i try and imagine you in your hospital bed. what are hospitals like in cambodia? i close my eyes, and picture white walls, green outside the window, and you - you skinnier than when you left, the respirator on your face, your hair maybe longer than the last time i saw you.
the last time i saw you, you were swearing because you couldn’t find dan, and you were supposed to be at the airport “half a fucking hour ago”.
my pride couldn’t let me ask you to stay again. i’d already asked twice.
i keep my eyes closed and imagine your shallow breath, the movement of your chest. imagination changes to memory: the end of fall, 2008. your garage. you and i at one in the morning, laying naked under a blanket, staring at the christmas lights strung from the rafters.
you lit my cigarette for me, then lit your own. you were so much taller than me, your arm wrapped all the way around my waist, holding me to your side. you rested the ashtray on your stomach, and we laughed about how much like an indie film it all felt like, boards of canada playing on in the background.
i loved you. i loved you, and when you heard that i did from lolita, your precious lolita, you asked me. i laughed. i thought i was going to die from the aching in my ribcage, but the aching wasn’t from laughing hard and forced.
“you’re my best friend,” i said. “of course i love you.”
my love wasn’t enough to stop you from overdosing a month later, from dying and being resurrected by paramedics and defibrillators. “you’re like jesus,” i told you. “you died and came back.”
i wonder if you’re going to come back this time. you’re in a coma far from home. you were far, and i couldn’t be there to tell you to take a smaller dose, to quit for a while or to focus on work.
you were everything to me, that night in the garage. and on nuit blanche, holding your coat sleeve and trudging down the museum stairs at 7 am as we saw our last exhibit and the night finally wrapped up.
i could not save you this time. i can’t, now. you probably won’t ever even come home. i imagine a hospital room with white walls, and green outside the windows, and you with a respirator on your face, your shallow breaths.
i imagine your funeral. i imagine your mother, your brothers. i imagine flowers, an empty coffin. i imagine what we all say to each other. “he was good, but he was lost, and he didn’t want to be found.”
i imagine thinking, not saying, suicide slowly, over years, is still suicide. you cannot stop a train wreck if it’s five hundred miles an hour or just five.
i imagine trying not to cry in a black dress, but when i open my eyes and i’m in my room again, my face is already wet.
(frankih.)
