Five Days Left

Three years ago tonight, your breathing was loud.
Distinct.
Labored—like a man twice your size,
but you were underweight,
your face—a gaunt warning
of what was coming.
Icy hands.
Numb feet.
There was no fooling me.

A few weeks before he died, working on the 72-hour Portland Guignol Festival. He and I won best screenplay. It was our last collaboration together.

We were both in denial.
Your reassurances gave me absolution.
I should have done something.
Why didn’t I do something?!

You moved like a man on a deadline—
racing the clock,
telling the stories you’d never told,
saying yes to everything
except yourself.

I liked my life.
I liked myself.
I knew who I was.
After caring for my mom while she died,
watching my sister starve to death,
twelve years of college,
a lifetime of making movies—
I needed rest.
I had just begun to breathe again
when you fucking died,
and the center of my universe
collapsed in on me.

Resentful that I had to fullfil a commitment instead of staying home, getting drunk and scream crying alone in the dark.

The tumor on my tongue
kept going away and coming back
with unbearable searing pain
I waited until I could take no more.

Protip: 
don’t do that.

I despair,
but try to deny bitterness.
I claw my way up the walls of the abyss.
Again.
I keep my head above the deluge—
just barely.

I am of two minds:
one wants to surrender,
to let go,
to sink into eternal silence.
The other is my wiring—
fused with stubborn light.
Whether I want to or not,
I fight.
I rise.
I endure.

I spent a lot of time standing in my kitchen, listening to music, smoking weed, drinking booze and messing with magnetic poetry into the wee hours of the morning.

I need to recover.

I need more time in my cocoon.
Everything in me is scorched.
My nervous system, a live wire.
Even my sleep is exhausting—
dreams full of pursuit and loss,
running from something,
searching for you,
protecting others
from unseen malevolence.

This started as a note about your dying
and my doing nothing,
but it became
a self-pity party post.

Every year,
in the days before your death,
my body remembers.
My stomach knots.
Time slows.
Dread drips through me
like IV fluid.

It feels as though,
on some plane of existence,
you perpetually die,
and only here,
in this thin version of reality,
do I know it’s coming
and can do nothing to stop it.

Somewhere out there,
we only have
five
more
days.

Sometimes I hear this song and it feels like a message from him to me.