Suicide

I found a short poem I had written last summer and decided to turn it into a piece. Here it is…

I never feel like running away, escaping my “world” for a day. Except when there is water. I think it’s something about the fear and unknown that lies underneath that black satin water-top that puts me somewhere on the edge of comfort and fright.

My brother-in-law is from a small town in southern Italy with rolling hilltops that blend right in with the coast. Outside his beach house balcony I look to the right and see gently sloping mountains covered with patches of bushy round trees, chunks of brown land where it is too dry. To the left is the vastness of sea, so clear it blends in with the sky above, a sheet of water and space outlined by the faintest horizon. It feels as though if I jump into that water, I’ll be carried into space, an outer world that I do not know.

The path to the beach is straight down, a sweltering hot road that curves steeply to the water’s rim. The sound of waves crashing into the seafloor’s edge divides coast from water. I feel the weight of gravity pulling me down, the pressure on every joint and bend in my body. I cannot sense the weightlessness I am about to feel.

Mediterranean winds wind through the multicolored pebbles. My toes curl up into the soles of my feet trying to avoid the scorching rocks. I wait until I’m so hot the sweat beads return the moment I wipe my forehead with the towel. My body feels like a rash--red and irritated, itchy with frustration. It only takes minutes before I head to the water, the immense body of weightlessness calling me in.

I go all the way under. The water feels like satin sheets billowing down around me from all directions, my hair swelling out like a heavenly seaweed patch. The sea, not dark, welcomes me into its underworld. For a moment I am obsessed with escaping, leaving behind everything I know and understand, everything past the edge where this water portal meets land. I swim along the top of the water, eagerly scanning the seafloor of its coral and rock and inhabitants. There is no direction but out. Every now and then I feel a need to turn back, a second of fear that engulfs me. Then leaves quicker than it came, and I keep going.

I am independent out here, my chest gliding along the glossy waters, my freckled back exposed to the sun, heating every droplet as they descend down my crevices and curves. My lanky arms and legs stretch outward, limp though sturdy as they sink below, fighting nothing but the buoyancy of water. For a moment, every point of pressure in my body is released, a euphoria of sorts enters my mind. I feel high and exhausted at the same time.

I want to keep going, let it all go,
drifting deeper,
lighter,
like falling driftwood too heavy for its drifter or a sinking ship too treacherous for its captain. To feel the sanded seafloor hug my cheek, imprinting my outline forever, completely alone and sheltered by the sea. To feel like dying.

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City

I read a short story the other day by a Brazilian writer, Guimaraes Rosa. It was about a boy whose father walks out of the house one day, gets into a boat and sails out to the middle of the sea. From the shoreline, everyone from the town can see him, sitting there in his tiny boat, waiting. He stays out there for many years and often the boy sneaks food out to him, hoping to convince him to come home, but more so wanting to make sure he stays alive. The boy grows old. He stays home; he doesn’t marry nor leave with the rest of his broken-hearted family because he can’t bear to abandon his father. One day, when the boy’s hair has turned gray and his father’s even grayer, the boy hollers out to him to come home and offers to take his father’s place in the boat. The father stands up and waves, the first and only acknowledgment the boy has received from his father since the day he left. Without knowing why, the boy immediately turns and runs away.

I couldn’t help thinking about this story when I came to the end of Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a memoir revolving around his father’s life and the life he leads as a homeless man’s son. From the first chapter, I felt immediately “in” with the narrator. His internal reflection cries out in a unique, witty, and somewhat bitter tone that hides nothing under the surface and yet slowly unveils a deeper voice throughout the chapters. The short and almost “snapshot” chapters were lively and candid and made for a fast moving yet compelling read. Flynn’s clever chapter titles are mostly one-worded and obvious like “shelter” or “photogenic,” but others are personal and lyrical like “the piss of god” or “vodka, stamps, flowers.” They seem reminiscent of the moments in Flynn’s life, short and on the edge of memory, yet pivotal in the way that they shaped him.

Flynn’s voice was evocative and honest; I often felt swept away to a place he visited in his life, whether bobbing in his Chris-Craft boat named “evol” in Provincetown or getting hammered on the pier with his “gangster” co-workers. Although Flynn’s memoir does not revolve significantly around place, the moments he does take his readers to one, there is a powerful connection between his inner reflection and his surroundings. For example, one of my favorite sections was when he is alone on his boat a quarter mile offshore, and he is forced to see the boat and the water for what it really means to him: “…somehow reluctant to move back onto land, feeling that land itself is a temporary state, a transition. Living on water quiets my mind…The boat has becomes supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway…that I can drift out of sight of land makes twisted sense, in line with my internal weather.” I admire his ability to weave in emotional reflection in a non-sentimental no-need-to-feel-sorry-for-me (something he does that I love) kind of way. Yet, I can feel for him and recognize his vulnerability without him having to scream it from the page.

Like Lori Jakiela, Flynn refers to a similar sense of “grounding” himself on land, but instead of being grounded between airplane flights, he stops on land while traveling by boat or motorcycle. Flynn touches down to earth with the soles of his feet while flying down the highway on his motorcycle and he docks on land while traveling at sea. I think Flynn does an amazing job of threading in this search for “grounding” as well as this search for where he is going.

The heart of this memoir to me lies in the complicated relationship between Flynn and his homeless father. Father and son have always held an intense expectation, one that assumes generalizations involving extensions of one another, genetic inheritance, like father like son, you are your old man, pride, and strength along with many others. Flynn touches on this inherent need to stay connected with the man in his life no matter what the circumstances. In that sense, he is like the boy in the Brazilian narrative, obsessed with staying close to his father, yet determined to break free from him, to take all the good of his father with him and find a way to turn it into his own.

I commend Flynn for his ability to bring his father’s character into the memoir, through his physical description, actions and most importantly the italics he puts his father’s words in. I wonder if he actually remembers much of this dialogue, or if he created what he thought his father would say based on his character. A couple chapters confused me, and I wonder Flynn’s thought process for them. The “fuckin gonuts” chapter and the “santa lear” chapter threw me off a little. But I appreciated so much Flynn’s new and creative way to approach a memoir, like with the “thirteen random facts” and “riddle” chapters. I learned so much about taking risks and being bold in writing just by reading this memoir.

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Write What's in Front of You.

I am sitting at my desk.

A matted painting of a hummingbird poking its long beak into the core of a lipstick-red flower. It’s still in its plastic wrap, the watercolor that is. My husband and I bought it on our honeymoon in the Bahamas, as a souvenir, at a small picture shop in Marsh Harbor. I wanted to hang it by the window so its green would blend in with the tree that climbs up to our third floor apartment, its branches beating against the clear pane every time there is wind, a stir of Bahamian breeze just outside my window.

A wall sized tapestry, the hippie kind full of intricate flowers and elephants, teardrop-shaped symbols circling from the center like sunrays. It’s all red, maroon red and orange red, some grayish hints of blue to contrast with the yellow orange. I bought it with my college roommate at a store in Philly, on a weekend away from school, away from frat boys and keg stands, away from routine. A store full of incense and hand-knitted sweaters, flowing shimmers of scarves that we used to wrap around our necks, sometimes around our heads. I smell the candles from our college bedrooms, the stale weed smoke from our housemates bong, the white chocolate mochas I downed while reading hours and hours of Shakespeare and the Tao Te Ching at the coffee shop, Brew Haha.

Barack Obama’s eyes. The top of his head is floating behind my computer, a red and blue and navy image, laminated and loud with the words printed You Have The Right To Vote along the bottom. Just focusing on his eyes, I notice how they are dark and deep, heavy with past and future consciousness. I wish I could reach out my typing hand to his shoulder, and tell him everything was going to be okay.

A picture of me and my childhood best friends. We are just 15, faces tan with youth, eyes soft and unaware of the tears to come. Our arms embraced one another, grabbing with excitement for our first real homecoming dance. These hands do much more holding, through suicides and heartbreaks, depressions and death. To have our hair golden in the camera flash again, just like that, our pure lips stretched and our minds thinking only one thing: who will I dance with tonight?

Write About Someone's Hands

I have my mother’s hands. I am one of four girls, and the only one who has my mother’s hands. Except hers are a little flatter. And by that, I mean they are long and skinny like mine, with thick sturdy nails that when left can grow long and rounded, but when I grab them they feel thinner, flatter, like I could squeeze enough to feel my own hand coming through on the other side. My mother’s hands are organic. I cannot remember a time when I have seen them painted or manicured, maybe once for my sister’s wedding. I remember the wet-black ink stains that spotted her middle finger, ones that would last for weeks. She was a calligrapher and her hands were her tools. She’d grasp the quill tip pen so gently, its sharp pointed tip sticking up like a peacock feather, gracefully circling her wrist above the off-white easel-hung paper, guiding the spilling ink into form. I would sit next to her with my quill tip pen and soft grainy paper and attempt to make the letters as beautiful and dark as she did.

Her nails are in perfect proportion to her hands, kept short enough to not get in the way, but long enough to reach just over her fingers, revealing the whiteness that borders her hands like snow caps. She would use the tips of her fingers and into her nails to pluck the harp that sat in our living room. Like stroking the paper with the quill pen, she would stroke the multi-colored strings of the harp, gyrating her hand back and forth, soft tunes of Greensleeves escaping her grasp. Her voice was clear and gentle, and reminded me of the nights she would sit on my bottom bunk, her head crouching down to rub my lower back, singing just loud enough for me to hear. The harp still sits in our living room, and from time to time I will hear her through the other room, recalling the notes with her fingers and not stopping until she’s completed a song without error.

The skin of her hands is much looser now and I can see the dark veins coming through, reaching up and in towards her thin wrists. Her hands are freckled, unlike mine, just like the tops of her shoulders and front of her chest where her v-necks didn’t cover. The freckles turn darker when she squats out in the garden in summer pulling weeds from her herb garden, fluffing the mint and spreading the basil and thyme. She would hum when doing this, as if the leaves of mint were strings of her harp and the soil she’d pat, my soft little back.

What Religion Were You Brought Up With?

Kids used to tell me I was going to hell. I never let it bother me, but they would flat out chant on the playground “Libba’s going to hell, Libba’s going to hell.” I told them I didn’t go to church and I didn’t pray. They said I was a sinner.

My grandfather is an Episcopalian minister. His wife, my grandmother, is an Atheist. My parents don’t believe in organized religion. My older two sisters and I were baptized, but I think my mom just did it to make my grandfather happy. My younger sister was not. I didn’t know much about church, prayer, or even the concept of religion as a young child; it wasn’t until we moved to a small town where all my friends went to church and Sunday school. I remember getting excited to dress up and wear tights on the Sundays after sleepovers when I’d go to church with my friend, Natalie. I went to the Lutheran church with her a few times, sat in the pews and doodled on notepads, while faintly picking up words from the sermon… “holy, father, divine, sacred.” I knew that everyone there believed in the same thing, and that the guy in the front preaching was talking about God the whole time. I thought God was a big silver head that floated above the clouds. He looked down on people and made them want to be better.

I would say I was brought up Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Taoist, Spiritist and any other religion that believes there is something bigger and greater in this world. When I was little I used to ask my dad why we didn’t go to church and pray to Jesus like my friends. He would hold up his hand and say: “if this is how many people there are on the planet,” and then he’d grab one finger and say: “this is how many people pray to Jesus.” I’d grab his other four fingers and ask “and what about these people?”