It looks cold, it feels cold, it smells cold. Everything in it seems to shiver and pulse and sob, whimpering;
Help me. Save me.
Love me.
But even with the air conditioning going, the windows cast wide open and the blistering Winter cold spreading itself beneath my clothes and under my skin, he sits there, rocking back and forth.
It’s hot, he repeats over and over. It’s hot. It’s hot. It’s hot.
He says he wants a fix. He says poets have been smoking opium for centuries.
He’s a poet, he says. He’s a poet. A poet. A poet.
Yeah, I know. I know because his room is filled with scrapped pieces of paper. I know because his ashtrays are overflowing and he’s still staring at a clean page.
I know because I know everything about him.
The local rehabilitation centre. All you can hear in this closed up little space is room after room of junkies crying, despairing with their zombie friends and zombie hallucinations enclosed within their quarantine of self-destruction.
You won’t find anyone in here who doesn’t hate themselves.
Everyone here found love in some form but paid the price of for it.
Some will tell you it was worth it, others will tell you, well.
They’ll tell you otherwise.
He smokes entire packs of cigarettes to make up for what he can’t have. His room is a cloud of asthma, glue ear and Cancer. Some of the staff in this place call it ‘productive suicide’, it’s supposed to be an ice breaker for family members sick of visiting their failure brothers and sisters, their disappointment daughters and sons.
But he’s no son of mine.
He pulls out a parcel from within his cocoon of blankets. He says that he went clean for an entire week to afford this, I pull away the newspaper gift wrapping and reveal a red toy aeroplane.
He smiles. It’s hot. It’s hot. It’s hot.
Back in Primary school, all the parents used to say to stay away from him.
He was bad news, that boy was. His mummy had magic mushrooms in the kitchen. His daddy was in jail for killing a man. But, I’d been curious because he’d only ever read.
Yeats, Shelley, Byron; he loved the Romantics. We became friends and he’d brought me to his house where showed me how to drink and taught me how to smoke.
“You see, the thing about spiders is they eat their company,”
He’d tell me
“My mummy tells me I’m a spider, I’m poison. I’m alone all the time and whoever I meet I destroy.”
The aeroplane was painted red and dazzling. It even had my name written on it in big, bold letters; ‘Richard’.
I wanted it painfully, but my father only worked in a toothpaste factory and my mother spent all day looking after my little sister, Lucy. She was dying.
“One day I’ll buy it for you.”
He whispered when he caught me staring, as if it was a secret. Or a promise.
We’d just been in a fight with two of the older boys at school; they’d left our clothes ripped, our teeth chipped and our souls alive. They’d said Jimmy’s dad had a real British gun, but we knew Jimmy’s dad was a Nazi, everybody knew that.
We stood there in the damp autumn air, staring into the candy coated window of the toy store. I thought to myself how sugary the glass would taste and what it would be like to be rich enough to go inside.
“You know, I reckon you’ll fly one when you’re older!”
He declared, suddenly, grabbing my arm and shaking it rigorously,
“You’ll fly you and me right out of this dreadful town!”
Then, without another word, he bolted down the foot path. I chased him, running as quick as I could, all the while my heart pounding faster against my chest then my feet against the shattered pavement.
I slowed as we neared the river, waiting for him to leave me behind, but he stopped and ran back.
‘I’ll not leave you, Richard!”
He exclaimed theatrically,
“You and I are two one legged men, Bonnie and Clyde! I’ll not leave you behind; you’ll fly us both out of here!”
Then he grinned, wide and honest, and I saw blood seep through the cracks of his broken smile.
He sits there, poisoning me with his cigarettes. It’s winter and everything is dead but his beauty is feverishly alive. His dark brown hair untamed and chocolate against his honey coated skin. His fringe falls over one of his eyes casting a dark shadow over his thin, tired face. This whole time he’s biting his wine-stained lips and smoking.
Nervous. Alert. He is an alley cat, a stray, never living here or there but always moving. Always running away. But this place has him trapped. This town has him jailed in.
He asks me if I like his gift. He tells me; happy birthday, Richard. He loves me so very, very, very much. He wants me to be happy. And he’s so sorry. So very, very, very sorry.
I’m sorry too, I tell him. I love him so much, I tell him, and I forgive him.
It’s not my birthday.
The nurse tells me that maybe I should leave and I sigh and stand. Clutching his present in between my hard hands,
I start to walk away, and on my way out I hear him chanting;
It’s hot. It’s hot. It’s hot.
The hall is light blue. It looks cold and I can sense the distance of everything around me.
I feel the ticket for one in my pocket. This is my way out. This is it. I push the unsaid farewells to the back of my mind.
The hall is light blue. In the corner of the floor I see a spider curled up, lonely and poisonous.
Trapped in its own clumsy web.
-- Mikee Sto. Domingo
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It is honestly wonderfully written, whatever beliefs for or on the contrary you may have, Mikee.
:P
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