A Sunrise I Never Want To See Again - Three Years Ago Today

Three years ago today, my best friend killed himself. If I'd been a better friend, he'd still be alive. He called me two weeks before he died, wanting to talk about some problems he had. I rescheduled because something that I thought was more important came up. I never got the chance to see him again. 

Rob was my best friend. He was there every time I needed him. I failed to be there when he needed me. This is something I will carry always with me. This is shame beyond that which I thought I'd ever know. 

I used to believe myself to be a good, decent man. I still think I am in most respects. I think I do what's right. But I've forfeited my right to claim to be the man I want to be. No matter what I accomplish in the rest of my years, I have to subtract what Rob might have accomplished. Maybe I couldn't have saved him. Maybe it's hubris to think that I could have. But I'll die believing that I could have, and not a day has gone by in the past three years without feeling the weight of my failure.

I believe in personal responsibility. I believe that I am as responsible for the consequences of my failure to act as I am for the consequences of my actions. How can I not? It's in my DNA. It's who I am. I failed in my responsibilities once. I'll never have the opportunity to fix that failure. 

A part of me wishes this would get easier, but I don't deserve it. At least I'm alive to carry this burden. At least I'm alive to keep trying to be the man I want to be.

---

About a year ago, I started working on a novel, The Sound Of Winter. It is a work of fiction, but it's intensely personal; the plot and characters may be fictional, but it's very much fueled by the grief, the anger, and the regret. It will be dedicated to Rob. 

The Sound Of Winter tells the story of a group of friends that, after their friend dies, they decide to take his ashes on a cross-country trip to do all the things he had wanted to do before he died. They end up at Burning Man, where they place his ashes in the Temple as the last act of the story. The prologue is below; it is set the morning after the effigy burn, near the chronological end of the story. The story is then told as a series of flashbacks, as if the protagonist were telling the story to someone else afterwards (so if it seems as if he's addressing someone specifically, he is; the identity of the person he's telling the story to will be revealed later in the book.)

I will finish this novel before the fourth anniversary of his passing. My pen is the only way I have to honor Robert Maner.

Today, as all days, I miss you, my brother.

The Sound of Winter

By Ben Bjostad

The Sound Of Winter by Ben Bjostad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://poeticphoenix.blogspot.com

Prologue

Mind strong, Body strong

Try to find equilibrium

Head straight, screwed on

Been screwed up for too long

I don't want to lean on the waves

I watch the storm evaporate

I think of you in starry skies

I keep you so alive

Let's walk through the fire together

Disappear in the golden sands

It's all in your face I see you break

It's like the sound of winter

The bleeding love, the silent escape

You've got to hang on to yourself

It's like the sound of winter

(Bush-The Sound of Winter)

                This is the beginning of the end of the beginning, or it’s the beginning of the beginning of the end. I don’t know for sure. The future is a darker place than it has ever been before, but I find myself mostly at peace with the shadows, or maybe it’s just that I’ve had to overcome my fear as I’ve learned to accept the two most painful words in the English language.

                If only. If only…

                Autumn has always been my favorite season. The world inexorably begins to ebb, seeking a frozen sleep before the bloom of dawn. As I face my own autumn, the metaphor no longer appeals to me the way it once did. I’m self-cognizant enough to realize that I am not now where I thought I’d be at twenty, and that I can’t imagine where I might be at forty. It doesn’t matter; in my bones, I feel the chill. Winter is coming.

                A ribbon of light creeps over the mountains, and the fire at my back seems somehow less warm, less bright than it was before. Laughter erupts as the artist and his friends chuck more wood into the furnace, and a fresh shower of sparks cascades across the air. To our left, the embers of the Man smolder and crackle; the orgiastic display of the night is slowly dying out as sunrise approaches. Winter is coming.

                A girl I’ve never met puts her hand on my shoulder and when I turn, she hands me a beer, the top already popped off. She smiles, squeezes my shoulder, and floats back to the cluster surrounding the “Timestar,” the metal sculpture currently being stoked by a merry band of pyromaniacs. No words are needed; I take a sip of the beer, light a cigarette, and watch the ribbon of light grow closer, brighter, inching its way into the present.

                Ash walks up and grabs my lighter out of my hand before I could put it in my pocket. We stand in companionable silence for a minute. “He should have been here,” I say quietly, never taking my eyes off the horizon.

                “He is,” Ash says. “He’s been with us every step of the journey.” He lights a cigarette and hands the lighter back; quietly, Bane and Sam walk over from the crowd around the flames. The four of us stand in silence, watching the sun slowly approach, coming back to the reality of the last day of summer. The crowd behind us begins to quiet, humans becoming, reverently greeting the sun. All things come to an end, no matter how much we want to remain in this moment forever, free of everything but the killing burdens of memory.

                I stub out my cigarette in an Altoids tin and slip the tin into my pocket, then shove my hands into the pockets of my jacket for warmth. The sun inches over the horizon, and the night fades to scattered shadows that falter and fade as the fire sparks up. He should have been here I think to myself. I can’t summon the simple faith of Sam, nor the hard-minded realism of Bane; I’m stuck in the middle, wanting desperately to believe that something, some energy, some spirit, some piece of Matty remains with us on this journey. Why did we do this if not for him? I know what awaits me upon my return, the sacrifices we have made to get this far.

                This is the last sacrifice I can make for Matty Wilkins.

                I’ve forfeited my right to anything more.

                It is only the idea that somehow, somewhere, Matty is watching this, watching us, which makes this an act of sacrifice and not indulgence. We should have made this journey years ago, tried harder to hold onto the torch. Have we learned anything? Or will this last act of summer become meaningless as we allow the autumn leaves to wall us off from each other once again?

                This city of light seems subdued by the sun as it rises above the mountain wall protecting us from the real world somewhere out beyond. We each have our own reasons to greet the sun, to emerge from the burn, our chrysalis and redemption.

                I don’t want to emerge. I want to stay in this moment, in the here and now, forever.

                I hear yelling behind us; as if to challenge the supremacy of the daystar, the artists are chucking wood into the sculpture/furnace as fast as they can, and fresh showers of stars explode out of the vents, ashes raining down into the tray mounted on its teeter-totter base.  The bearded man from whose mind the sculpture sprang  has a maniacal grin, cigar clenched between his teeth, appearing determined to use up all the wood they brought to fuel the fire before the sun rises high enough to leave no doubt that burn night is over. Sparks flash higher and higher, but the sun is winning the battle. Everything we have wrought, the fire and the light, cannot challenge the natural rhythm of the stars. We can only hold it at bay for a while.

                The last piece of wood clanks off the edge of the sculpture; laughing, the artist picks it up and throws again, sinking the piece of wood into the furnace. The sculpture sparks for a few more minutes, but the battle is over. In twos and threes, the crowd begins to fade away, trudging back to the city that surrounds us, leaving an empty desert behind.

                “He should have been here,” I say again. This time, Ash just nods. We need no words; as one, we begin to walk back toward the city of light, magic dissipated by the onslaught of the dawn.

#

                It’s been six weeks since I killed my best friend.

                I didn’t pull the trigger. I wasn’t even there. I know, intellectually, that I didn’t kill him; I know that sentence is melodramatic. You can tell me that he made the decision himself, that there was nothing I could have done. You can cite all the suicide statistics and platitudes you goddamn well want to, but that won’t help me sleep at night. I should have known. I should have been there for him, the way he was always there for me.

                It’s been six weeks since Matty Wilkins blew the top of his head, his mind, and his soul all over the ceiling and door of his stepdad’s garage. 

#

                Immortality has a time limit. We were once invincible, but when dawn came, so did the toll for the nights when we were kings and gods. We believed in a future greater than ourselves, a future in which we would rearrange the stars to carve out our names in the fabric of the universe itself. We were the outcasts, the homeless, the lonely. We were beautiful.

                We would sit on the roofs of houses or in cars on long rides or in the food court at the mall, talking about photography and physics, novels and politics, hip-hop and hallucinogens. We were gonzo intellectuals and suburban wannabe gangsters, as comfortable arguing over Dylan Thomas as we were selling ecstacy in the corner of a club. We’d sleep our way through dead end jobs and rendezvous at night in front of a pair of turntables, dancing, screaming, dropping another hit of X or another tenstrip of acid, celebrating the angels and demons of our youth. Do a line to get through the dawn, make the long drive to the afterparty, hook up with someone, pass out, wake up, and repeat the process.

                It was in this way that we bonded. It was in this way that we became a family, a tribe, fiercely loyal and bound by chains of iron and gold.

                Later on, we were doing a lot less X and a lot more crystal meth. We became DJs and promoters. We hustled. Flip took the rap for a busted deal and went to prison. Ray-Ray joined the Army to get his head on straight. We’d almost all flunked out of college. None of us could hold a job.

                Sara went to rehab so often we renamed her Detox. Too many of us did. Not enough of us got clean.

                Somehow, we all made it through those days. Somehow, we survived.

                The stars still shine in the same places as they always have. A decade later, the fire has died out for so many of us. Immortality is a forgotten word.

                We burned so bright, suns that we thought would never go nova, but every fire must someday die. We thought they never would. As we got our lives in order, had kids and went back to college and found careers, we slowly drifted apart. Under the harsh light of the dawn, our frailties were unmasked; we were judged and found wanting, titans cast back down to Earth.

                Doc Clue was murdered in 2006 in a parking garage at school, a botched robbery, wrong place, wrong time. RJ contracted HIV and died of kidney failure a year later. Splendor, after four stints in rehab, finally got her shit straight and was working as a paralegal; they never found the man who raped and murdered her as she was running in Piedmont Park. Brenda, who had once been Brandon, died in a housefire; the autopsy showed she was unconscious when the fire consumed her, a few too many oxycotin, a faulty wire setting her trailer home aflame.

                We thought we made it through, but fate has a long memory. Destiny was hiding in the long grass, waiting until we thought we were safe to make its move. We were never built to handle the onslaught of daylight.

                Fuck your logic. Fuck your reassurance. I'm no stranger to grief. I know nothing is forever. But this is not something to work through. It’s not something you smooth over with a few words of wisdom on Facebook. This is a sunrise I never want to see again, harsh light casting shadows on everything I once thought was true. This is being chained to a wall, a crow coming back to peck out my eyes over and over and over again.

                It’s been six weeks since I killed my best friend. I’d like to see you work through that, you judgmental son of a bitch.

---

I may post chapter one later on today. Not sure if I'm ready yet.