Lynn’s friend hung himself a couple of days ago. She’s been doing the funeral, wake, vigil circuit for the past couple of days. She looked exhausted although with good reason, all that driving is murder and meeting all those people for the first time, forget it. A suicide brings people out of the woodwork and there is no way you can know everyone in another person’s life.

Normally I’m one for small talk. I like meeting new people, but anything to do with death is, if you’ll excuse the expression, a killer. My sense of humor isn’t suited to serious occasions. I’m a joker. I can’t keep my mouth shut. Like a tourettes patient with a speed addiction, sweating and talking, eyes wide, all panic.

Lynn is a lot like me. She is the beer pong, sarcastic comment, life is a joke type. While a glass of wine or maybe a scotch is appropriate at a funeral, doing keg stands definitely is not. Everyone seems to be horrified when you ask them to hold your legs, and besides, apparently funeral homes look down on rolling a keg in right along with the casket, or even keeping it in the back, behind the benches. And those plastic cups, tacky at the best of times, are horrid when everyone is all suit and tie.

When Lynn told me, I panicked a little. Not because death is a tragedy, I’m still up in the air on that one, but because I didn’t want to hear it. Its selfish, but Lynn and I aren’t really at this level, we’re the “weekend get drunk and clown around” type of friends, not the “Sunday morning recover and talk about our lives” type. When she said it all I wanted was a drink. I pass out next to Lynn, but I never wake up next to her.

But I’m a sucker for a girl in distress. Nothing is sexier, and God help me I must be sick, then a girl who needs my help. And I didn’t want to fall for Lynn. She’s this half Hispanic, half Asian mix and she is truly, truly amazing. Everyone falls for Lynn, her personality is all flirt. I don’t want to fall into that. I think the reason we are friends at all is because I haven’t fallen for her and because I can hold a conversation with her eyes and not her chest or her ass.

But I shouldn’t have panicked. Lynn is more like me then me sometimes. She wanted to talk about how he died, not why. The mechanics of the act, not the metaphysical.

“How do you hang yourself in a bedroom? No I mean, where do you put the rope? I couldn’t hang myself in my bedroom, there are no exposed … anything. Where the fuck does the rope go? And do you think he used a rope or a belt? Where do you get rope from anyway? Like, he wasn’t a sailor; normal damn people don’t just have rope lying around.”

Mechanics I could discuss. It’s a good point. Hanging takes infrastructure. It’s a strange crime of opportunity. If I was going to go out, take myself out, it wouldn’t be hanging. It would be drugs. I know too much about hanging. It’s the fall that breaks your neck that kills you. Not the strangulation. And with your normal 8 foot ceilings, where is there to fall? To strangle to death, legs kicking, eyes bugging out, fingers clawing at the neck, that’s not a good way to go. Suicide is an escape. Why make the escape hard? Definitely drugs. Just quietly drift away on a stomach full of painkillers and alcohol. Or a massive fucking heart attack from too much coke and the requisite whiskey. In either case, something euphoric. Something wonderful.

Or I’d eat a gun. My friend Lauren ate a gun, right in her living room, ruined a ten thousand dollar, imported, hand woven, 18th century Asian rug. It’s not really something to talk about.

We both agreed pills would be easier. I was nodding like a weeble wobble and she was just talking, pills easier, drugs easier, drive into a bridge abutment easier, will I go with you tonight? Nod. Fuck. I had just agreed to go … somewhere with her, tonight, and I couldn’t ask her what she just said. How terrible would that have been?

So I got into her car, and off to a night of … whatever … we went.

I woke up the next morning crucified to the bed. One eye was swollen shut from where I fell into someone’s fist. My breath was coming in quick, almost hyperventilating gasps and I whimpered every time my head pounded. Panic inducing nausea washed over me every few moments. Lynn was passed out, or dead, next to me. I think I would have started crying had there been any moisture in my body anywhere. As it was, every blink dragged sandpaper over my eyeballs.

Details from last night blinked into existence. The liquor store, the memorial, the candle light vigil, me losing it, Lynn running her mouth, the fight. The endless talk about death and dying and being in a better place. Then last night dissolved into other, older memories. Lauren with that gun in her mouth. Lauren crying and shaking while she forced her thumb in the trigger guard. Fuck.

I force myself up out of the bed. My inner ear is useless and I crash to my knees. One knee slams into a half full bottle of Southern Comfort. I roll over onto my side, mouth open in pain and shock, my brain unable to comprehend, for a moment, what is going on, unable to deal with all the information it’s receiving from my peripheral nervous system. Laying there, on the floor, everything is pretty for a second. The sunlight on the carpet, the dust motes floating through the air, the color of Southern Comfort with the light coming through it. Maybe it’s all pretty because my brain has shutoff. I’m taking it all in and not processing any of it.

I wake up a while later on the floor. I can hear music, muffled beats, from somewhere else in the … house? Apartment? It occurs to me that I don’t know where I am. Lynn isn’t in the bed anymore, just rumpled sheets, a bra, and my boxers. My shorts are on the floor next to me. My shirt, and hers, are across the room. Fuck.

I get dressed slowly. My heart aches a bit, these things are always so complicated. I grab the SoCo bottle and take a huge mouthful and force it down. My stomach rebels, saliva floods my mouth. I squeeze my eyes shut and bite down on my tongue until I taste blood. It keeps me from throwing up. The world swims and shakes for a second then settles down into a warm glow. I take another mouthful, this one is easier. The world shivers around me and once again I am the warm little center of things.

I walk out of the bedroom and down a hallway. Lynn is on the sofa in a bathrobe. She’s holding the world’s largest Bloody Mary, and looks terrible and wonderful all at the same time. I’m suddenly unsure of myself. Last night? What exactly happened? Was it a mistake? Does she think it was a mistake?

She grins at me when she notices me standing half way in the hallway.

“Thanks” She says

“Yeah, sure, of course … wait, for what?”

“For last night. For going with me to that horrible memorial … for defending my honor” She winks as she says the last part. I touch my eye, at least its opening now, it hurts and I feel something crusty, like dried blood. I remember the fight. Well, ok I remember getting punched. Lynn was making some inappropriate comment, some off color joke about how the deceased was just like Jesus now. Both of them being dead and having this huge following. I thought it was funny, being that there were so many people there. Then a gorilla in a cheap suit started getting real agitated because she had insulted his best friend or his brother or something and how this was a time of mourning and respect. Then he stepped forward pushed her. Hard. I guess the irony of preaching respect and then pushing someone to the ground escaped him. I’m not normally a fighter, but before my brain knew what was going on my body had stepped forward to take a swing. That’s when he punched me in my eye socket.

She pats the sofa and I sit next to her. She curls up under my arm and we sit there watching T.V. for the moment. I don’t take this for post-coitus cuddling. This is Lynn being Lynn. She’s just friendly, and she has a way of making you feel like you’re the only thing that matters.

I feel guilty for her gratitude and for sleeping with her. It wasn’t some act of chivalry that got me here, it was a short attention span. Had I been paying attention, I might have laughed in her face when she asked me to go. Or if I didn’t laugh I would have made an excuse, then ran as fast and as far from her as possible. I feel guilty because the vigil was terrible and because I resent her for asking me to go. I feel guilty because all night I kept thinking “where are your goddamn friends? Why me? What the hell am I doing here with you?”

And the memorial was terrible, full of uncomfortable people in unfortunate suits. Even at the beginning of the night when it wasn’t so bad, before either of us were really drunk, it was bad. We both stood there with frozen grins on our faces, white knuckling our drinks, 20 oz Pepsi bottles half filled with Southern Comfort. We were totally underdressed, even those who weren’t wearing suits at least had on a button down shirt or a skirt. I was standing there is a golf shirt and cargo shorts like I had breezed in from a country club lunch. “Sorry about your loss old chap, now where is the bar, and is there still time for a round of golf?”

Then it got bad. We kept sneaking out to the car to refill the bottles with Coke and Southern Comfort. We were way past being acceptably drunk. My vision was doubling. Lynn was starting to visibly sweat; there was panic in her eyes. Neither of us had a clue as to what was proper. People kept coming up to us and talking, I had no idea what to say. The normal “I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a terribly tragedy” canned condolence lines had completely fled my mind. Looking for something to say was like staring at a blank chalk board. I could see the lines had been erased, and it felt like if I stared hard enough maybe I could make them out. It was no use; I could get maybe half the line before it just disappeared. I deferred every question, every comment, to Lynn. People would talk to me and I would just point at her. Smile and nod. My face felt like it might split open. I could have been molded out of plastic. I could see she was starting to crack under the pressure. She kept looking at me, and then making jokes, or trying to change the subject. Did you see the news today? How’s that paper for English coming? Have you seen any movies lately? Books? Magazines? March madness is just around corner. Then someone dragged Lynn off and I had to fend for myself.

Standing perfectly still, pretending I didn’t exist wasn’t working. People kept coming up to me, making their inane small talk “How did you know him? Oh, you’re just here with Lynn? I don’t think I know Lynn, but let me tell you, he was a great guy, really great. He was so funny, and sweet, and I just don’t understand, everyone loved him so much. I guess he just wasn’t meant for this world.” I heard this speech, almost word for word out of everyone’s mouth. After a while I couldn’t take it. I was staring through them, seeing their lips move, hearing nothing. I couldn’t get Lauren’s living room out of my head. I started to get confused with where I was. “Am I here with Lynn? Who died? Did I know him? Is this for Lauren? This can’t be Lauren’s memorial, I never went to Lauren’s memorial.” All I could see was her living room. The rug, the piano, that huge picture window. All covered in blood and bits and chunks of white which a paramedic would later tell me was brain, and pieces of bone. There is way more blood, more matter, thrown out of the back of someone’s head then they let on in movies. A nine millimeter hollow point or maybe a .45 reduces the skull to mist. Lauren’s face was just a mask afterwards. There was nothing behind it. The back of her head didn’t have, what they call, an “exit wound” it was just gone. Everything behind her ears was gone. It looked so strange, like her head had been deflated. They would later tell me that she had the gun in her mouth, that was why there was no, as they called it, “entry wound”.

That’s what it looked like when I found her. Like someone had taken a spray bottle full of blood and sprayed down the room. I walked into the living room like I had a hundred times before. Slipping my keys in to my jacket pocket and yelling “Lauren!” because I knew her parents weren’t home. That’s when I saw it, and, when I say it hit me, I mean it hit me. My heart stopped, my breathing stopped, my vision tunneled and my knees got week. I kind of slumped onto the back of a chair. The only thing I could really focus on was the piano. It was one of those baby grand designs that are kept open. The lights weren’t on. Everything was dark except for the piano, which was lit by the picture window. The blood mist all over the window didn’t stop the light from coming in, it just left little round shadows everywhere. I kept wondering how you clean the blood out of a piano. Do you take it somewhere? Is there someone who will come and clean the blood out of it? Can you use cleaning supplies on those strings? Aren’t they catgut or something weird like that? I started to panic a little. What if they had to get rid of the piano? Who’s going to take a bloody piano? That’s not something you can just drop off at goodwill. I didn’t know what to do, I walked over to the phone, called the police, told them something was seriously wrong.

*****

The bloody horror of Lauren’s living room slowly and reluctantly let go of my brain and I found myself back at the memorial with Lynn. I couldn’t remember the kid’s name, if I ever knew it. Of course, Lynn had disappeared. I was in a loose circle of people talking about … something. I couldn’t listen to these people anymore. None of them knew about loss, they were just putting their time in here so they could go on with their lives and feel good about themselves when they got home. The idea that this was just a shitty night for them, that life would return to normal tomorrow made me lose my mind. Something broke, I could hear it snap way back in my head. I started off softly; no one was actually speaking to me. I was standing in the middle of a conversation and just started talking. I was drunk to be sure, but I was angry too, blisteringly so. I wanted to throw their bullshit right in their faces. All that talk about tragedy. The volume of my voice kept getting louder and louder. “He wasn’t a great guy, he was selfish. He was horribly and tragically flawed and too weak to even ask for help. He’s a weak-willed loser who didn’t make it. Fuck him, and fuck all of you. You’re all so self serving with your painted on grief. In a month, in a year, you’ll have forgotten about him, moved on. This isn’t cancer, this isn’t tragic, this is someone who gave up, who said you’re all not enough to keep me here. He doesn’t deserve your love because he didn’t love you enough to simply live”. It’s amazing how good my memory is, it was word for word almost the exact speech I gave Lauren’s parents. Change the pronoun and I’d be 19 again.

The response was immediate and horrified. No one spoke, their faces shocked, stunned, staring at me, over my head away from me. No one knew where to look or what to say. I simply walked away, it was time to get Lynn and get out.

As I walked up to her, the faces around her showed the same horrified expressions that I just left. For a moment I thought I was turned around and walking back toward the group I just left. But no Lynn was standing at the center of all these horrified faces. I walked up, Lynn said the Jesus thing, I took a punch and we were back in the car, driving.

“Hey, I think I may have messed up back there”

“What no, he was an asshole, he hit you”

“No, no, no” and I told her about my little speech.

“Oh” We sat in silence for a while. I was lost in thought and pain, my eye had swollen shut and my head was pounding. I hoped my contact hadn’t cut my eye or anything terrible like that.

“Thanks” she said a bit later. I thought she was talking about the guy.

“Oh, no problem, I’d take a punch for a pretty lady any day.”

“No, not that, what you said … never mind” At the time I didn’t think much of it. I was starting to pass out in the passenger seat, the adrenaline was wearing off and the alcohol was telling me it was time to sleep. Looking back on it, I wonder if she was thanking me for what I said at the vigil. Could she actually be thankful that I lost it on everyone like that?

I woke up a while later, Lynn was asleep, her head on my chest. We were still on the couch; it was warm with her next to me like that, comfortable. It was nice not to be alone.

Lynn is sleeping with other people. I know this because, well, because everyone knows this. I shouldn’t be hurt, it’s not like we’re in a relationship. And well, I’m sleeping with Marie. But it’s different. Marie is strictly second string for me. She’s a bench warmer, plan B. She’s the girl at the party you know you can go home with if nothing else pans out. She’s the one who’s drunk at one in the morning on a Wednesday and who doesn’t mind if you stop by on the way home from the bar and don’t spend the night. Well, she might mind, Marie has an air of sick desperation around her that definitely is not attractive. Two or three drinks however, and I’m not cognizant enough to notice the desperation anymore.

Sleeping with Marie is an exercise in the absurd. Her roommate is a cokehead and is always home, bouncing off the walls, pacing around the apartment. She’ll leap out of her seat at the computer desk and take a lap around the living room. Then its living room to kitchen, kitchen to bedroom, and finally bedroom back to computer desk. She’s like a wind up toy and when I watch her in action I wonder how she hasn’t worn a track in the carpet yet. Ostensibly she is supposed to be doing homework. She’ll explain to anyone who will listen, in that breathless excitement only cokeheads can convey that “I just need to get this one assignment done, then I’ll get some sleep, but it’s due tomorrow and I just need to be able to stay up tonight.”

When I first starting going over there, it required a period of adjustment. Sometimes right in the middle of sex with Marie, her roommate would burst into song, singing along with whatever was on the radio. The walls of the apartment are paper thin and we could hear her, bleating out off key R&B hits. Her singing was enough to inspire hysterics in me. I could see her, alone in the living room, singing at the top of her lungs, oblivious to her roommate in the next room having sex, oblivious to everything. What was funnier, or perhaps disturbing, was that Marie never reacted to her singing. I’m not sure if she was immune to the strange habits of her roommate or just didn’t realize how strange the whole situation was, but after this happened two or three times, I would remember to flip on Marie’s stereo or TV so that I could drown it out.


“… He had tickets to Australia. He had been telling us for months ‘I feel like I’m going crazy, I need to get out of here’. It wasn’t really a surprise when it came but it was a damn shame. This was two years ago … this month actually.” My English lit professor stares off into the distance for a second. “His wife left him for his best friend. We could all see his decline, he was slowly just losing it, but no one thought, well, at first we thought he might, but then, when he got the tickets, when he was going to spend six months in Australia, starting over, we thought it would be alright. He already had the tickets, but I guess it just wasn’t enough. On the morning of what would have been their anniversary, he drove to their new house, and shot the husband. Just shot him on the doorstep, in broad daylight. This had been his best friend. His ex-wife had already gone to work for the day. Then he drove himself home, said hi to his housemates, and took a shower. Not one of his housemates noticed anything strange … or wrong. Then he drove down to the beach, the beach where he had his first date with her, the ex-wife, and he called her at work from his cell phone. She never told anyone, or at least anyone I know, what he said on the phone, but after he was done talking, he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. She heard the shot.” He pauses, the pain of losing a friend and of not understanding is clearly evident on his face. He’s not choked up, its pain he has long ago dealt with, but it is pain that is still with him. I’m oh-so-thankful that he isn’t going to cry. I couldn’t take it if he starts crying. I mean, physically couldn’t take it. I’d have to run screaming from this second story classroom and throw myself over the railing directly onto my head hoping to either crack my skull or break my neck. Anything to get the image of my professor sobbing out of my head. As it is, I’m not doing too well with his little Friday morning confession session. My entire body is rigid with tension. I can feel my lower back starting to ache with the stress. My shoulders drawn up in a half flinch, like I expect at any moment to get hit in the face. My one leg is jacking up and down like I’m working a sewing machine for all its worth. My hands have clenched themselves into fists crushing my Styrofoam coffee cup. My fingers have left four neat holes in the side of the cup. Coffee is everywhere, it’s on the desk, its pouring onto my lap, it’s dripping on the floor. Luckily our desks are in a circle and no one has noticed yet. I can’t move. I can’t breath. My teeth are grinding themselves into dust and I can feel the headache starting from where my jaw muscles are threatening to snap under the pressure. He’s still talking “I guess we saw his suicide, but murder, that’s a whole different thing. No one saw that.”

But it’s not different. I could have seen that murder coming from any distance. Far, near, around corners. The murder makes sense. A murder suicide is the only way that story can end. No one in the class sees it, or they’re not willing to admit it. They are more then willing to discuss it however. I can see people dredging up tales of suicide, emotionally brutal mindfucks of friends who didn’t make it. I can see the wheels turning, bringing the elevators of memory up from the depths of the psyche. In a moment this whole classroom is going to be filled with virtual strangers sharing on a level of emotional honesty that is beyond atrocious. It’s going to be the spoken equivalent of snuff porn, titillating in its debasing horror.

I tell Lynn that I’ll be right back. She doesn’t even look at me, which is good because I don’t really want to explain the coffee. She just nods. I drop the coffee cup on the floor next to me and quickly walk to the bathroom. Once there my stomach clenches and I lose the remains of last night’s alcohol. I throw up until there is nothing left and I blame it on my hangover. But that’s a lie, it’s not the alcohol that has me puking in a bathroom sink at five of nine in the morning. It’s not even the suicide. It’s the infidelity. While all those 18 year olds upstairs trade war stories from their upper middle class lives, while they explore the social implications love, I’ve been on the wrong end of that little threesome my professor just described. Even now, years later, I can’t handle even hearing about it. It drags me back to that morning. It was a Saturday when I found out my fiancé had cheated on me. When I called her place and a guy I had never heard before answered the phone. When over the course of the conversation I realized that not only did he have no idea that we were engaged to be married, but that he had run into her at a bar the night before, and that he had indeed spent the night at her place, and that, as he confessed to me “I think I really like this one, she’s pretty amazing”. I hung up the phone. She was in the shower, I didn’t mention that we were engaged.

I don’t remember much after that. I remember being in the shower myself and punching the tile. I remember that I kept punching the tile until it broke and splintered, cutting my hand. I remember that I kept hitting the wall, dislocating and breaking all sorts of important sounding bones. I remember my throat being raw, but I don’t remember screaming, just the sound of the water. I remember my friends coming over and finding me soaking wet and fully dressed on my couch. I don’t know how they knew and I remember them driving me to the hospital. Then the doctor gave me something and everything was fuzzy and warm and ok again. I remember that when I got home the next day with a cast on my hand, someone had gone through my closet and taken my shotgun. I don’t know at they had expected of me, but I remember thinking that it was probably a good idea.

A few minutes later and I was already a third of the way through a bottle of SoCo. It became my drink of choice in such times. I remember looking at the bottle and wondering why the level of liquid just kept creeping down the label. I woke up late that night to someone beating on my door. I don’t remember opening it or even talking to anyone. The next morning I found myself next to Lauren.

It was the start of our dysfunctional relationship. We found comfort in our pain. We rarely spoke to each other. I never once saw or heard her cry. Neither one of us knows what happened on that first night just that we woke up together. Looking back I should have seen her death coming. She was weak just like him.

I stagger back to class to find it empty. Lynn just left. We’ve now officially become “wake up next to each other” friends. Last night was the first time since we’ve started hanging out that she didn’t call me to see what I was doing. Fridays we used to pre-party together. Fridays we used to go out together and by Saturday we were headed in separate directions. Last night I started getting ready around 7. By 9 Lynn hadn’t called or stopped by, by 9 I could see the writing on the wall.

At 3am my phone rang. I had just staggered in from a Marie’s place. I didn’t call before I stopped by her place, I just showed up, on my way home from a typical Friday night college party. Marie wasn’t home and I wasn’t surprised. Her roommate was home painting some horrible mural on the living room wall above the couch. I hung out there long enough to put 20 bucks up my nose, and a few shots of vodka in my stomach, and then made my escape when Marie’s roommate started, in her nervous, bright-eyed way, to flirt with me. Maybe I’m flattering myself, maybe it was the coke that made the vibe change, but I knew it was time to walk away.

I had just walked in when my phone rang. It was Lynn, she wanted to stop by. At least she spent the whole night. We even had breakfast at the little café down the street and saw a movie. When she left, I could still smell her perfume around my apartment. I opened all the windows and pulled the fan out of the closet.

In the month since the memorial I’ve become a once or twice a week stop on Lynn’s fuck buddy rotation through the week. When she called last night, I almost didn’t answer the phone. I sat there, finger bouncing back and forth between answer and ignore. Finally I caved. I hit answer. I should have hit ignore. I’d spent the night with a few friends watching movies and relaxing after midterms. Sunday a few of us fly out for Florida, spring break, go local sports team.

By the time she called, it was just me and my close friend, James. That’s Jim Beam to you but we’re such good friends, I call him James. That’s an alcoholics joke. That joke is more like a friendship litmus test. If I tell it and they laugh, or at least smile, then we’re good. If that joke makes them want a drink, all the better. But if they’re horrified, uncomfortable, then, well, maybe we should pursue different interests. Somewhere I’ve forgotten that people don’t drink by themselves, that it violates social acceptability. Even if the TV is on, they still consider it “drinking alone”, even if I’m watching sports or porn. They don’t think things like “do I have enough alcohol to make it through the night?” or “maybe I could talk the pizza guy into picking up a bottle of gin”.

By the time Lynn arrived at my place I was doing my best to achieve blackout. Sunk into my couch with my bottle and a glass of coke, too lethargic to even mix a drink, I was just taking shots and chasing them with soda. When she walked in though, my body reacted, even if my brain didn’t want to. To be fair, she looked amazing. There’s this way she enters a room, slow, relaxed, like she already arrived and is just waiting for her body to catch up. She was all legs in that skirt and there was no way I could say no to that.

But its not her legs, which are amazing, or her ass, which begs to be squeezed, or even her breasts, which, I swear, if you look up perfection in the dictionary there’ll be a picture of, its her smile. I’ve always been a sucker for a woman’s smile. Her smile makes you feel like you’re the only person left on earth. Her smile is so warm that it makes me a little light headed and when she laughs and her eyes light up, I can feel my heart in my throat.

Later though, when she was on top of me, crying out, my brain wouldn’t let it go. Where am I in the rotation? I got a Friday spot, that’s got to count for something right? Did she plan to be here when she started the night or was I an afterthought? Did she call someone else first before she called me and he just happened to be out? Was she even thinking of me or of that other guy who wasn’t home?

After she passed out, I lay in bed and tried to sleep. It was no use. My buzz was gone and I had that sick feeling when you’ve been drunk and subsequently sobered up. I was trying to sleep, grinding my teeth and wishing she were anywhere but next to me. The sweat cooling on her arm, which was touching mine, was making my skin crawl. Little shivers of disgust ran up and down my spine. “Now god if you exist, this would be the time to strike me down.” The Jim Beam was still in the living room where I left it stuck between the cushions of the couch with no cap on. I could see it in my mind, all alone in the living room, just a little bit of the bottle and the neck visible above the cushions and sitting in the shadow of the arm of the couch. Not enough light coming through the living room window to illuminate it. I finally got up, picked up the bottle and took a long pull. The burn felt good. The instant nausea and saliva in my mouth were familiar, comfortable. I know how to deal with liquor, I know how to muscle up and stop myself from puking. I drank until everything got dim, until I could laugh again, or at least grin and I think I could sleep. In the morning, before she leaves, she makes me promise to spend Saturday night with her before I leave for Florida.

I should be packing or at least getting ready to go out with Lynn. When I woke up again, hours after Lynn and I split a light lunch, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but sit on the couch and watch TV. I had an idea to make those champagne and orange juice things, “hurrah for me, I’m on spring break” but didn’t. “Fuck this” was all I could think, until, finally, I grabbed my jacket and headed to the liquor store with no real idea of where I would go after that. “I should go home, I’ll go home after the liquor store, I’ll pack. This is going to be fun, Florida, alcohol, girls, loud clubs and topless dancers. I’ll pack, I’ll stop being a fucking asshole and I’ll start acting like I want this,” I remember thinking.

Instead, I’m at Marie’s. Marie isn’t here, which is surprising considering the hour. I’m splitting a handle of bourbon and couple grams of speed with her roommate. It’s rotten stuff that burns wildly, but it does its job and between it and the whiskey, I’m a blank slate. Marie’s roommate is having some type of tweaker get together. When I knocked, this guy, who looks like a transplant from the local trailer park, answered the door. I was about to apologize and leave when Marie’s roommate came bouncing up behind him like Tigger with ADD. Maybe it’s not surprising that Marie isn’t here.

The whole apartment is filled with overly thin guys in wife beaters with bad tattoos. I’ve walked myself into some weird episode of cops where I’m watching everything through a hidden camera. They’re playing poker and betting with drugs, and doing more of the drugs then they’re betting with. It would be funny maybe, disturbing probably, if it weren’t so surreal. I realize that I am wildly out of my element but seeing as how I don’t have anywhere else to go, I roll with it. Besides, the unreality of it is so overwhelming that I can’t do anything but sit on the couch and crack the Wild Turkey.

The afternoon passes in a blur of color and motion. I realize that I’ve missed 6 calls on my cell phone and I laugh so hard that I’m afraid that my heart will burst. I can’t help laughing, or maybe I’m just hyperventilating. The poker game has been getting increasingly more heated all afternoon with the tweakers yelling at each other and banging on the table. We’ve crossed a line and are I think we’re now on a dangerous downward slope towards violence. Its time to change the channel. I pour myself a huge drink in a Nalgene bottle and sneak out of the apartment. The cool night air goes along way to shaking off the bat shit insanity of the apartment but I’m still affected badly. Walking home I’m twisted on the speed and near blackout from the alcohol. I alternately sing and shout at the empty street.

26 hours later, 20 of those spent in a car and I’ve run as far as I can reasonably go. After I left Marie’s apartment I lost my appetite for the drugs and the bourbon. By the time I made it to my apartment I could hardly walk. I had fallen a couple of times and my hands were torn up, bloody. Some homeless guy watched me stagger down the street at insane volume and looked worriedly around; I guess he was used to being the strangest thing out at night. By the time I got home I crashed through the door and didn’t even bother to close it. I just fell onto my couch and slept there, fully clothed, like a guest who had one too many. I couldn’t bring myself to go into the bedroom.

There’s this little place in Maine, way up on the coast, called Acadia. I think it’s a national park. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where you can sit on these cliffs and overlook the ocean. Its amazing, like something out of a book. It was the first place Lauren and I went after we broke up for the first time. We went just as friends. I don’t even remember how we found it. I think it was mentioned on the radio, some NPR travel show she used to listen to. I used to make fun of her for listening to that stuff, but then, I never really liked NPR. After we’d been there a couple of times, her parents used to pay to fly us up there for a week on our breaks. Every time we were there, we talked about staying, but that was probably just so we didn’t have to return to real life.

When I left Marie’s, I knew that a week in Florida would kill me. I was insane with speed and sadness. I couldn’t stand the sight of my apartment. I couldn’t stand to see any of my friends. I definitely couldn’t stand Marie’s place with the tweakers and the self-loathing painting all over the walls. Every familiar thing made my skin crawl and I would jerk away from it as though it might burn me. Maine was suddenly the only place in the world that I wanted to be, that it made sense to be. The last time I was there was with Lauren, I hadn’t been able to go back since she decided, well ... Her parents had tried to bribe me into going to her memorial service by offering to fly me there for a few days. It was the complete wrong offer, 180 degrees from what I could handle. After the cops let me leave the house, after they had done whatever they do at a suicide and decided that I didn’t blow the back of her head off, I did everything I could to get Lauren out of my life. All the pictures, all her stuff, everything that she ever touched, or even looked at. Hell, I buried things in the back of my closet just because they were her favorite color.

Maine is cold and gorgeous, just as I remember it. I check into the bed and breakfast that Lauren and I used to stay in. I can almost hear her laughter as I get out of the car. I can almost feel her next to me, but that’s just lack of sleep and the speed hangover. I check in and pass out until the next morning.

Morning is a novelty. It’s just like I remember mornings, quaint, because I haven’t seen one from this side in a long time. I’m up early enough to make it to breakfast. I can’t remember the last time I was up early enough to have breakfast with the rest of my time zone and I can’t definitely can’t remember the last time I woke up without any trace of a hangover.

There is a couple at breakfast, just married. They’ve got to be in their mid-twenties and watching them together is strange, like watching a commercial for how life is supposed to be. I imagine their life, so far from the late night drunk dials, the casual relationships, the crushing alcoholism and occasional drug use. I wonder which of us are the outliers. Is that what life is really like, people falling in love, getting married, being happy? Or is that the “just married front”, the honeymoon period if you will? In six months will he be banging his secretary and she’ll be fucking his best friend? Or will they be happy, working on starting a family, making their friends sick with talk about baby names and house shopping? Will they’ll both develop parallel but hidden drug problems and secretly grow to hate each other before the divorce rips them apart and sends their kid into years of therapy? Or are will they become one of the good families, happily seeing their kids grow up and succeed, nights at school plays and baseball games?

Dear god, I hope they make it.

I spend the first couple of days in Maine just wandering around bookstores and coffee shops. Lunch at cafés and afternoon hikes. I chat up the barista at the local coffee house/café/hangout. She’s cute, with green eyes and dyed red hair. She’s funny and sarcastic without the overbearing bitterness of my friends and after two days of chatting, I ask her to lunch. The expression on her face lets me know I’ve way overstepped the bounds of our blossoming friendship. The thing is I don’t really care. Her rejection doesn’t feel like rejection and it just rolls off of me. I apologize, smile to let her know it’s no big deal, and walk out. I walk down to the restaurant and grab a table outside. It’s a glorious day, warm, sunny. I can’t remember the last time I’ve enjoyed myself this much. I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed myself this much.

Ten minutes later the barista from the coffee shop comes strolling along and sits down. After I get over my surprise we laugh our way through the initial awkwardness and lunch goes smashingly. Her name is Michele, she’s a college student and while she talks, I fill in all the details of her life with imaginary perfection. I see myself staying here, asking her to marry me. We could be the happy couple in the bed and breakfast. I could start over. No basement apartments with late night booty calls. No cokehead roommates. No more plan B.

Lunch ends, Michele and I make plans to grab a drink when she’s off work and I tell her where I’m staying so she can stop by and get me. I realized yesterday, or maybe it was this morning, that I’ve left my cell phone in my apartment, next to half a gram of speed and a Nalgene filled with Wild Turkey, like some sort of an impromptu altar.

I spend the afternoon walking the cliffs where Lauren and I used to sit and watch the sailboats. It’s exactly how I remember it. The boats from this distance are so clean. The perfect white triangles of their sails, their speed and implied adventure as they cut impetuously across the water. We used to sit and imagine that we had a boat, that we could fly across the water so effortlessly and feel the spray on our faces, free to fly anywhere we wanted, to the other side of the world if the mood struck us. I remember that we would never dress warm enough and always huddle together, giggling like we were getting away with something. I don’t sit now, just stand there against the blue-gray sky while the wind whips and snaps at my clothing. It feels like I can see forever and from here the world looks perfect, all the imperfections and fuckups smoothed over by time and distance. I stand there for a long time, tears frozen in my eyes, the wind blowing too hard for them to spill down my cheeks.

After a while it gets cold and I wander back down to the pier to watch the fishermen bring in their catch for the day. It must be close to seven o’clock or so. I watch them haul the fish from below decks and negotiate prices with restaurant owners and buyers right there, shouting up to the pier from their boats. Lauren used to tease me, saying that I should start fishing up here, and then we could stay. We both knew that I wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. It’s too honest, with none of the irony and sarcasm that pervades my entire personality. It’s after dark when I wander away, the fishermen are just finishing up their business for the day.

Back in my room, I know what I have to do but that doesn’t make it any easier to get started. I pull out a piece of stationary and a complimentary pen and I write. It’s short, 3 pages at most, which is short for these kinds of things. It starts with an apology to Lauren’s parents for not going to her funeral. Then I talk about the Lauren I knew. The one they rarely saw. Finally, I write out what I’ve been doing recently. Not the gory details, just that I’m back in school and doing well, and that I’m in Maine for spring break. Finally, I give them my current address so they’ll have it if they want it. I address an envelope amazed that I remember their new address. The one they moved to after, well, they couldn’t stay in the house.

I shower and get ready for my little date with Michele. Just as I finish getting dressed there’s a knock on the door and I think “perfect, I’m right on time”. I open the door and Lynn, looking breathless, looking, for once, un-composed, is standing there. She pulls me to her roughly, and kisses me, hard, slamming us together violently.