Ghost Story – 12/25/2001

"We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly". 

Unknown

 

We went to P’s. P is a friend of my mum’s, and used to be our neighbour. B is her son and has been a life long friend to my brother & I.  We were always tight. My brother Marty and B shared poetry, sex, drugs & music. We shared drawing, reading & writing. I only use the word brilliance in reference to B. No one has set my mind on fire the way he has.

 

B lost his dad when he was about 14. At about that time he started smoking dope. I remember a time when I was about 15; we went swimming across the river & back. We then went to the river pool & went skinny-dipping. The following year, we started to exchange letters. I still have everything that he has written to me, cryptic little ditties. We always had a head connection.

 

The night of my 18th I went home with B. I was tired & drunk. We slept on his mother’s loungeroom floor. It was long, slow & delicious. I awoke throughout the night & he was kissing me all over with wet soft kisses. We only slept together a few times. I think I wanted more to happen on one level. I adored him. At the same time, he frightened me.

 

I was self-conscious and straight. B had a dangerous quality; he would immerse him into any type of situation. I was trying to live the life of a saint & he was living a life of excess & abandon. B started using heroin. That part of his life is kind of a blur to me. I think I have buried it. The thing that I can vaguely remember is that he had a relationship with an older guy, R. I seem to remember that R was sick but B felt tenderly about him. He also started to live a street life. He was caught stealing, a bag snatch & has a criminal record. I think he traveled through Asia with R.

 

I remember one time he came home & a dealer arrived at the door & smashed out his two front teeth. B overdosed on countless occasions however succumbed to the grace of paramedics who always managed to find him. He turned up at my place once & asked me if he could stay over. I was frightened & turned him away.

 

He came over another time & we sat up all night. We talked about Frederick Nietzche’s book "Beyond Good & Evil". I had just bought this painting from a yard sale; it was of a woman, like an icon, her eyes pointing to the heavens. I remember we had a strange experience. He was telling me this story about how he & my brother had dropped a trip & had become lost in the bush. They felt a presence, were overcome by fear & my brother had started praying out loud & casting out bad spirits, "In the name of the blood". As he started to tell this story, I am not sure whether it was that we were both so scared or whether a presence did enter.

 

It was about 4am & the room started to take on a purplish aura. I remember looking at the uplifted eyes of the icon, which now took on a menacing quality. A shadow started to descend upon us & I could hear my pulse thudding & both of us hyperventilating. It seemed that the room had a pulse & a breath of its own. He started screaming, "Get out of here, get out of this house right now, leave us alone!" I let out a frightened moan. B became more animated, "I told you to leave us alone, get out of this house, you’re not welcome!"

 

There were a few minutes of pure panic & terror & watching B screaming. We both sat on my couch paralysed with fear. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to stay or leave. We sat together, waiting for the sun to rise. That was the longest 2 hours of my life.

 

Marty came over & I told him about it. He said, "You shouldn’t be reading that book. It is written by the dogarse (his word for the devil)". He burnt it in the sink & threw the remains into the bin. He smashed the icon into smithereens & s

aid, "Thou shalt not make graven images". He then walked around the flat, casting out the devil, speaking in tongues".

 

B & I have seen each other a few of times over the last 10 years. The first time at Marty’s funeral. He wrote a beautiful letter to me about him. He then moved back home, is now on methadone & uses heroin 1 – 2 times a week. He has worked in a fruit shop for the past 8 years.

 

They are the kind of people that take advantage of the fact that B finds it hard to get any other employment because of his record. They employ him casually even though he works 14 hours a day, 6 days a week. No sick or annual leave pay. If he takes two days off & they call it a holiday.

 

B is living with his mum & his partner C. I liked her. She is beautiful, gregarious & has a loud stupid laugh like me. I could tell that she is good for him, he seemed a bit embarrassed. I was conscious of how she might feel about me being there. Although she is probably not aware of our history, it is evident that we fit together like an intricate puzzle. I tried hard to be straight down the line, no behaviour that could be construed as flirting. We talked for the first time about my social anxiety. He didn’t scoff, he understood. He said that social anxiety is what had prevented him from finishing many attempts at an education, changing jobs & making friends.

 

I told him that something that he had said to me the last time I had seen him had made an impression on me. That is, that people were always trying to reform him. He said that he just wanted people to understand that heroin was a part of him.

 

He said that he had since thought about trying to stop. However, he knew that even to work as hard as he does whilst addicted was a battle. He knows that to get completely off heroin that he needs to take some time off to dry out.

 

I told him that this was the first time in 10 years that I had heard him speak of the future. I felt a sense that he must be feeling a tad of a hope, that it had been so long since his criminal offence that he might find other type of work.

 

He said something touching, "Well I think like this when I talk with someone who understands me". I will treasure that. That is better than love as far as I see it & that is exactly how I feel about him. Although we will probably never be together again, I know that B is the closest thing to a soul mate that I have ever had.

I wrote that nearly five years ago in my first diary here. My last entry in this diary about B, Sobering, showed how naive I was about the true extent of his drug addiction and that he did make it off drugs eventually. In this entry I talked about my fear that he would try to take his life as it was so hard for him to re-enter a normal life.

"The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility."
E.M. Cioran

I found out yesterday that he did attempt suicide on Friday, taking a horde of anti-epileptic medication. He was released yesterday, even though I know he will be looking for another more sure fire way to die. I have tried to contact him but he is not answering.

"Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren’t in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life."
Vaclav Harvel.

I feel truly powerless.