I fell in love once, with a broken boy who fell off the wall and hard as I tried, much as I wanted to, I couldn't put the pieces together again. Nothing quite describes the particular agony of loving someone to the point of desperation in the vain hope that some of that energy will break through the fortress around their heart, mind and soul. Some of you will know what I mean. Some of you will have lost someone to the realm of darkness that is intense melancholia. I believe the experience of living with this darkness is as mystical, mythical, magical, painful, surreal and beautiful as it is pathological. I willingly got lost in that darkness, looking for the boy who needed love, craved love, desired to be loved but the forest was dense, the river too deep to cross, and I was not the one who could pull the sword out of the rock and save the day.
I don't fit in.
I never did.
Maybe you don't either. Or maybe you have loved someone who lives in that parallel world where one is constantly in a state of intense melanchoy or intense euphoria. A heightened sense of reality. Or: a chemical imbalance in the brain. Listen to what the Good Doctor has to say. Take your pills now, one by one, yum, yum.
Mad, Bad, Beautiful, Luminous.
He was.
Dying all the time. Crying all the time. Lying all the time.
And me asking Why all the time?
I wanted to believe I was his saviour. The arrogance of youth, the romance of self-destruction. I was the one who poured the wine and drank to the Good Times and picked up the mess in the Bad Times.
Okay, I admit it. Sometimes I was the Bad Time. Like everyone who loved him, I too wanted to shake him so hard that he would just snap out of it.
He had a secret weapon, to keep Love at bay like all good fairytales. The Girl who makes love to the Prince will inevitably die because of a curse put on him by the Wicked Witch who shared needles.
Welcome to the Basement, where Love goes to Die.
I embraced him, held him tight and rode the waves of his despair until finally it lead me to the Emergency Room. When you have a 72-hour window to save your own life, things get very real, very fucking quickly. There is no escaping the fact that Hospitals are pathological spaces. Dreams fall apart, and illusions are shattered under those harsh lights. This is where the broken come to be repaired, the moment at which one is utterly bound to one's body. Emergency. Urgency.
The Prince spontaneously combusts, leaving the Girl Who Loved Him standing amidst a cacophony of pain, suffering and of course, sirens. The ominous wailing which cuts through the night, a constant reminder that the Grim Reaper is coming for you and I one day.
Of course, I ran from the hospital. Precious hours thrown away because my heart couldn't withstand the truth. For the next 48 hours, I was in Denial. I did not want to give in to the pathological reality because I wanted to believe in the power of the mythical. Infected with Love, infected with Death. I ate the poisoned apple and I paid the price. You can love, and love, and love a person but it won't always save them. You know how it is with young lovers and their tragedies. Another hour passed, and another.
It was a close friend who came crashing in to my apartment, and drove me back to the Emergency Room. His brother had died recently. Death, everywhere. Mine, preventable. My friend so angry, so very angry with me, pulled me down to the car, my fairytale was shattered, landed back in the Emergency Room.
There is something intensely intimate about having someone who cares about you hold your hand as your world falls apart. His friendship was the anchor that kept me hanging on when I was so close to letting go.
I don't know which hurt more, the series of intramuscular injections that saved my life, or the knowledge that sometimes you have to walk away from the mythical fairytale of Love and into Reality with a capital R. I now have lifetime immunity to the curse of death the Prince carries. I cultivated that in a very pathological way, over the six months it took me to disentangle my emotions, and reconstruct my body chemistry.
If ever I had broken wings, it was then. It was a slow crawl from the darkness back into the light, but eventually I made it.
Now and then you might fall in love with someone whose wings are broken beyond repair, a flightless bird that just doesn't know how to be in this world, at this time.
Love them while you can.
Let it hurt.
Forgive them.
Set them free.
Then start crawling towards the light, and keep going until you find you are flying on your own again.
As for you Lost Prince:
Never forgotten. Completely forgiven.
FIONA
No comments:
Post a Comment