I have a few happy friends
I ask them about being happy the same way
My high school friends ask me about being gay:
"So what do you people do exactly?
How do you do it?"
Their answers are never as freaky as I would hope,
Almost always the answer god or booze,
One I don't tolerate and the other I'm told doesn't tolerate me.
I'm fascinated with this idea of getting high on life,
I imagine people on their backs in fields of lilacs
Snorting the lines the planes leave in the sky
Waking with honeymoons in their bloodstream.
Me, I often feel like the vaccine for goosebumps,
So low I flip through old dictionaries where gay still means happy
And I say "well if it were 1822 I'd be, like, the happiest".
I can't remember the last time
Someone commented on my sunny disposition,
That doesn't mean I'm not trying to juice the sun for every holy drop.
I know it is its own Injury
Spending too much of your life just holding yourself together,
I've known that since the first time I tried to die.
I was too ashamed to go back and get the stitches out on time,
So the stitches scarred as badly as the wound
It's the one part of me I never stop thinking ugly,
20 tiny holes framing a would be flatline
I still can't look at without seeing the light
Going out in the tunnels of my best friend's eyes
While she watched the doctors needle
Close the letter I'd sworn to never send.
The last, and I mean the last, time I tried to return myself to sender
Was a year ago this June,
After 5 months so sick I was certain my
Stomach would never know a butterfly again.
I got so low I had to look up to see rock bottom
And ghosted by hope I got in my car
And started driving towards a dead end,
A cliff that had been my back up plan
If ever the pain got stronger than I am.
Now, I gotta let you know this is a true story.
On my way to the end that day I was already half gone
Clumps of my own hair on the dashboard
From me failing to weed the hell from my mind,
I was sobbing and snaking around my own
Neck when I looked up from the steering wheel
And saw a stranger above me on the overpass
Holding on to the wrong side of the rail with one hand
His arm as taut as a kite string
About to lift his body into the air and fly into four rows of traffic.
This stranger and I had the same idea,
But as soon as I saw him my eyes
Locked on him like two screeching red lights
That wouldn't stop begging "stop stop stop".
I was the last car to pass before the fire trucks
And ambulances raced to clot the vein of traffic,
To tourniquet the road
So when the man jumped his body wouldn't
Graveyard the windshield of someone driving home
With their baby in the back seat.
I watched rescue workers run to try and talk him off the ledge
While I shot out of my car behind the
Overpass and circled in the madness of being a twister
Praying for someone's son to not go down,
Pacing and the mind mangle of being someone on my way to die
Stopping to ask somebody else not to.
I'll never know if he saw me
But I was haunting the ground
Punching my hands into the tornado of my
Grief to grab every piece of my lost mind
So I could get my footing long enough to beg the air
Beneath this man to catch him like a snowflake on the tongue,
A tongue that might also whisper "sweet, sweet soul
Heaven is in the other direction,
Please don't make gravity play god
I've heard there are fields,
Acres of lilacs like petaled Purple Hearts
Blooming only to pull us through and all you have to do is haul
Your name into a canyon and hear someone else's name echo back".
Never in my life did I want more to keep my blood blue,
Did I want more to live than when I looked up and
Saw myself in someone else trying to become the sky.
I didn't even know him but i know it
Would have killed me to watch him die.
So when at 12:31 he decided not to,
When he came down,
When the road opened, I did too.
My whole heart, my whole mind,
Went home with living proof of what I'd only before known in theory:
That we are truly not alone in this,
That our veins are absolutely strings tied to other people's kites,
That my butterfly's aren't gone,
They're just flying around in someone else's belly.
Sometimes I pray right now they're with that stranger,
I pray he's goosebumped by a mountain range of joy,
I pray he's high on the long line
Rivered across the country of his open palm
Held out the window while driving and singing along to a
Stranger's favorite song he suddenly know all the words to
But doesn't know why.