I read my old diaries casually this morning, when I had nothing better to do than sink into myself. All the frayed wires of those same electric phrases. The sun has consumed us as one. I felt the burn of the body’s betrayal. My heartbeats are aftershocks.

Something sweeping. Something about light and longing and swimming. I remember feeling that way: suspended and unstoppable. Gigantic and everywhere. In love with four girls all at once, and certain that any one of them could have steadied the hand I’d wrapped around my trigger of a heart. Seeing a street as the sea, and a crosswalk as a teetering rope bridge. This city was epic and insurmountable, and I was its fearless explorer, claiming its every mountaintop in the name of–what?

But I had become my own Aristophanes; the bar was set impossibly high, and I’d put it there myself. And after some shiver-shake withdrawals, I’m facing the city in the cold, swinging, dim light of sobriety, and all the quiet deprivation and disappointment that comes along with it. I can’t seem to see anything well enough to know where it ends and I begin.

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A fantastic find tonight: someone made a fan video for one of my brother’s songs. The song is called “In a Jar,” and my brother is Christopher Harrison. Enjoy:

In a Jar from elrobozo on Vimeo.

And here’s his band, Le Switch (he’s on bass):

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Every time I taste lipstick, I think of you, which made me feel powerful and you seem shortsighted. I remember leaving you sadly. In spite of everything, I was certain I’d missed some epic opportunity with you. I remember that year as synechdochic, part standing for a simulacrum whole.

And suddenly it’s three years later. Today, I was closer to my perfect body, to my sainted self than I’ve ever been, and then you called. A static buzz and an interruption in conversion of life and vows of stability. The smoke and overheat of remembering your slanted ceiling in winter. The shattering backfire of your question, loud as it was then. Close as my passenger seat in the rain. The white roar between call and response.

I will do what you ask me to do because of how I feel about you.

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“Do something difficult, just one fucking time!”

A beat of feeling my face redden. I was no less angry, and it was no less true, but I felt the rising tide of my realization of the severity and intensity of what I’d said.

It took nine conversations to drain the residue from my dirty mouth. It wasn’t until the tenth that I found an audience with the prophet I’m learning to love. He offered the gentle, generous truth that people are stupid, sweet and sad. He knows us as a breed destined to become strays, but maybe stray together. He holds us against the warm light of the projector and dutifully recites what he sees there.

And then it was so quiet, and I was calmer than I’d ever been. From birth, my head would whir and overheat, break down like my straining body. And then, so suddenly, white noise. Nothing disappeared, and no oasis wished itself into being. Everything was real and solid and soft and I knew what to want.

If my prayer be not humble, make it so.

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I am incurably blue these days, heavily, ineptly waltzing through lopsided days in my cumbersome skin. I come home to the sinking feeling of underachievement and wake to the shallow breath of too much left. I read the flourescent poems on the bus home each day; I watch your calls come up on the telephone and let the water rise in my fast-filling voicemail. There is a fist that holds nothing, hits nothing, but still never releases. When did I become such a disappointing iteration of your hopes? And when did I first haunt myself with so many specters to prove away?

When my father first got hearing aids, he was angry with everything, and he’d never say why. When he returned them, the audiologist told him that they didn’t need adjusting, he did. “You’ve become accustomed to your quiet world.” So maybe that’s me, too. I didn’t anticipate needing this much courage to take a phone call, or stand up in the morning.

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A memory of you, writ large. A picture of you flashed on the wall, too bright, too translucent. A sweet, blurry ghost. Someone drew you wrong. Someone who didn’t know you enough drew you wrong. Things are so difficult now, and after years of thinking of you briefly and fondly, I’m stranded in the thick of my grief for you. It’s a sinkhole, growing steadily for years now. All from one stupid, cumbersome picture.

I need some courage from you now. You, the real you, not the sinking bones on an overgrown hill. Not a photograph of you, or a tape of your voice. The you that breathes and talks and catches me. The you that chokes up unexpectedly, that swears like a sailor, that swings hard, that speaks confidently. This is the steady settling in of what I was always afraid would come to pass: I can’t make it without you.

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I drove to Kalama and back, just to shut myself away with the feelings I haven’t had time for. I turned up the radio as high as it would go: I’m an animal; you’re an animal, too. Sang my oasis tears to life; called the devil by his proper name.

I missed my mother, for real this time. I remembered my grandfather and thought of him–the fact of him, the flesh of him, the heavy hole where he was–for the first time in months. I let the weight of my brother (the flatline dialtone) hang in the air like humidity, breathed it in.

I hadn’t left all this in the hopes of wishing it away. No–I’d held onto it, held and rationed it like halloween candy. Because I know that when your heart breaks, it breaks open, like a pomegranate or an anemone, and everything inside it is hungry and soft and free. And now that sweet and gentle has opened just enough for me to leave, and I will. I own every bell that tolls me.

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