Everything I’ve Had But Couldn’t Keep
A boy I loved was born with a hole in his heart and probably it had to somehow have been my fault.
He wasn’t the first boy I loved, but he was the first one who died. I had lunch with his mother at the museum a month after, for what? For absolution, for explanation. I didn’t know what she knew. That he did cocaine, that he smoked cigarettes, like everyone did, even though he shouldn’t have. That he was gay, after me. That before he died he was invincible, as we all were then. That once we stopped speaking I saw him sometimes walking from Hill House to McCracken for class, purple in the face, paused halfway with his hand on a bench and waiting to breathe easier before he walked on.
That I never said hi or are you okay and instead I walked around the long way to avoid the confrontation, to avoid him seeing me see him hurt, to spare myself the guilt, to spare him the indignity. That we never slept together but we did other things that shot through me to the base of my spine, that I’ll never forget, that nobody knows but him and me.
Even now I cannot write it. Years after the heart gives out, years after blood to ashes, years after the first time I pressed my open mouth against his and bit down hard with my teeth to draw blood. No, it doesn’t start there. Start it again.
I used to write it all the time, when he was alive and lived next door to me in our co-ed hall of a freshman dorm. I lived it six days out of the week. On the seventh I wrote it. During the six days we went to upperclassman parties and drank warm beer and plastic-bottle rail vodka mixed with tap water that cost ten cents at the Pub with a free cup and straw. We drank until we could not stand and sat on someone else’s floor and talked about second grade and our mothers and felt very old and very young at the same time, and I wore hand-me-down designer dresses with garter belts and braided pigtails and we held hands and read each other’s journals. I fell asleep in his bed. I shared my ice cream. I bought him flowers. I touched his face. Often, we cried. Oh, God, start it again. It doesn’t start like that.
On the first day of college I remember everything. How hot it was, how much we all sweated, moving in. My hair dyed red and stuck to my forehead with sweat-glue. His shoes, green. His feet, turned out, and him telling me they’d always been like that and me walking right up to him and showing him how mine had always turned in and putting my feet inside of his feet and standing like that for a minute, having just met him, showing him how we fit. Brazen, naive. Nothing to hide. Putting away my underwear in front of him, in front of all the people sitting on my bed in my new room, and not thinking about it for a second, and seventeen, and nothing lace and nothing white, and the curls behind his ears, and the ears themselves, and his record player and the first record he played on it, and his eyebrows knit together and my never dancing.
No. I can’t. I can’t. Start it again. Maybe it starts with the songs. It was good what we did yesterday. I don’t want to live on charity. Even now, to hear one of those songs -- ten, fifteen of them in all -- puts my heart all the way up on the roof of my mouth and I am flattened and ashamed to remember that I have a heart still to jump all the way up there, that I have a mouth to catch it in.
The thing is, I say to his mother like Matthew McConaughey, I keep getting older, and he stays the same age. Each year I am farther away from him. Each year I think God, he was so skinny, he should’ve eaten more, I should have protected him.
Walking to the Cross-County early on he said show me how to walk with a girl. His arm around me. His footsteps slowed to match, or sped up. At the Gap both of us buying girls’ jeans and him saying Okay, fine, I’ll tell you, I do. I do think that you’re pretty. Angels
sang, I think, at the Cross-County. It was as sweet, as heart-stopping. My whole world opened.
I had a boyfriend, by the way. I don’t mean to make it small. But I say it now only because it was the reason for the locked doors and the angry crying and the almost-not quites. The boyfriend did not die. I miss him less, if I can say that. Not because he did not die. But because I had him for as long as I wanted. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me. Start it again.
He would not have wanted for me to say that it was because he was so innocent but it was because he was so innocent. It was his feet turning outward. It was his zip-up sweatshirt and his books and his bedspread and the smell of his room. It was every day, it was all of me, it was nothing. It was kids. We were seventeen, eighteen. We drank on the bathroom floor and kissed each other’s necks and did laundry and ate cafeteria food. We did drugs, hard ones, but easy ones too. We wore each other’s clothes. I loved him but not enough and then he died and I lived and the boyfriend lived although we broke up and everyone else lived and his mother lived and there was a hole. A hole in the blood and a hole in the ash. A hole in my white skirt with the ruffles from a cigarette flicked. A hole in my stomach where I put a crystal-encrusted fire engine in my navel. A hole in the heart.
I want to show him, now, like this. I want to do it right. I want to show what it was about him, how big the hole left, how the tips of his fingers turned purple because his circulation was bad but not because he was weak but because that shade of purple was so beautiful. I would paint a house the color that his fingers turned when his heart was working too hard. That he would have liked to hear me say. A heart-lung pregunta, we called it, inexcusably bad translation. The question though of the heart, of what to do with it, of how much it could withstand. My breath stuck halfway from crying until I vomited, from being pulled apart. Maybe it starts here. The first hurt exchanged, the first swearing-off, the first slammed door, stomped foot, slapped face, spilled drink.
No. If it turned, I don’t know when. You know how kids are. It was always, it was forever, it stretched out on either side of us like the Potomac. It was bigger than nature, uncapturable. It was Sleeping Bear. It was too high, too wide. It did not fit through the door. It was irregularly shaped. It required additional postage. It was the day he came back from class to find me asleep in his bed and threw a pillow at me and told me to go back to my own room. It was the postcard he sent me home from spring break when I’d given him my favorite stuffed animal to take with him, of Courtney Love smoking on a stoop and a note from my leopard about their adventures. It was cherry pie. It was Adderall.
He stood in the basement doing a dance that was his knees going up and down, his feet stomping, his arms stick-straight at his sides with the palms faced down flat and tensed, his mouth open. Onstage he tossed his hair. Onstage he took the placebo pack of my birth control pills, pushed each one out through the foil and downed them in a handful with ten cent vodka water. Girls and boys screamed. He glowed with a certain kind of fame that can exist in a single room, in a basement, in the midst of a circle of of taut-skinned deer-legged creatures, a ceremony, a ritual. Consecration. On these nights he was too famous for me and I did not dance and I was spiteful and too young then to know that nobody nobody nobody can ever belong to you.
It is in lists that I remember him. In articles of clothing, in the lyrics to the chorus, in t shirt slogans, in the times that different kinds of fluids were exchanged. In lists he is manageable, my hurt is managed, I can count the lines and know how much I have lost, how many items have fallen into the hole. It starts here, then, easy: 1. A. I. An outline of a year and of the things inside of it. One year. After that his anger welled up and I lost him like a punch in the gut, years before I really lost him, years before never going back, years before the tentative reunions, years before the last cigarette. I don’t know where it starts but it never ends, does it, it stays here halfway between the heart and the mouth, where the lungs are, where the breath sticks, here in my throat where I hold him, where I carry him, still as a single second, the first second, his heart in my heart, his mouth in my mouth. I do not believe in Jesus but I believe in him, when I see him in the corner of my mind like a long-distance live video feed connection, coming to me over waves, invisible as poison and real as infrastructure. I do not pray but I say please, God, please. I carry him. I hold him in the light. I offer it up. I do not believe in God but I saw God in him and I see him now in signs in the subway station, in the waves. The list starts easy but it rolls over me and there is not enough paper in the world, there are not enough letters in the alphabet, to itemize how big the hole.
If he had not died I would miss him still, or maybe we would drink tea once or twice a year, or maybe we would have fallen into a different, a more correct kind of love and gotten a dog, or maybe he would hate me now as he did later on. Maybe we would have meant very little to each other, in the long run. If he had not died he would be a boy that I had loved, and not the first. Still he would have been larger than I can tell you, and more beautiful. Still, to me, he would be myth and legend.
It starts long before. It starts in the places we both stood, years before we met. It starts in all the ways we overlapped, all the footprints that touched with infinite layers in between. At the Metropolitan in front of Jasper Johns’ White Flag, hearts empty, eyes open. Halfway up the sand dunes high as mountains, hands on chests, lungs straining, making it to the top maybe, or over and over, or once, or never. At a Whole Foods. In a library. In Cherry Hill. In Highland Park.
Before any of it started I carried him with me without ever knowing it, like a latent irregular cell, footsteps sure as a dance, leading to the first time, the first place, the first second, my feet inside of his and his heart beating electronica, hearts empty, mouths open, hands tensed, breath stuck, lungs straining, blood drawn, ready and waiting. Start it again, here, where I can remember him like this always, young and perfect, famous, a legend. Start it again before anything went wrong. Put it on repeat. Start it again before the door opened, before the song played, before the first sip. Start it at the very end of the last moment before I knew him and everything changed. Let me see him just once now from the beginning, for the first time. Let me hear the first note. Start it over. Start it again. Start it one more time. Start it here. And here. And here. Again. Again. Again.
