No Grand Passion

AFTER I WAS ABLE TO SCREW MY HEAD BACK ON TIGHT, they told me I’d swam ashore. Finally, I’d swam ashore after many years living on K Street with the other cursed lowlifes. But, I didn’t swim ashore. I was washed. Washed ashore. And I believe it might be the wrong shore. Shore of the ocean. It wasn’t a choice, but the only possibility for me when there were just two possibilities: I would get better. Or I wouldn’t, as so many people I knew hadn’t. They’d end up living at the beach. And when I say “at the beach” what I mean is on the sand. There were fates far worse, as I would come to know.

On K — in more ways than one — there’s an old movie palace. One of those beautifully decrepit relics of a more innocent hour. I’d seen movies there as a child. If I knew then that I’d be living at the palace years later I would have thought it was a dream and not the complete and utter nightmare it was.

They don’t always let me leave the house. They say nothing good ever happens after midnight and that’s one thing I agree with them on. Another agreement? I had fallen out of love with life and needed to find a way to fall back in love with it. They are a single unit but a family unit we are not. In my room at the house I have my own bathroom, which is where I spend a lot of my time. I don’t lay on the cool-tiled floor. I am no cliche. I stand straight like an arrow and stare into the mirror. A lot of my valuable life is burnt out this way. They ask me what I did all day. “I spent it,” I say.

My room’s doorframe is doorless and so I can come and go into the kitchen or out into the yard without too much trouble. In the beginning during those first few awful sick days my meals were brought to me. Now I’m well enough to be trusted among the silverware instead of chained to the bed. They work most days so I have the house to myself. I try to take a walk around the neighborhood. I might buy a coffee or two if I’m feeling particularly social. Not that I say anything more than my order to anyone. “Two coffees,” I say. I don’t pretend one is for someone else, say a close friend coming to join me. Close friends don’t join me. I do occasionally see someone from my life before this. Back then they had names, now only faces. And arms. Such long and exasperating arms. When I feel them getting too close I head back to the house. Back there I might be alone and myself for another hour or two before they come back. If they come back. Some nights they might get stuck at the hospital. On others I might just not notice they returned.

At night I dream I’m back at the palace. I’m a child at the beginning of the dream and an adult, myself, by the end. Or often the reverse. Dreams and memories sometimes collide and I’m reminded of the time when the sheep entrails showed up spilled at our front door after getting ransacked by a pack of foxes. It was a sheep I raised to be sold for slaughter at the county fair that they then bought because no one else had placed a bid. One of those haunted images from my youth that refuses to set sail, burn out, fuck off. In retrospect, what a blessing. I didn’t want to eat the sheep anyway. I’d raised the sheep. It was my sheep! In any case, it was an early lesson imprinted upon me: Sometimes you do things that don’t turn out worthwhile and other times you do things just to pass the time. Before I fall asleep and return to the palace, on more nights than not, I take stock of my day. Check. Another one drifted out and gone with no grand passion.