SHARED by TOBIN, 2013
APPLES WITH HONEY
I’m just a simple man. I love food and sex. I exercise here and there, and find I cannot be the best at everything; although I try relentlessly to be. I have passion, and, nowadays, passion is hard to come by in life. I am not the blonde-haired, blue-eyed mastermind as which I have been dubbed. I’m smart with a crooked head on my shoulders, but that’s because I’ve lived life in the moment without regret and without direction. I’m like an apple. It took a while to look this good, but, even when you bite into that foreboding apple, it’s not as sweet as you had imagined; as you sink further in the tuft becomes less and less edible, the seeds get stuck in your teeth, and your fingers are painted with raunch like the grime congealed on the outside of your living room window that’s unreachable until you remove the grate with a screwdriver. The iron-cast grate that is there to protect children, to out-wit the suicidal; who would jump out of the second-story window anyways? You would just end up a paraplegic with a shit-bag stinking up that living room that you once called home in a life you once had that is now devoid of joy.
I have been feeling like my old self lately; my teenage years were dreary from a bird’s eye view, but they were the best I ever had. Possibly, the heroin addict lifestyle is not for most people, but it was exactly what I dreamed of, it was exactly what it was; I was addicted to being a heroine, a woman, but, also, a savior, not for myself, but for the friends I had around me that were killing themselves, and I was helping them die. I saw something in the tripod wenches of mystery lacking fore-thought, lacking morals, but indulging in the snow-globe love we had for each other. Love doesn’t always mean you’re good for each other, and love, also, doesn’t mean that those not ensconced by mine are hate-worthy, but I hated them. I hated anyone that was not a part of my crew. One of the few manly traits to which I had become accustomed was territoriality, the rest of me spewed asexuality without gender or definition. Sex with a man or a woman just never a boy or a girl; you had to know what you wanted. Just because I didn’t know what I wanted was no excuse for you. Just keep that needle in my mainline, baby, and I’ll tell you what you need to do.
I’m surprised I didn’t catch the gay man’s cold sooner. My dad would say this is what I deserve for being a faggot. The worst part is I agree with him, just not for the same reasons. I deserve to have contracted HIV because I lived such a high-risk lifestyle that disregarded my own health and safety. It would be pure luck if my life was less afflicted, and I never lived my life by chance. Wishing is for people who already have everything material but want more. I am perfectly content with the wardrobes that consume my closet and the sheets on my bed. This is the way I have lived my life, and I’ve dealt with that, but it never gets any easier trying to make other people understand. I recall having so many revised suicide pacts in the past that there is no way I wouldn’t have overdosed as much as I did, or lived life with as little boundaries as I did. At 16, the plan was to climb the forty-foot sign in Tackett’s Mill, the shopping center, and jump off into the middle of the road as my car was drifting diagonally through the intersection. If only my great friend hadn’t refused to let me start climbing. At 17, the plan came to me in a drug-induced dream: a party of people downstairs, and I was in the bathtub upstairs with a razor blade. If I was smart I would’ve turned the water on to keep the blood from scabbing over. At 18, the plan was in Tijuana with a revolver in the desert with my two best friends in California; a plan that never even came to surface. At 20, just out of jail, and a newly reborn felon, the plan was to get high, and, instead, I shot a staph infection into my vein and spent the next twenty-four hours close to drowning in a hot bath. At 24, there was no more plan but to just drink until everything was black, until the last memories of my ex-fiancée ceased to replay like vinyls in my head slicing my skull in half to separate my eyes from my mouth. Separating your senses separates the man.
It reminds me of the first time I ever cut myself. My friend told me her secret of what she was doing to herself, and then showed me how to do it without hitting a nerve or causing much damage: a posed surface wound more for show than anything. It baffles me how that would never occur to me, how I could live my whole youth extremely depressed, and what I thought was alone, and it never occur to me to cut myself. I’m surprised I didn’t try a test run with a beet or a potato; I’m usually more of a scientist when it comes to the way the world works. Psychology never amazed me as much as Biology and Chemistry. I had every vice imaginable at that time in my life, and with nobody watching me fall it was that much easier to hit a stride in my own abyss. I was even a chef in my own household. I knew how to cook because otherwise I would have died from starvation, and with all of the maladies affecting me at the time cooking gave me an outlet. Someone, with as many synthetic visions as I, should be a whiz in the kitchen if only that person would focus on one conquest at a time, focus on the life they are living, but, more so, focus on a passion that will sustain them through the night. Dreams are not unattainable goals; they are the things that pass through your mind at night. Webster may have a different definition, but Webster’s definitions never really helped someone survive. Like Chicken Divan can be indulgent, but, when it comes down to the truth, it is just chicken, broccoli, and cheese. The Mornay sauce and almonds are just an interpretation. I never let anyone else’s interpretation intimidate me from expanding my own horizons.
I found out I had HIV when I was taking my roommate to the clinic. Isn’t life always full of surprises at the least opportune moment? For the first time in my life, I had been ill, I had been consistently sick for about five months, and this was the answer. It was the answer to my present circumstances, but, also, the answer to all of my past problems. This would be that overwhelming reason for me to give up the mania that I’ve thrived in, that was pushing everyone away from me, that was slowly wearing away my physicality like a sewage pipe: almost completely eroded and dulled. That was my hope, but nothing could ever be that simple. A decision had to be made: to live or to die, and the walk home from the clinic with my roommate was elongated; there seemed to be one extra brick to every building, one extra picket to every fence, one extra stop on the train. A ghost stop in New York City that was unfathomable; in a city already so congested how can we afford to be adding train stops? Her eyes half-drawn, and mine completely glassed-over. I was thinking about the ghost stop, and the kind of people that lived there: the abused, the raped, the worn-out, but, I guess, at peace. They live in a city without rent, therefore without hope just waiting to die. These ghosts are what I dream about at night along with perfectly mastered French cuisine on plates that when you take a bite it disappears. Without a taste, but it is the aesthetic that matters.