I think I’m numb…

When, exactly, do you reach the point where you no longer enjoy having birthdays? I suppose that it’s as much of a variable as all other elements of what some of us mockingly refer to as the human condition. All I know is that I turned forty-seven last Thursday, that I didn’t like it, and that I’ve suddenly become one of those older people who never care if they have another birthday again. This, from someone who has always appeared far younger than their years. This, I think, must be time’s revenge, as virulent as it is delayed.

I wouldn’t mind it so much, I believe, if only I didn’t feel so emotionally numb, so incapable of either laughter or tears. I have been wondering for months now, actually, if I’m even still capable of love. I wrote yesterday (although typically obliquely) of how I no longer feel as intensely as I did before, and how terrifying that is for a person who relies on intensity of feeling for their art, their intellect, for their very existence. To put it simply: if I no longer feel, will I ever write or enjoy music again? Am I even alive?

my heart is broke
but I have some glue
help me inhale
and mend it with you
we’ll float around
and hang out on clouds
then we’ll come down
and have a hangover
have a hangover…

I hope that this is merely a trial, or something experienced by nearly everyone at one point or another. I fear that it is not normal, however, and that fear is currently dominating my life. I think I’m numb, I think I’m numb, I think I’m numb…

“my heart is like a broken cup; I only feel right on my knees…”

I’ve had very little to say for months now; even my internal dialogues, usually so rich with words yearning to be written, seem strangely mute and barren. Never did I think that I would be unable to write, to create, yet now I fear that my intellectual decline has decline. Perhaps it is only melancholy, or depression. Perhaps it is too many years of loneliness, disappointment, and estrangement. Perhaps it is merely ennui, or a normal fallow period of life. Rilke, after all, waited years to complete the stunning Sonnets to Orpheus after the beguilement of an effortless beginning. Words may yet return to me. And yet…

And yet I notice changes deep within my heart which make me fear that I will never again experience the thrilling intensity of daily life itself. I rarely read anymore, for one thing. Books are no longer a comfort. Even the deep feeling of music escapes me. I am changing in ways I don’t understand yet; I don’t particularly like the person that I am becoming. Perhaps, now that I think about it, I don’t like the person that I’ve been all along.

I know there’s a place you’ve walked
where love falls from the trees
My heart is like a broken cup
I only feel right on my knees
I spit out like a sewer hole
yet still receive your kiss
How can I measure up to anyone now
after such a love as this?

You. You. You. Ah, you.

No One’s Sleep (The First Published Excerpt)

Baltimore, a bright Saturday morning in early August. All my nerve endings on fire, in pain that becomes more intense by the hour, sleepless for days, unwashed, sick from withdrawal, sick with worry, and sick in heart and body, I step out of my apartment building on North Eutaw Street, take a wistful look south at Camden Yards a few blocks away, and then walk the half block to East Fayette.

“Yo, Ed,” Outlaw says, standing down the street at the intersection with North Howard. The blue and white light rail train clatters by, maybe on its way south to the airport, I think.. “Hurry up. I told you I have to catch the bus.”

I give him a brief wave, more of an acknowledgment than amity (I‘ve paid him more than enough when we‘ve done business before that he doesn‘t have the right to tell me to hurry), and walk across the street toward the KFC and the pawn shop on the corner–the pawn shop which already holds my notebook computer, Citizen Eco-drive watch and lovely, beautifully-grained, hollow-body Epiphone guitar. I haven’t had so much as a dime in over a week. I’ve been drinking tap water just to stay alive.

Please click on the link below for reader comments on this section of the book.

http://edlynch.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/no-ones-sleep-the-first-published-excerpt

“it’s all right, ma, I’m only bleeding…”

It’s rather…odd. It doesn’t seem to matter how reclusive or shy or hurt I feel when I’m alone, because when I do venture back out into the world I seem to naturally adopt the swagger of the very young man who used to work the room at million dollar fundraisers and always seem to know exactly what to say and when to say it. All of which makes me think that of all I’ve lost, some part of the person I was and wanted to be yet remains.

Darkness at the break of noon

Shadows even the silver spoon

The handmade blade, the child’s balloon

Eclipses both the sun and moon

To understand you know too soon

There is no sense in trying*

I’m writing about depression, of course. Which I certainly don’t care to do, as talents as diverse as Mike Wallace, William Styron, and Adam Duritz have written or spoken extensively of their own experiences. There are many causes, of course, but the effect seems to be the same. After a while, though, it seems that the greatest challenge is simply to walk out the front door. After that, everything else is…cake. You just need to get going. You just need to walk out into the world.

It’s okay, you know. I’m only bleeding.

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

*Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) from the album Bringin’ It All Back Home, 1965

“if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills…”

I seem to have developed a habit of waking up and not knowing “when” I am. To say that it’s a little disconcerting is more than an understatement: it usually takes me a moment or two to understand that my sons aren’t in bed with me, that they’re not in their bedrooms down the hall, that the ceiling above me is no longer that of the house we shared with their mother in Lexington. Not to mention the fact that they’re no longer boys, that they are, in fact, young men.

…and time is long. And times goes on, and time grows large, and time is like a relapse after a long illness…*

I can understand, philosophically at least, the passage of time. But somewhere in my memory my sons are forever young, forever little boys who need my help in making it through their day. So now I hold onto those memories of awaking in the middle of the night to meet some need, of awaking far too early on weekend mornings, of taking a quick nap while either Adam or Aaron sat beside me, enraptured by a movie or a cartoon of some kind.

“Choc milk, daddy. In my sippy cup.”

“Sure, Aaron. I’ll be right back.”

I know. “Even children get older. And I’m getting older, too.”**

But that doesn’t mean I find it easy to believe. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give anything to have two little boys sleeping beside me…and in the process stealing the blanket and literally pushing me out of the bed. Those days are often on my mind when I first awake. But then I realize where and when I am, and I spend the day alone.

*Rilke, Requiem For A Friend
**Fleetwood Mac, Landslide

“stronger at the broken places”

I know that you have endured a great sadness. We all have, of course, and some of us hold up under the sadness better than others. Sometimes we move beyond the sadness; at other times we wear it like a shroud. Sometimes the sadness is all that we have left.

“The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway wrote, “and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places.” If he had ended there, one would be able to take encouragement and solace–and even strength–from his words. But no, he went further: “But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”

Surprisingly, he wrote this in a letter at age twenty-six to his early literary mentor, Sherwood Anderson. Hemingway, it seems, was fatalistic from a very early age.

He would soon embarrass Anderson, of course, in the savage parody The Torrents Of Spring. The book is largely unreadable, but Hemingway wanted it that way: he and Anderson shared a publisher, whom he wanted to reject the novel so that he could sign with Charles Scribner and Sons. And that’s exactly what happened, although the experience says more about Hemingway’s tendency to “outgrow” and attack his mentors (including Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein) than it does about his literary ambitions.

But, somehow, I digress.

Sadness is a weight, of course, that most people never see. Sometimes we are able to move past it; sometimes it stays with us for an entire lifetime. Sometimes it even…defines us. But that, of course, is something we must try to avoid. It’s a fight, a daily struggle, and at times there is no clear winner. But if you are lucky, very, very, lucky, you just might become stronger at the places which are broken.

“I don’t go out much these days…”

There are still times when I am perfectly content to stay inside all day, ensconced in an enforced solitude that is as much withdrawn as it is literary. I’m sure it’s very difficult for most “normal” people to understand, but there are days when the mere act of venturing into the world is more than a little…frightening. I know at these times that I’m becoming withdrawn; I know it and yet there are times when I can do very little about it.

Don’t wake me, cause I was dreamin’
And I might just stay inside
I don’t go out much these days
Sometimes I stay inside all day*

The odd fact is that I can be incredibly productive on such days; office work seems to take very little time at all, and my literary work sometimes assumes a new music and poetry. Somehow it seems easier to concentrate, to focus, to think, to write, to create, to produce. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t become…lonely…on such days. I do, sometimes very much. Sometimes I reach out to someone, usually with only mixed success. But there are days, though (still), when all I want to do is sleep. There are still days when all I want to be is dead to the world.

You wouldn’t think it would require such great effort to accomplish one of the simplest things in life, that of venturing out into the world. But sometimes it does, and all I can do is force myself to keep going. I don’t always succeed, but I do try. And yet there are still times when I must say: “I don’t go out much these days…”

*Counting Crows, “Miller’s Angels” (from the album Recovering the Satellites, 1996)

“when only memory remains”

“Is that the best you can do?” she said.

It was.

I’m not sure what, if anything, we talked about after that. There was, after all, nothing left to say. I had told her everything in my heart for the last ten months, and now with only seven caustic words, I could only wonder if any of it had meant anything at all.

There is no memory of taking her home that night in June, only memories of what came after: sitting alone for hours in my car because I couldn’t face anyone, crying for days, seeing no one, missing her voice and her perfume and her touch. I spent the next four years waiting for a letter that never came, trying to understand and survive in a life without her: a life I never wanted. A life I am still adjusting to now.

“It’s not right anymore,” she once said as I was driving her home just after dark. “It’s supposed to be…perfect.”

“I think perfection is more of an ideal,” I said. “We have to work at this like we would at anything else.”

I mentioned other couples we knew then; told her it probably wasn’t perfect for them, either. I knew they weren’t giving up; I know now that some of them never have.

I’d sooner forget but I remember those nights
Yeah, life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care*

She placed her hand in my hair one night; I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so good, or so loved. One of those small intimacies we all take for granted; one that I’ve known not nearly enough. But most of all I remember the cool, but not cold, September night when I first visited her, the way she walked me back to my car after the visit, the way the moon hung low in the southern sky, the way we kissed, the way I fell in love even before that first kiss. I remember and I must always live with it; I remember because now, after all this time, the memory is all that remains.

*Dire Straits, “Telegraph Road” (from the album Love Over Gold, 1982)

“just yesterday she was here…”

Everyone disappears. Everyone runs. Nothing lasts forever. Sometimes things end before they’ve even begun. And only the few, the very, very few, even bother to say goodbye.

I understand that everyone goes disappearing,
into the greatest grey
that covers over everyday,
and hovers in the distance and the distance and the distance…*

Maybe goodbye is the cruelest word of all. I’m not sure; I just know that there have been many times when I needed to hear it. Without a goodbye you can remain for years–even decades–in the moment of parting, the hurt so fresh it feels that it will never go away.

Sometimes I go out for an errand and forget my phone, and foolishly think I’ll have missed a call by the time I get home. So I pick it up from the table or kitchen counter, power it on, and stare a second in disappointment at the blank screen. It’s funny, I think. Maybe if I stare at it long enough a call will suddenly materialize; maybe the phone will even ring while I hold it in my hand. But it never does. Of course, it never does.

You would think I would go slightly…daft…after a while. Start talking to myself or something. But no: I read, write, listen to music, play guitar, and when I have the nerve and feel like it, even go to the pub. But I’m not going to the pub much these days…

Who knows? Perhaps tomorrow will be different somehow. Perhaps I’ll feel better; I might even feel like going to the pub. But I’ll carry with me memories of all the disappeared. They’re not here, of course, but they’ve never really gone away.

*Counting Crows, “Up All Night” (from the album Hard Candy, 2003)

“straight into darkness”

For one summer–one lovely, all too brief summer–I truly loved her. She was eighteen then, and I…I was only a few years older. For those few months she was the woman I thought she could be, while I was the person I was and am still becoming.

There was nothing but joy then when she called, or visited, or we hung out, or when we made love. There was a creek we swam in that summer; I remember holding her in the part where the water began to run deep, her bathing suit off, her body wrapped around mine. I remember the kiss of sunlight on my face; I remember her lips on mine. It was the kind of summer Fitzgerald might have written about, the one with “blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.”*

And then there was the day she told me she was pregnant. I was, to be that young, ecstatic. I had never thought much about becoming a father, but none of that mattered now. If she could have stayed that young and happy forever, and I was going to have all that and be a father also, then that was all right with me. The rest of my college would take care of itself; it was almost over, anyway. I wanted her. I wanted the baby. I wanted to be married.

But she, who so often talked of marriage and of becoming a mother, became truculent and withdrawn. I quickly realized what she planned to do, even before she told me, and the day after it was over the feeling just died.

we went straight into darkness
out over the line
straight into darkness
straight into night**

Every January or thereabouts I wonder about the child who never was. Some years–though by no means all–I’ve also cried. And I can’t help but wonder if things would have different between us, if in the realm of alternate possibilities I would love her still today. Impossible questions, impossible to answer. But I still grieve for our child; I still grieve over what might have been.

I’ve never written of this before, not even in a journal. I’ve never even talked about it, to anyone. Anyone at all. We all live with our silent grief, one way or another. I can’t say with certainty that this is what led to all to the vehemence and hatred later. But one day she told me that I never treated her better than during that summer when she was first pregnant. I hope, someday, that’s the way she’ll remember me. And I will leave the darkness for good.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Absolution”
Tom Petty, “Straight Into Darkness (copyright 1982, Gone Gator Music)