To S.

I found this drawing in an old sketch book I hadn't remembered for over seven years. We unearthed it from the bottom of a closet at my dad's house yesteday. It's a picture I drew after coming home from a friend's funeral. He hung himself on Christmas Eve when I was twenty years old. He was my first kiss. He was

so

beautiful.

I don't want to tell you about him. I don't want to give him to you. It isn't because I hate you, I just don't know how I could. Remember when we were sitting in the dark and you gave me that story about the man with his dead daughter's name tattooed on his arm that you met in California? This is the story I wanted to tell you in exchange for that one.

This picture was the way I saw his mother when I walked in to say goodbye to him. All my hometown boys were standing around looking stunned and no one was speaking. My knees buckled at the door when I saw him from afar- the black suit, the stiff hands, the bloated neck. Ebony walked in with me and when she saw him she started wailing, "I guess this is it, C. This is it."

His mother was guarding his casket with such dignity- the stone face of a sphinx or a sentry- daring anyone to judge her or her son, God help them, God help him.

I said hello to her and gave her a hug. I said I was so, so sorry. Her eyes were glazed with high and razor sharp with something I have never felt, and hopefully never will. I said, "I'm Jessica," and before I could continue she said, "I know you are. I know all C's friends." It wasn't unkind, but it stunned me. She was a good mother and he was a good boy, she said without saying. This is always what parents say at suicide funerals. "He was a good boy." I have been to several.

But her eyes were so powerful. It was as if she was standing with him and we couldn't see him and she was preparing herself to walk with him through a long cave to another world and there, she would say goodbye to her heart, her womb, her everything. It was as if the Catholic church we all grew up in had said no, they wouldn't perform the service because suicides are damned and she said, ok, then I am damned, everything she ever was canceled out. I will never forget it.

I can't imagine what a mother loses when her child dies, when he kills himself. Her mind? That's just where the losing starts and that's if her body is merciful. I imagine it is as if your entire life is sucked backwards into thin air with a slick, quick sound. A terrible sound.

The first time I ever climbed your stairs I had a vision so profound and distinct of a young man who had shot himself in your smoking room. Remember I told you that? Every time I climbed those stairs I saw him dead in the corner and felt the heavy weight of his sadness and you said, no way, no one ever died in the house and no guns would ever come in in the future. You said no way, but it still made me shake and sweat and feel nauseous every time I climbed up to come get you to watch a movie or to go to sleep or to just make sure you weren't od'ing.

And remember the time at the top of those stairs when I blew you for a half hour because you said you couldn't come when you were high and I was so determined? You laid back and your ab muscles clenched your beautiful body into such symmetry I was scared- scared of what beauty like that could do to a woman's heart. When it wasn't working, I laid on my belly and you climbed on my back and I knew you always fantasized about coming on a woman's face, so I twisted mine toward you and pulled my hair up, an invitation. You said that as soon as you understood the signal, you blew. Funny thing was, most of it ended up in my hair and not on my face and we laughed about this. As we sat in the dark afterward talking, the moonlight from the window on our bare skin, I felt the back of my head and the hair was matted thick with come and I became so silent. You asked me what was wrong and I said I just had a thought, a very sick one. You asked me what it was and I told you: I imagined that the come was blood and I was a dead boy with my brains shot out.

We laughed, a little disturbed, but not entirely because we both enjoyed sick, random thoughts and you were pleased that I had I shared it with you. Something about it turned me on- who knows? I'm a Scorpio and we love scary things. But soon the sexual energy wore off and I was just wondering what the hell it meant. I went to bed touching the back of my head and I didn't wash my hair for days because I needed to feel that ghost and what he was telling me.

After C's funeral I said fuck the church and painted a picture of an Angel tearing through time and space and sky in a rush of wings and other-worldly screams to catch him where he was falling fast out of his body and into the darkness. I painted this angel screaming and lifting him up and out of there into blinding light of unconditional love. I wanted to give it to his mother, but I never did. I regret it and maybe now it is just too late. It hurts to remember. When my grandmother died a few years later, her headstone was, by chance, right next to his and this gave me so much comfort. I like to think I made it happen- her watching over him forever, like I conjured that shit out of cheap acrylic paints mixed with tears that night I painted my angel.

I don't know what we do to get through our lives, S, but we get through them. We talked a lot about the pain of seeing our parents look small or feel embarassed. This was a metaphor for us of one of the worst kinds of ways to feel and neither of us could bare it.

Just imagine your mother if you hurt yourself. Imagine what that would do to her and then don't do it. Ever.

Imagine her if you live. Imagine her shock (please, live) if she knew you came in my hair.