You were the centerpiece of the morgue. They – a term I used for all the other people that populated my life – placed you on the metal slab and left your chest open – exposed. We gathered around your body like it was a Thanksgiving dinner.
I’m sure someone even said grace.
I’d never considered what happened to our bodies when we died. My focus was always on the interstitial space of soul and afterlife and where we ended up; it was never on the body.
I was surprised when I saw how they emptied you out. It was always something I thought I would get to do. It was just another thing someone beat me to. You beat me to death. They beat me to taking the parts of you that were important.
“What would you like to do with her?” The mortician or coroner or whoever they were asked.
I imagined how they moved your body around after it was dead. Did they wrap you up in a plastic sheet? Did they stuff you in the back of a truck like something I’d need to keep track of in the future?
These were the things you forced me to consider.
“What do I want to do with her?” I repeated. “Bring her back.”
“We can’t do that,” they said.
“I know,” I said. “I’m not fucking stupid.”
* * *
I watched you from the kitchen as you got high on the balcony. That had become our lives. I used to get high with you on the balcony and in the backseats of cars and inside of restrooms at bars. I gave up chasing – the high and you. I assumed you wanted me to be better than that. On the balcony, there was just a plume of smoke and morning sunlight. It was just you leaning backward in a plastic chair that had rust in the aluminum along the base. The chair was just waiting to give into the pressure of your weight. It was ready to fall apart.
“Breakfast,” I yelled at the sliding glass door that separated our worlds.
Coming, you mouthed back.
I just kept waiting and watching. In so many ways, I’d hoped you would come in from the smoke, from the balcony, and be a different person. That was the problem with my kind of Magic 8-Ball love: I wanted real answers, but I was easily satisfied by the platitudes we offered up.
“It’s nice out,” you said as the sliding glass door opened. “Especially for the morning.”
“Are you ever going to give that up?” I asked. I motioned toward the balcony and the cluster of smoke that clung to the cast iron railing.
“Don’t get there,” you said.
* * *
At your funeral, everyone gathered to mourn or cope or pretend; it was hard for me to stomach it all. You’d left me with a head wound, blinded eyes, and a tongue that couldn’t lick the salt away.
I stayed away from the belly of the beast; instead, I chose to meander around the outskirts of the church. I clung to the stained-glass that made my hands seem less bloody. The stained-glass faded the sunlight and dulled the sharpness of the nights that were to come.
I tried to pretend not to notice the people that pointed their fingers at me right before they pantomimed our names. I was a criminal in a police line-up to the funeral goers; I was only there to be identified as someone who had lost.
When your parents came for me, and came for answers, after the service had ended, I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell them. I didn’t think it would be the truth. At the entrance, the mouth of the church, my hands tugged on strangers’ hands, as your parents massaged my skin for answers.
“Uncharacteristic of you,” your father said.
“You’ve never been this quiet,” your mother said.
“She told me I talk too much.”
“That’s something she would’ve thought about you,” your mother said.
“That’s something she would’ve said to you,” your father said.
I let the amens and the prayers for you go in one ear and out through the other. There wasn’t anything left to save. It’d all burned up; it was all drugged up and dug down deep-deep-deep into the mud. But when I stood there with your parents, I decided to fight the good fight for you.
I wanted to tell your parents they were to blame; they hadn’t noticed the warning signs, right? They didn’t notice the bloodstains and bruises along your legs and thighs. They had a chance to help you before it got bad.
I wanted to tell them it was all your fault.
I didn’t. I didn’t want them to agree with you. I wouldn’t talk too much.
So, in your honor, I did nothing, right?
* * *
I stripped down after the funeral. I wore a white undershirt and a pair of gray sweatpants. I kept the lights off. As I tried to sleep on the couch, I turned on “Twin Peaks.” I thought I’d misremembered the point of the show – who the characters were.
I thought I’d misunderstood Laura Palmer. I thought you were supposed to be my Laura Palmer – and you always contended I didn’t know what that meant. To me, Laura was the apple of the eternal eye, the pit of the peach, and the too sweet to stomach. Like you, Laura was the patron saint of how I wanted things to be.
But that’s not all Laura Palmer was.
She was a sexually abused child. She was a drug user. She prostituted herself to survive. And she died without sense – senselessly – and no one ever got the answers they wanted out of her.
That’s the duality of life and of death. Laura Palmer wasn’t good, and she wasn’t bad. For all the beauty she put out into the universe, she took just enough of the ugly to keep herself whole. That’s a delicate balance; a needle I wouldn’t be able to thread.
In between Laura Palmer’s scenes, I’d look out at the balcony. I hoped to see your head bobbing past, and the smoke trailing after you. I thought you’d be sagging into the seat of the plastic chair waiting for another drag.
Waiting for another hit.
You were never there – on the balcony. You’d never be there. All you left me with was the real Laura Palmer and the mystery of how we were all so easily corrupted.
Mathew Serback‘s debut book will be available through ELJ Editions in late 2017. Meanwhile, you can find his poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in [[PANK]], filling station, Crack the Spine, and many other terrific publications.
–Foreground Art by Claudio Parentela
–Background Image 1 by J Stimp
–Background Image 2 by Thomas H