My mother is getting on a plane in the morning from Kansas City to San Francisco and I can't begin to describe how tremendous my excitement is over this fact. I have not seen her in over a year. It occurred to me, maybe about an hour ago, how badly I have missed her; when I began sobbing on my porch for the duration of an unsmoked cigarette, the ash of which resembled a long burnt green bean when it fell. It was one of those cigarettes that you only light for a reason to get up and go outside, one of those cigarettes that once lit hits a play button of memories and for me, this night, those memories were of the past year and a half of my life . It occurred to me how badly I've missed home, and how even though I tell every new friend I make that I hate Kansas and never want to go back, it is my home and one more than one occasion since I have been gone I have needed nothing but its air in my lungs.
I write a lot about all of the fun I've had, about all the sex I've had, love I have lost and gained and then lost again. I write a lot about how much I've grown, but in spite of those personal growths, those sexual encounters in public places, those parades, the unrelenting beauty that engulfs the hills of the west coast, in spite of the unabashed drug experimentation with company God would envy, I have also broke in ways I cannot write or tell. In ways only the trinkets on my desk could tell if you listened to them whisper on a silent night, in ways only the bits of finger nails I have scattered over Chicago sidewalks and the dirty tiles of San Fransisco train stations could recount, or my walls can scream. Those things could tell you. But I cannot.
I can only write what happened, and what happened was I spent the past year and a half wondering streets of alien cities looking for an answer I staunchly believed existed outside of the choke hold Kansas City had around my neck, and what happened was that feeling of being choked never left, of being constricted so tightly you know you should just stop, that like quick sand, if you froze it would stop, but I couldn't stop. What happened was I kept going until its hands stopped the flow of air into my lungs and even when I should have begged for air I did nothing, and even when I should have asked for it, help would have done nothing. And then something inside of me died, it shriveled like a leaf and waited for a breeze to pluck it from my flesh.
I lost my best friend, the closest thing I have ever known to that feeling when a kid finds the missing puzzle piece and slides it's plastic coated cardboard into place, and that all that time spent working on the puzzle all the sudden seemed worth it again. Jen was my puzzle piece for a long time, and I miss her terribly. I can also state with as much veracity as my admitance to how much I miss her, that her decision to separate herself from my puzzle, which is now in a box in a closet and mixed with pieces from other puzzle boxes, entirely my fault. I have been, an awful friend to her, and like the ways in which I have broke, only walls, street lights, and finger nails can tell you just how awful. I can only write about what happened.
When I was a kid I remember very vividly having breakfast with my friend Josh's family, who was made up of himself, his grandfather and grandmother. I would go over there every morning before school and they would see that we got on the buss safely. We had two pieces of sausage with one piece of burnt toast, with no butter, on a Styrofoam plate like clockwork at 6:45 a.m. We would all join hands to thank God and I would often think, "It's just toast and microwave sausage, why be thankful?"
One morning after we thanked the higher power for our radioactive sausage links, I asked Josh's Grandfather if Hell was really that scary, because I though that a lake of fire would be kind of cool to see. He leaned in close to me and with eyes like coils said, "those are just words in a book boy, words can't begin to tell you the horrors of Hell.." I think of that now as I write this, not to compare a place of eternal suffering to my past year of momentary suffering, but to state how little my words are able to convey and that when I cried on my porch an hour ago, and as I cry now, I see what people mean when they say something hurts like Hell.
What it's like to miss something like hell, what it is to be grateful for sausage links on a Styrofoam plate.
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