Six Years Later

He had become a bit of a pain in the derriere, since he got back from visiting his father in the hospital. He had always been a sullen citizen. A good week in the penitentiary might have sorted him out.

On the days he was not feeling particularly morose, he was guided by whim and fancy. I only wished that his inclination for jerked meat might have been saved for the days when I was not so desperately lonely.

He was always selfish, and I wished that maybe someone would tell him this, because he never listened to a word I said. I thought perhaps he could write a book, or complete any one of his previous attempts. He would need to learn how to write dialogue, as it was never his strong point. Dialogue was always our thing, and if he abated this instance it would be the final indication that ours was a friendship of ineptitude.

After thinking over our time together, I realised that our story would most likely be very boring. It would be riddled with insobriety and addiction to eyelash plucking. He taught me to do this, on the very last day of spring one year. He knew it was the time I was at my craziest, and convinced me that the loss of eyelashes might keep us cool. He never apologised for these kinds of things. He never apologised for anything. Sometimes he would just wait until I was no longer tempestuous, and act like nothing had happened.

I never heard him say thankyou either. He felt embarrassed saying it, so he always said gracias, merci or dank instead. It felt as though he never really meant these words, even though he said them often. Similar to how the word tree lost its meaning for me many years ago. He never really appreciated anything we did for him.

I thought maybe it was because his life was served to him on a proverbial silver platter, even if it wasn’t at all the life he wanted. We thought the trick might be to not get drawn down by him, or at least make better predictions as to when he was about to sink. It never worked.

When he was down, I spent more money, I stopped talking to my brothers, I watched more television, I read less and wrote more. I took apart toy weapons and rode my bike up and down the street with flat tires. When he was down, I tried to make myself crazy to understand where he had gone. Being dragged down was so much easier than living on like normal. Sometimes, in order to find someone, I suppose you have to lose yourself. Like tug of war.

Neither of us was successful after school. I tried harder and loved what I did, but my future was never guaranteed, and when I failed to find employment in my chosen area, I sort of gave up. He finished a law degree and got a job cleaning old records in a musical restoration shop on Auschwitz Avenue. I was convinced he chose to work there only because of the name, which was congruent with how much he loved my cat. If there were a law firm in the same street, he may have chosen to work there instead.

On many occasions, I wished he would just listen to me when I told him to leave me alone. Not once did he listen, obviously. I ran, many times. I made new friends, who always loved him. I got new jobs, which he would visit me at. I moved towns, states, countries. He always came within a few months. It was never enough time to forget the past. I always emphasised that history meant nothing if the present was in dystopia, but of course, I was exaggerating. He always said we were never meant to be happy.

I was cleaning up old drawings from before I knew how to draw, and this left me with many old, cardboard cylinders. I remembered a poster from many years before which gave a list of ideas to reuse cardboard cylinders. I sat and smoked exactly ten cigarettes, thinking of the best use for the cylinders that were so filled with charcoal and other personally redundant forms of illustration.

I collected every photograph I had ever had printed of him and neatly placed them in the bottom of one cylinder. I closed it up and wrote our address on the front.

I collected every drawing I had ever made of him and rolled them into another cylinder, which I then wrote our address on the front of.

I spent four days obsessively searching for every instance of him on the backups of every computer I had ever owned. I printed them all out, and donated one hundred dollars to a forest replacement organisation, because recycled paper still came from somewhere. I put them into ten separate cylinders and wrote our address on the front.

Finally, I found the invitation that began everything. I wrote goodbye on the back, and put it in a cylinder.

After sending the cylinders, I sat outside our house at ten o’clock in the morning, every day, for thirteen days. I watched him sign for each one, and then I left. He didn’t follow.

The only way he was ever going to listen to me was if I acted in neurosis, the only pathology he seemed to understand. Six years later, I realise, we were never meant to be happy.