So, some candor, some reckoning:

I find myself deep in the belly of the worst depressive episode for some time. I cannot say in how long, the memory slimes out of me, I lose track of time, I cannot recognize the year of an event or the woman who has written so many of these words, I unravel, my body fumigates itself against the recollection of all this pain and the chronology gets muddled.

But here, I am. Up to my neck in thick, inky blood. Questioned, ceaselessly, to which I can only respond with a violent shaking of my throat, organs unhooking themselves from their stables and threatening to bolt. My eyes are crawling out my mouth. It is so, so dark, and this high keening tone will not leave me. 

My fat red heart beats sicker and sends its fuck-hungry tendrils out, desperate for a point of contact, the flesh to sink some anchor into, an unhaveable man to drag down in the mud with all my wallows. 

Each unturning head undoes a stitch in all my holding, foolish stupid. 

This has always been, and shall likely always be, a fight for my hand to raise a knife against. 

Loneliness like an ocean raging at each ear, sewn into my chest, rip tides shredding off the skin of my thighs. 

But stupid, stupid, to think that you are utterly alone, or to think that if the unending need inside you could somehow be satiated you would stop finding yourself here, alone with the pale wet underbelly of your thoughts, tragic weak weapon in hand.

This time last year, my thoughts and limbs bolstered up and tangled in his, all the many kindnesses– now I can hardly stand to speak with him through long-stretched wires, because to be reminded that someone so good once stood beside me and is now so far away is often more than I can bear.

And so again, and so again, I fight until this passes. Forgive me all my too-much speech, my desperate clings and ill-timed advances, give me what love you can spare and I will try to keep myself in forward motion. 

I imagine myself as a little girl, diving into the deep end of a swimming pool, no adults in sight and no swimmies on. I remember sinking, I remember sinking; but so too I remember standing back on land. 

Some small part of me, flawed with possessive and obsessive need, keeps having this fantasy in which you ask me to marry you, in a certain sense sight unseen, waters utterly untested. Foolish and daring and desired. The first kiss the one that seals us up together in the fever dream of impulse. Or rather, the impulse that stays and stretches itself languid out through time, sticking its fingers into many days until finally: there, blooming forth to the surface with the appearance of spontaneity. It seems only appropriate, that the rules could only be broken or changed, risks taken, when you are certain I will not abandon the game, that it and you are not some toy to me to be discarded when the novelty wears off, when some days the toy does not shine or sing or crawl across the carpet when it’s supposed to. No. It seems right to use so grandiose a gesture to assure you, the moments when you falter and drop are as valuable to me as when you swagger through in perfect time and say the clever thing. Both the breaks, and the things between the breaks. Not only the sumptuous articulation of pain, but the pain itself, in all its sloppy, petty inconvenience. I want to breathe into your mouth when words fail us, when our temper tantrums and our skittish hands get too far ahead of us where games can’t save us. I want to forgive and be forgiven and be condemned and be regained and victor and child and the face of god and the rotting leaves, in a flick of those eyes looking up and down across a room. 

I dream we are on a train, hurtling through the night on the upper deck. I lost the ability to discern dream from desire, one method of fabrication from another. 

You look back at me over your uniformed shoulder, stern, and I know we are headed toward punishment. The infraction matters less than its swift address. We follow the rules, except when we don’t. I crawl down the aisle, past grey cushioned seats. I carry the leash in my mouth. 

We are on a sunlit sidewalk in a foreign country, Belgium, maybe, and I follow just a step behind you. Every few blocks you reach your hand back and slide it under my skirt, just one second’s touch, less, just the slightest press against my cunt to check again that yes, I am not wearing anything underneath, and yes, this belongs to you. 

We are in a large white bed on the shore of a lake, and your hand is on my throat. You kiss my cheeks and my temples and my gasping mouth. 

We are sitting in a familiar bar. We are in the bathroom of a familiar bar. We are in the alley along the back of a familiar bar. I am up against the wall and you are up against me, and the air is full of summertime night, sliding along our pushed-aside clothes. You make me beg. 

Jason Rosenthal, August 26, 2006. Photo by Sid Branca.

In the midst of a slog of archival narcissism, the digging through of digital boxes, the unexpected pinch of the long thin twisting needle of loss up in my guts. the losses of time, the losses of death. to come across a pile of poorly-lit pixels, spelling out your face. The face that I knew, years before your death. 

This is, I suppose, a reason for photographs; a site for eternal revisiting when the site itself becomes one day barred to entry. Starved of the sight, we cling to the contracts we’ve signed our memories to. I am so afraid of forgetting what you looked like. 

Remember, remember. Your skin was soft, and you were kind, and you liked crude jokes and certain voices. This is what you looked like, and may the sound of your quiet voice speaking my name be one of the last tapes to be rewritten. 

Your voice across long distances, your radio wires trembling in your throat. The strings pulled taught over the banjo neck in your guts, the melody of every time I shied and meeked away from the wolf smile barracked in your lips. Here, I can perhaps play the huntress, with the blood at arm’s length.
-
Your voice just at my side, leaning against my leg and looping through my days, but my fingers are brushing cracked screens when I look at you. Little bits of glass hitching in my skin when I reach out to slide myself across your mottled body. I will place my pussywet fingers behind my ears, I will speak only on this just barely side of proper, I will ache and ache and ache, for looping.
-
Your voice held inside your mouth like a secret. Your face, in my dreams nearly every night, the way you hold your body like you know something, your poet’s hands and your fascist grace. If simply once you placed your hand on my neck: a falling, and a smell like cut grass and cold lake water, the scar burning on my arm.
-
Your voice, echoing strong in the night world, glitter and flash, but quiet spoke against my shoulder. The nervous girlish in your boy’s demeanor, the spit wet lips on your young coyote jaw. I want to twist myself inside you like a slow construction.

Dream (I don’t usually go for blonds). 2/9/14. 

We are sitting on my bed and talking, although it’s a bed and a room and an apartment that looks nothing like mine, and somehow I’m not sure if it’s in Chicago or somewhere in the Northeast. We had been sitting there a long time not speaking, and then we had been sitting there a long time speaking. The room was dim and it was late. We thought it was maybe 11:00; we looked and it was two in the morning. You said something about getting a cab, holding your phone sort of vaguely in one hand, the other in your hair, letting it spike up between your fingers all blond and kinetic. You sprawl out across the bed.

Somehow I have gone without moving from sitting up to laying down, my face close to yours. And then our lips are touching, this isn’t even kissing yet, just my lips and yours resting lightly against each other. I can feel how yours are chapped, the winter has only just ended, and you move back and forth ever so slightly. We stay this way a long minute, and then we kiss. There is stubble on your face but your mouth is so, so soft, and your spit tastes like honey and coffee and fresh tobacco and something else I can’t quite place or describe. It is so very good. Your body is all around me and it feels like we are slowly turning into silky water, lapping at each other. 

Then we are in a hallway in my actual Chicago apartment. You are asking me a question, and from a doorway I say yes, my answer is yes, for you everything and always is yes. 

This starts out about one thing, and then becomes about some other things, but ultimately is all the same business. 

Today Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tragic sudden death from an apparent heroin overdose has been all over my social media feeds, vastly overwhelming the Superbowl (or Puppy Bowl)-related posts, or the usual buzz of “come see my show!” and “my friends are/this food is really phenomenal.” Instead, my friends–many, many of them actors and directors–are posting clips from his films, photos of him, even fond memories of meeting or knowing him. He was one of the most universally admired actors of our time. I have by no means seen his entire body of work (I kept saying I would wait until I finally read In Cold Blood before watching Capote), but have always greatly respected him. Synecdoche, New York is one of the best movies I have ever seen. I thought about what to post, what to say. I kept scrolling through my feed.

And there, nestled amid the PSH posts, and the sports talk, and the usual business, were a couple of posts from members of my family. Three years ago in early February, my cousin Denise died suddenly. We saw each other rarely and were not close; she lived in Alabama, and was about fourteen years my senior. But I remember vividly the last time I saw her, a family gathering down South a few years ago. She was a kind woman. A nurse. Two young children. 

I don’t recall the medical details, just the mental image that flooded me as I cried into the telephone: a woman alone in a hospital bathroom, falling to the ground. 

I didn’t really know her, barely at all, not enough for the phrase “missing her” to make any sense. But I see the words written by her younger child, now, I think, in the seventh grade, and weep. I think my own strange thoughts:

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed with you and you’re asleep, I stare at your body, waiting for the next slow breath of deep sleeping, and when it comes I realize I’ve been holding mine, heart racing, because any one of us could die at any second, but if it was you, if it was you I think every bone in my body would break at once, giant carrion birds tearing through my mouth for weeping. Every screen would go dark, a last twitch of static spelling out your name. The sun, burning out and dropping, like a peach pit in the snow. 

my reticence, little witch boy, my backing up and off. your tiny body made of collarbones and aching. my disappear and reappear. it’s for you, because I know I’m stronger in your head.

to wet my lips with the tongue of the woman you imagine me to be is to be a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. it calms my nerves to make you nervous. five strides into a crowded room, my hand your neck the wall. 

if I keep you begging and guessing and at arm’s length, you will not know how afraid I am, how uncertain, how lazy and distracted. you will not know how much I hate myself for my lack of follow-through. yes, I’m telling you, but: actions, words. 

instead: to build some little corner of the world inside your body where I am utterly in control, where my hand holds the needle and the hand of time. where I can point at something and say yes, this is good, or no, that is not, and the way you lower your eyes when you look at me bears more weight than all the thousands of things I am always failing to do. 

open up your skin and show me what’s inside. I, too, am always bleeding, often and everywhere and improperly cleaned, even if I’m being figurative. I want to taste someone else like pennies and tensed limbs. Some strange climate where these parts of me rise to the top, slough off the others, grow over me with a crown of bones. 

found in Drafts, unsure if ever posted or completed:

I see a man who looks like you from the back and the bus I’m standing in explodes.

Great swathes of metal are unfurling, are throwing themselves down Lake Shore Drive and sparking into nothing. The dead bodies of strangers pile all around me.

All the water in the air vanishes at once, and the breeze is on my hands on the Natchez Trace.

I no longer know birthdays; aside from my immediate family, a few somehow-still-remembered childhood friends, my most recent exes, that’s the type of information I glean from my machines. I do not mind this. I do not think it signifies some end of sympathy, some un-fuck-giving of friendship. It’s more like the way I sometimes rely on autocorrect while typing–I have the ballpark information, and these funny little ticking beasts make me more precise. This does, however, occasionally lead to surprises.

I for some reason bother to click “and 1 other,” to know who else is turning something, who else is going to a fancy dinner or ignoring a barrage of notifications, who else is going to get way too drunk or get some jewelry. It’s you. You won’t be doing any of that. Not ever, no, not again. I don’t think I ever saw you on your birthday; our friendship was for summers, and for long-distance calls. 

You’re in the ground, or in some scattered ashes, I was no longer close enough to know. You are over, over, ended. But your voice is still playing through my speakers, like it always has. 

I suppose this is a reason to write music. So that even in the face of a sudden drop dead, even when the pieces of us that belong to you get pulled through our chests and plunged into the dirt, into the late-night waters of the Long Island Sound, even when I will never, ever see you again, not to laugh at our matching tattoos or smoke cigarettes in the driveway of my mother’s house or trespass in New York City private parks, even when it will never stop hurting to know that I should have gotten on that fucking plane to Texas like I said I would, even when the closest I will ever get again to holding you is your beautiful shaking girlfriend crying in my arms, even when my shit memory is fading and fading, I will always have your voice. We will always have the sound of you to hold us. 

Fucking hell, Jay. I miss you so fucking much.

I don’t even know how old you would be today. I guess I could do the math. Thirty-six. 

There we are, all those years ago, somewhere floating in time. And even when my body joins the pile, every grain of sand we stepped on will remember. 

Jason Rosenthal, I will miss you always. Thank you for everything.

—

If you want to hear the sounds I’m hearing, here are links for streaming: 

On the Might of Princes - Where You Are And Where You Want To Be (2002)

On the Might of Princes - The Making of a Conversation (1999)

On the Might of Princes - Sirens (2003)