carrying the dead

i can't remember if this is posted here somewhere already, and frankly i'm too tired and/or lazy to look it up. so here goes nothing.

november 21, 1990. i was supposed to go out with my girlfriend at the time, but was asked to work until close at my store. i readily agreed. i like my job well enough, i liked my boss, the extra cash wouldn't hurt and she would understand. i called, she did, and that was that. until 11pm. her parents called me then, to tell me. she had decided to surprise me, to come and see me at work, something she had never done, a place she had never been. she lived on the north side of denver, i on the south, and we usually met somewhere in the middle. one patch of ice on an overpass, one inattentive moment or tiniest lack of ability to overcome that ice patch, and her car went through a rail and fell. she more than likely was killed instantly. and so was i.

this writing will not finished today, not by a long shot. there's so much more under all of this than even i understand that it will be pouring out in pieces and bits for weeks, months, years. but it is time to let it out. it's time to figure it out. because it is partially responsible for the mess that is my mental landscape.

i don't mean to absolve myself or to blame my entire depressive history on one car accident almost 20 years ago. heaven knows that i was enough of a mess prior to that. looking back, i had been wrestling with depression for years. carolyn showed me joy. she was not a cure, not a miracle that kept my illness from plaguing me. but she offset it to some degree, or gave me highs to match my lows. she forced me to see the big beautiful picture, let me have some faith in that beauty that is everything. she took me to beautiful places where she had spent her life and showed me how they made her feel, and together we felt our own smallness and significance in the face of mountains and lakes and rivers and forests that were so immense yet made of the tiniest plants and creatures. she gave my heart something into which it could pour itself.

when she died, that part of me died with her, or so i imagined. i dammed up the font of my soul, turned off my feelings and began to live my life in black and white. without her in it, the world simply had no color, and i foolishly accepted that it would always be so. without joy, there is no color. without that other piece to my puzzle, i did not fit the grand design. i shut off my heart and went about life as though there was never to be anything like that ever again. my place in this world had been taken from me, and now was my time to be but an extra in the movie, some cog in the machine that made the story go along for others.

now i have been trying in my own screwed up way to capture all of that for 18 long years and i didn't even realize it. my heart has been off, but it has not wanted to be, and it has been trying to make its way out of the prison i built for it all along. through whatever means necessary - be it drugs, religion, self-flagellative relationships, rebellion, music - my soul has been trying to free itself and regain that magic i once lost. for years i reeled with it, allowing myself to flail uncontrollably in the world and make a mess of things. for years now i have been trying to control it, trying to point that impulse in some direction that i can perceive as 'responsible' or 'productive'.

i am not, down deep inside of my soul, someone who feels nothing. i am not a man who is rigid, who needs control, who want things to be orderly and regimented. i have tried to be, and i have been fighting myself. i am kali. i am wild, i am freedom that is not run amok but travels creation with abandon and self-assurance. somewhere within me lies that bohemian youth that does not care for the way that thing seem but rather sees things for what they are. somewhere within me lies that free soul that she unleashed that could find joy in the bark of a tree or the tickle of a crawling ladybug on his skin.

i have told myself for years, secretly, that i died on that night, but the truth is that i tried to kill myself. not literally, but figuratively. i have been punishing myself for the decision to stay at work by killing everything she gave me. her name was carolyn, and i loved her fiercely, for she taught me to live fiercely. and she is the dead i carry with me. and man - that would really piss her off.