Survivor’s Guilt

Here is something I wrote at a different time. I am posting it now because Valentine’s Day. It was clearly written in June, and two years ago, but I wanted to share it here now.

The body remembers what the head ignores and forgets. I have been moody all day, and I had no idea what the cause was. I figured it was just me being a tool. It happens to the best of us really, and I am not really the best of us.

Turns out, it is just annual worst day of my life day. No big deal really right? If you are reading this, it means I have decided to post what I am writing about the past. I sometimes like to leave that shit where it belongs, and sometimes I like to bring it out and let it bleed so that the scab will grow over it and scars can form. Maybe this is a way of scarring over the sadness. Scars make us stronger right? They are the proof that we survived a trauma and have come through it with learned behaviours that will lead to better survival chances, right?

Think about that time you said to that friend, “watch this!” Then you did something stupid and you almost died. A scar is left to remind you not to do that again, and thus, your chance of survival has increased.

That is a story about adolescence, and this isn’t that kind of story.

This is a love story.

In the sense that one needs to place blame for everything in their life so that they don’t have to take any personal responsibility for their actions, or the consequences thereof; I will blame others for this mess.

Picture if you will, a young headstrong boy. He has been on his own for a little bit, unless you count his roommate. They have created a thriving little enterprise in pharmaceuticals distribution. Small business ownership can be a pressure cooker.

One day, the young man, we will call him Dave Notme…..ok fine, we will call him me. Anyway, so I am hanging out at home when I should be at school. It`s a warm day in early June, so I am just chillin`with my homies, as they say.

A young lady named Martha comes in and says her sister wants to meet us. She wants to buy weight.

Normally, this is one of those discussions that makes a person feel uncomfortable. A pretty usual trick of the police is to catch a little fish and get them to introduce the big fish to their “cousin” from out of town. We told her to invite her sister to a party we were having on Friday night. She did. We had some serious delusional thinking about our value at the time. Small fish always think they are something special, but I digress.

The next day I remember like few other days. The first thing that happened was that our apartment, the shack in the alleyway, instantly smelled like pacculli. I was kind of upset because that was hippy smell. Next, the girl walked in. She did not disappoint either. She was wearing an olive green tank top, and ripped jeans. Her hair was in a pony tail, and she was beautiful. Brown hair, green eyes, and perfect design for the budding teenage fantasy.

She was a year older than myself, so that made it all naughty and fetishy.

I’d like to say she immediately threw herself at me in a fit of pure wanton lust, but that isn’t the case. She did start talking with me on a regular basis. She would come over, hang out, get high and shoot the shit.

Eventually that didn’t cut it, and we started hanging out away from the others. One of our favourite things was to go to the park off Augusta and Baldwin and hang out on the swing set and just talk, especially at night.

We flirted. A lot. Not that cheap little teenage flirtation of two people who don’t know how to close the deal, but that flirtation of two people who would rather be making the love. Well, that is how I thought anyway, she may have had other ideas, who knows. It’s that type of flirting that dares you to create the awkward silent moment. That one moment in time where you look at each other and dare each other to kiss.

Thing is, I never closed the deal. We were always dating someone else.

Many things came in to and out of our lives over the next couple of years, but she was a constant. At this point, I finally told Joanne that I loved her. She was too distraught over the disappearance of a boyfriend to listen. At least that was my hope. I hoped she wasn’t just making it up so she wouldn’t have to reject me. Looking back, I see that it could very well have been that she just wasn’t that in to me.

We stayed friends. I would hold her when her dad beat her. I would comfort her when she was sad, I would laugh at her bad puns. I even let her use my shower, even though she used some hippy shampoo that smelled like well, I think we know the smell I hate by now.

She would spend a lot of nights at my place. And we were the bestest of friends.

Then these fools we were beefing with destroyed her. They found her out late one night and took their time, and turns, on her.

There are some sights that are forever etched on to the back of a person’s eyelids. Some sights that you cannot drink or drug away. Some memories that will be with you for the rest of your life.

The look in her eyes that night when I opened my door is one of those images.

I have always loved Joanne’s eyes. They sparkled with a light that just read mischief and fun. Despite all of the beatings she took for her sisters, the men who mistreated her, and the system that forgot her, she had a fire in her eyes. She was a fighter, a winner. This sparkle was dead that night. Her eyes were vacant, dark, distressed. She looked as much through me as at me.

It would take several hours to find out what had happened. Several days to get the full picture. I spent every moment of the next two weeks with her. Holding her, feeding her, listening, or just letting it be silent. Today, and this just made me say holy shit in my head, is the 22nd anniversary of the start of those two weeks.

It was decided that she should move away. Go somewhere safe. My heart was crushed. The woman I loved was leaving me.

She was moving down to Florida to be with an aunt, or was it an uncle in Atlanta. I can never remember these things. Anyway, after everything died down, say about two weeks, she called me.

I remember the life in her voice. She was full of joy and excitement. I thought she would be sad, but the truth is, she wasn’t. At first this hurt me. To think that getting away would have saved her and made her happy even though she no longer had me, for a moment at least, cut through my heart. How could she be happy without me?

Turns out, she couldn’t.

She told me she loved me and she wanted to come home to be with me. She said she was leaving right away.

My love was coming!

She never made it. Her ride, a drunk,  had crashed the car. She died then and there. My love was gone.

Those two days were the happiest two days of my life though. The time between when she called, and when we got the message.

I spent those two days in love, and loved.

I knew Joanne for only three years, and I have not known her for 22 years; yet, somehow, someway, things are still so very real inside my body. They are so real that I can feel them across two decades. I can feel them without even thinking about them. The joy of true friendship, of the safety of a confidant that sends waves of warmth pulsating out from your chest. Waves that slowly coalsce in to pools that settle and heat and calm. The feeling of a whole where a person should be. A pit that cries in anger, and fear, and hunger.

There is a part of me that asks the question, why should this person hold sway over me?

I think it is because I did love her. Not in the I want to sex you up sense, but rather in the acceptance of anouther’s being sort of way. It would have been very easy for me to just toss my heart into the trash on this and a few other occasions, and maybe for a few years I did. It has only been in the last seven or eight years that I have begun to feel for others with my heart rather than think for them with my head.

My intention was to write something profound about lost love and found love and refeelings. I am not sure I did that. I wanted to, but I might not have the words to convey the change and normalize it across the spectrum of human experience. I did find the words to describe my experience. I even did it somewhat flippantly. I want to say though that while a part of me will always mourn the loss of Joanne, I am still here, still loving people. Others have had experiences that make my life look like a privilaged boat cruise, but I know for a fact that my experiences are survivable.

I know that people can come out the other side of heartbreak and find happiness. Maybe that is all the message I have left in me on this issue. To wallow in the loss, and to not move on is to betray what she did mean to me. To not live life now and to embrace all of the people who mean something to me, or to worse yet, harden my heart against friends, new and old, would be to succumb to the bitterness of survivor’s guilt (roll credits) and not know the excitement that is a new friend, the joy that is sharing yourself with close friends, and the bliss that is loving anouther whole heartedly. She was all of those things, and I will remember what I felt for her, as I feel those things again for new people.

I owe her that much. I owe me that much.

So do you.