know that to an extent – I just have to integrate further into my definition of Who the Hell I Am. But I always welcome Jeremy in my dreams and he comes to me with his doe eyes and smiles and says, ‘Oh Vibbles,’ saying my last name in a mock-German dialect to say ‘it’s not that hard and you know it – think of where we are and where you are now and how much I love you and you can do anything.’ We were supposed to ascend together. We were supposed to become successful together but he left me to ascend elsewhere. I sometimes think this world was too much for him – it tried to hard to contain him and he had to leave it through his own intention or not. I imagine our masculine embrace, our bare chests touching and warm from a day spent sunbathing – I imagine us both crying and then giggling hysterically at the craziness of it all. ‘Oh Vibbles.’ And now I am crying as I write this.

Wooo… I’m back. Just had a really good cry. I felt that cough in the depth of my soul as woe bubble up and out of me. Whew – I’m a mess now. I more to write today but I’m just going to let this post sit here awhile.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *