Nothing Warm

Try, just try to capture the bleakness of Middle Atlantic winter in plain language. The average adjectives, like dreary and dull and depressive – all are such objective nonsense words skating by in recreation on the frozen landscape. Whose bright facade of unsullied cheer can survive at a time like this? The mediocre cold simply discomforts, and the tree branches obscenely stand as dirty tombs without the relief of a Northern blanket of angel white. That which is cold but beautiful is lacking here.

Does anyone really want to die?

At the time of which I speak, I was neither boy nor girl, not child nor adult, not alive nor dead. I believed in neither heaven nor hell, nor the lack of either. I would say I was not yet born – that I speak of a time before reality, but in conventional perspective, I had been born and was real and will be real until I am forgotten, provided I first forget myself.

I tried… I tried so hard back then. It never seemed to work.

I have been counted in number among criminals and transgressors, although I am neither of such nor the Christ treated as such. I have eaten lunch in a mental hospital with one who strangled his sister, one who brought a gun to school, one who stole cars with the intention of driving off of a bridge. How can one glare at such innocent children, confused lion cubs roaring before their time?

My crime was an attempt to eradicate myself. My “crime”…

*******

PART 1

First Frost

I like girls. I’ll tell you that much. I at least know that much. I had a girlfriend, I guess. She smiled at me. She always smiled at me, red hair roaring. She burned me. And she burned herself.

Jamie… Jamie… I loved her. 

“Hey, fuzzy,” she’d greet me. She called most of her friends “fuzzy.”

“Hey, babe.” She’d smile at this. And walk over to her boyfriend. Hands linked, hips kissing in the subtle PDA so stigmatized in school. 

I wanted her to be happy. But I loved her. Was that enough?

I remember when she first came crying to my old car. She was still beautiful, even with her face as red as her hair. No makeup to run, though. Jamie was a real woman, not a doll.

“Whatsa matter, babe?”

She could not answer. She just cried. I maintained distance, unwilling to rape any boundary she set, even one a mile away from her, if she so desired.

“It’s OK, sweety. Fuzzy’s here for you.”

She managed a smile, then launched into my shoulder. The center of my chest carved into a stream for her tears. My arms ventured around her soft body, my hands found the calming spot on her back. It was my body healing hers. Jamie fell asleep in my arms.

Eyes closed, I communed with the angels. I wasn’t quite so cold that day. 

That wasn’t the first time her boyfriend had emotionally injured her. She spent hours in my car outside of school. Her man suspected nothing. He shouldn’t have. Even though we didn’t, we could have held a month-long fuck fest and he wouldn’t have known. He couldn’t see what was going on in front of him.

I should have stepped in. But I wanted Jamie to have what was best for her. So I removed myself from her. I did not wait for her outside school one day. I should have. Damn retrospect.

I went to school the next day…

Oh, why do I try to explain this with sophistication? What’s the point of chronological order, or grammar, or any storytelling informative voice? There is nothing intelligent to say about the love of your life, whom you have emotionally betrayed, freeing her vitality onto your body. Through her neck. With a knife. 

I don’t fear blood. I feared Jamie’s.

I didn’t cry then. Shock had not registered. I stood there like a police officer, cool and cruelly observant. Time was normal. Had it sped up or slowed down, I could have either saved her life or extinguished it with minimal suffering. Time was merciless. Events were too rational. She glanced at me, whipped out a sharp pocketknife, swiftly slit her own throat, and watched where her blood spurt onto me. The blood ran down the valley in my chest where her tears had been – where only her tears belonged. About a minute later, she fell.

Jamie. My love.

*******

I didn’t think I would ever be warm again in the winter. Either that, or it is just the coldest one yet. The bottle and cigarette taunted me – the flame of the burning death comfortable and rational, the drink cold and nauseating. Or maybe I just didn’t have enough. I couldn’t. There was none. No more familiar warmth of oblivion. If I had thrown up, even that would have been cold. 

I knew who I was. And what the papers said I was. My name is Alexandra, Alex for short. I was 17 at the time. I told the hospital staff to remember to put that on my tombstone. I guessed I couldn’t have left it blank.

*******

PART 2

Snowstorm

I tried to hide the pill under my tongue – to expel the brutal demon from my body when nobody was looking. After three days, I think they figured it out. They searched me and my mouth. They would have searched my ass if they thought it was shoved up there. 

No chemical could cure me; I lacked no chemical. I don’t know what they were trying to do. If they were trying to annihilate me, they didn’t need to bother. I could have catalyzed my eradication with my own implements. Either way, at least I didn’t really have to feel. 

Right. I didn’t have to feel. Like I didn’t feel the prick of a needle every day, moving into my vein and being carelessly jostled around until my vein was pushed against my skin from the inside out while draining me of my own vitality. I didn’t feel the lack of fresh air and sun of the outside or the stale air coating my lungs like a rotten smoke. I didn’t feel the degradation of being forced to go to the bathroom and shower with someone else nearby. Ridiculous. Cuffs, the police car, the seven-hour wait, the hospital gowns, the midnight entrances – in and out, in and out, in and out – three times I was sent to that mental hospital to undergo the same old troubles. Each time I tried to die, I prayed I would just die, but after three failed tries, I ended up with a needle in my ass again, strapped down and tranquilized, wondering what went wrong. Resentment and depression grew – in a little bottle where they tightened the once-loosened lid – the pill bottle. 

I could feel it. I could not free it.