Death

It is said that the same chemical that is found in ayahuasca is naturally occurring in the body and floods our system at the point of death. So when we engage in ceremony, it’s the closest thing to death that we can feel without actually dying. And so then what does it mean that I’ve died four times now? One weekend I died twice.

And what to make of the lover that brought me to this death? The one that kills me multiple times a day, every single day, the deaths building in their intensity since January when I first met him? On my mother’s birthday? Two aquarians; two people that I’d rather not know. 

How do I tell this story so that it becomes poetic and not just sad? Sad and boring. Like the worst romantic comedy - one with a predictable plot line. Man falls in love in SE Asia. Propositions woman to remain his lover while he waits for his true love to arrive on a fiancé visa. She will keep him warm while he waits, reduced to nothing but a source of comfort and maybe sweetness. If he’s lucky.

One friend said, “That sounds perfect,” without irony. But that friend just blew out an eyeball with a firecracker. Her cornea is stitched together by tissues from another human. She’s severely depressed. 

Another friend shared about her worst lovers. One had a bunny that he loved and lived out of a van until moving in with her. He also fucked another woman outside their apartment in his van. The bunny’s fur is the real protagonist in this story because her lover wanted a bag of the bunny’s fur mailed to him. Her friends had to beg her not to send it to him. It belongs in the dumpster, they said. 

So … am I the bunny fur?

The same friend shared a story about another lover who would only drink water from a well on his parent’s property. He carried a giant glass jar around with him. He lived in makeshift tarp tent. He was apparently objectively extremely gorgeously hot. He never cleaned his feet before getting into bed though and it caused fights. And pine needles.

Am I the giant glass jar of water?  

The man in my story lived for the next experience and I often was that experience for him, but it’s hard to be an experience as a human being. The only way to really do that is if you are dramatic and volatile. Which I’m not. Every time he’d try to initiate a fight, I’d think about the clients I knew at the homeless services shelter. How they’d weave a story that was self serving and not fully true. That ensured they were permanently the victim instead of a nuanced human being with flaws and tremendous beauty. 

Maybe I’m a bracelet. That was beaded by women from tribes in North Vietnam. The labor that went into those beads, each one. The tourist that swept through town, looking to heal wounds that should be healed at age 50, buys the bracelet to bring home to his lover that he’s talking to nearly every day. Except that he’s also talking to another. And another. And eventually falls in love with another. Where is the bracelet now? Maybe it went on the wrist of yet another. 

I like to think of what the women who made the bracelet are doing with the travelers money. I hope they gamble it away. Or use it to buy beer. To sully the sanctity of it. Sanitary napkins. Maybe even, if they are so inclined, they buy a little bit of forgiveness.