I’m standing atop the Empire State Building in New York City, on the other side of the guardrail. The clouds are all but pitch black and skull and crossbones form in the sky. The flashes of lightning and claps of thunder–the rain pouring relentlessly–present the perfect setting; in fact, I couldn’t ask for anything more fitting. I’m soaking wet. My cargo pants are now a dark brown, my hoodie a damp and obsidian black, and my brown Levi boots match my cargo’s. A flash of lightning strikes near the building but I don’t flinch, no use being fearful when looking death in the face.
Looking down, I see the lights of the city that never sleeps for miles–the cars and people look like ants from this height. White and red lights move back and forth and sometimes sit still. People go on with their lives oblivious to the fact someone commits suicide every thirty seconds on average. I look at my watch and count the seconds; when it hits the thirty second mark I think of the person that just finished hanging themselves, the person that drank poison, the person that jumped off a building (as I’m about to); the person that shot themselves in the head to stop the tortuous internal chatter, the person that killed themselves because of a broken heart, and the person stricken by grief, sorrow, and death itself.
That last one, I think the last one resonates the most with me.
Sort of.
Looking over the city, I see nothing but deep, blackish purple and pouring rain. I see the shadows of hell’s damndest souls coming into form to greet me. The air transforms into a sea of black flames with little puffs of skull and crossbones rising, as if out of a boiling pot. I look to the sky once more and the claps of thunder and flashes of lightning continue their light show in the darkest of nights, the moon is nowhere in sight. I start wheezing then coughing then hacking, I look at my hand and see blood. My body is eating itself, my immune system is useless, and I feel weak, so very weak. The red blood clots on my hand look like enlarged liver spots at this point, consuming my hand in a deep, dark red turning to purple, the color of rotting flesh after a person’s been bludgeoned to death.
What are you waiting for? Jump! My mind says, Jump now!
I inch my way closer to the edge of the building and look down again for what will be the final time. My vision gets blurry and the world starts spinning, I almost fall over but catch myself just in time. No, not yet. The sea of black flames becomes an abyss. I see faint skull and crossbones form and disappear. My body tries to fight, to fuel me with the will to live and my reptilian brain backs up this will with the need for self-preservation. The fact I can feel this at all astounds me but it is futile. This disease eating my system has gained too much momentum and I’ve suffered too much, lost too many people I care about, people I loved, people I’ve had the best of times with, people that guided me when I was nothing but a stray orphan with no sense of purpose in this world. The pain, grief, and bouts of depression that surround my heart are out to kill me and I’ll be damned if I’m left on this earth to be alone.
What about Jasmine? The thought enters, will you leave her alone?
Jasmine will never be alone; sure, she’ll grieve for a time but then she’ll move on like everyone else. She’ll hold on to the poem I gave her and find the last poem I ever wrote, but, in the end, she’ll move on as all people do.
I clench my fist when my eyes water and hot, stinging tears run down my cheeks, “WHY?!” I shout into the heavens. I try to shout again but all that comes out is a whisper, “Why?”
I grew up in an orphanage. My father died three months before I was born and my mother in childbirth. I was taken to Children of The World, a local orphanage in the Bronx. The place had been founded in 1844 and had a longstanding reputation and relationship within the community. The staff there were friendly but the other kids wouldn’t play with me from what I remember, and any time one of them tried to mess with me or make my life a living hell, a staff member was there to straighten it out. There was this one kid name Bradley who always locked me in the closet and called me a worthless nigger that should’ve died in the hospital with his mother. He whispered it so no one but me could hear him, and he said if I told anyone he would come to my room and stick a branch up my ass (I know, a swell guy wasn’t he?). Other than that, I was invisible. I’d watch the other kids play at recess, chase each other around, play catch, and pick their noses and hold out boogers in each other’s faces. I didn’t feel like I fit in with this group. I didn’t feel like I belonged. I was always on the lookout for Bradley for fear he’d lock me in the closet and verbally abuse me. His words haunted me every night as I lay in bed looking up at the plain, white ceiling. The internal chatter in my brain would go into overdrive and not let up even a bit, and the only sleep I did get was thin and broken by bad dreams and the echoes of Bradley’s insults.
This went on for five years.
Bradley was finally transferred to a foster home in October 1995 and I never saw him again, I was ten. He didn’t forget to leave me a little going away present, though. When I went to my room, an hour before Bradley left, it was ransacked and looked like a hurricane hit it. All my writing trophies and certificates I’d won in the monthly contests we’d have at the orphanage were torn into pieces, my trophy from when my poem about a tornado survivor won first place was broken in two and stomped until nothing remained but broken shards, my mattress was flipped over and my sheets were torn, and the words worthless nigger and you should’ve stayed in your mother’s cunt were written on the walls. I walked in and stood in the center, asking myself why he hated me so much, why would he do this, how could he do this. A staff member came in and screamed in shock, not at the mess but at what was written on the walls. She looked at me then looked at the walls and realized I wasn’t the one that messed up the room and came up to me, squatted down to my level, and placed two gentle hands on my shoulders.
“Who did this, Rudy?” she asked me. “Do you know?”
I did know. It was Bradley, no doubt. Even so, those words from five years before still haunted me as when he first said them. If you tell anyone what I said, I’m gonna come to your room and stick a branch up your ass, ya hear?!
I shook my head.
The staff member pulled me into her arms and hugged me fiercely. She smelled like lavender and her bosom was pillow-soft. I wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come out as if they were dammed up. She released me, stood up with her hand in mine, and took me to the foster care specialist’s office.
I remained in that orphanage for three more years.
I ran away in November 1998. I snuck out the orphanage at midnight, ran up Fordham road to the nearest train station, slipped through the security door, and hopped on the first train out of there. I got off at Forty-Second Street, Grand Central. Navigating through that maze was something else–thinking back, it reminded me of Hogwarts. The corridors seemed to lead to an infinite number of places, hundreds of people walking back and forth with luggage, some in suits, some in casual clothes. Families of all races, colors, and creeds meshed together in a chaotically organized fashion which not only astounded but bewildered me, as well. I didn’t know where I was going but I knew I was going somewhere. I walked around aimlessly for what seemed like hours. I’d already found the way out and seen just about every platform the trains arrived and departed on, the only thing on my mind then was where to go. As far as I knew my parents were the only family I had and the both of them were dead; I supposed I could try the yellow books but trying to find another person with the last name Sarabelli was apt to take a million years.
It was then I met a woman named Stella Casey. She was a tall, gorgeous, blonde hair woman with deep-set blue eyes, a coke bottle body, and somewhat pale but smooth skin. She asked me if I was lost and I told her I was. She figured out pretty quickly that I was an orphan that ran away and invited me to stay with her, I accepted. She lived in a cabin in Upstate New York, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. It was a quiet and peaceful place with a large front yard and a backyard next to a pond. The inside of the cabin was warm, cozy, and beautiful. A brown, suede sofa and two love seats with a coffee table on top of a dark brown rug sat in front of the fireplace with a T.V. hanging on the wall just above it. There were portraits of artwork I’ve never seen, one was of a sunrise over a grassy cliffside with the sun’s light reflecting off the blue ocean. There were no animal heads mounted on the walls like there usually were in cabins (which was fine with me), and a small, wooden, dining room set across the cabin in the kitchen. There was one room on either side; the room to the right led to her study and the one on the left led to two separate bedrooms and bathrooms.
“You can put your stuff down in the first room to your left.” She said as I made my way there cautiously.
This one room was larger than two rooms in the orphanage combined. There was a large dresser to my right and a queen-size bed to my left sitting between two nightstands. A large window looked out to the pond and the tire swing that moved back and forth like a pendulum. The bed was made up with a dark brown comforter, white sheets, and brown throw-pillows.
I’d never seen a room so nice.
The first two months of living with her were the best. It turned out she was a freelance writer that worked from home and made decent money, she wrote about politics and occasionally did movie reviews when she had the time. I told her I wrote poetry and she said she wanted to read my work. I wrote a poem called Locked In The Closet describing my experience in the orphanage and gave it to her to read. I turned to go to my room and she grabbed my arm and held it while she read, the warmth of her hand was soothing. I saw the sadness consume her face like shadows consuming the light at sunset. A tear dropped from her face and she was speechless at first, then, she pulled me into her arms and hugged me the same way the staff member did when she saw the words worthless nigger and you should’ve stayed in your mother’s cunt on the walls. Her bosom was warm and soft and smelled of lavender, just like that staff member. She asked if I ever entered my work into writing contests and I told her I did, that I’d won a couple of trophies and writing certificates back at the orphanage. She smiled with tears still dripping from her face.
As the months went by she taught me how to write sonnets, blank verses, golden shuffles, narrative poetry, among other forms. She made me go over drafts again and again until they were either short and powerful or long and thoughtful. She watched me as I looked through the Writer’s Digest magazine, wrote and stamped envelopes, and walked to the mailbox and put them in.
She forbade me from going out there and taking them out.
One day, while I was writing poetry and she was washing the dishes in the kitchen, I got thirsty and went to get a drink. When I got in the kitchen, I saw a black aura surrounding her; it was thick, smoky, and dark and smelled of death and decay. She was whistling a tune without a care in the universe. I closed my eyes and opened them and the aura was gone as if it’d never been there at all. She looked back and flinched.
“Oh my god, Rudy.” She said with her hand on her chest. “You scared the living Christ out of me.”
“Sorry,” I said as I made my way to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water.
“So, how goes the poetry?”
I sighed and shook my head.
“That bad, huh?” She said then smiled. “You know what that means?”
I shook my head again.
“It means you’re a writer.”
We smiled at each other for a moment then I turned and went back to my room, not knowing that’d be the last time I’d see her alive.
The next night she died in a car accident while coming back from the grocery store (which was three miles from the cabin), she left while I was still in bed, looking at the ceiling; a drunk college kid in a dusty gold Chevy Tahoe was having a night on the town with his girl and a couple of buddies, swerving recklessly down the back road while Stella was driving home and obeying the speed limit. She came up to a stop sign then looked both ways then went when the college kid sped around the corner and hit her blue Toyota Camry dead center, killing her instantly. I’d just finished writing a poem called A Sudden Crash. I found out when I got out the shower and turned on the T.V., her blue Camry looked like a person entering the fetal position and the Tahoe looked like an accordion. They showed the faces of the people injured and then the one fatality. Stella. I dropped the remote and stood there in shock, mouth agape, eyes watering. My knees gave out and I fell on them hard but didn’t notice, all I could do was watch helplessly as tow trucks and paramedics crowded the scene and got Stella’s mangled and lifeless body out of the car and onto the stretcher. They showed Stella’s face again and she was smiling, those deep-set blue eyes brimming with life with white teeth to complement them. I knew what I had to do next but I couldn’t. My legs refused to cooperate. My arms were in better spirits, though, they listened to me when I instructed them to pick up the remote and turn off the T.V.
I left the cabin thirty minutes later and never returned.
In March 2003 I met a man named Stan Jackson. A tall, dark, and handsome man with jet black hair that went down to his shoulders and light brown eyes that had a way with the ladies. He worked at an ad agency where he had to come up with catchy slogans for clients or companies like Low price, high quality and Check out Zeal’s and seal the deal! Before I met Stan I was homeless. Living in train cars and stations, taking up residence in the abandoned houses and then getting kicked out by construction companies with government contracts, living under freeways and bridges, and inhaling tobacco, asbestos, and other cancer-inducing chemicals. I was sitting on the sidewalk in Times Square (after a twelve-mile walk), tired and exhausted when Stan came along and read my sign which said if you gave me a dollar I’d write you a poem. Stan gave me a dollar and I got out the sheets of paper and pen (which was running out of ink) I’d been carrying at the time and got to writing. The poem was called A Sudden, Painful Death. I handed it to him and he read it in front of me.
“This is pretty good,” he said, “dark, but pretty good.”
I nodded and he walked away, a few minutes later he came back with a BLT and a bottle of iced tea.
“I read your poem again and I must say,” he smiled, “it’s worth way more than a lousy dollar.”
I nodded and bowed from my sitting position.
He said his company was looking for more writers for the creative department and asked me if I wanted a job. I looked up with a dumb look of gratitude and nodded firmly. He told me to come with him and I did. He gave me the BLT and iced tea and went to the store and got a bacon, egg, and cheese and a coffee for himself. We sat outside (it was freezing) and talked for hours. I told him my story and he listened intently and he told me his and I did the same. He gave me money for a hotel room at the Night Hotel and asked me what size suit I wore, I told him I didn’t know. He said it was no problem and gave me some more money to at least get a pack of tee shirts, and I did.
A week later, I was working under Stan as an apprentice at an ad agency called QuickAd’s Inc., an agency that promised to deliver ads to clients and companies within twenty-four hours or less. The place was always moving, changing, evolving. People never sat idle, assistants flashing in and out to get people their coffee, people sitting in small conference rooms looking at a projection screen, piles of magazines stacked on top of low, gray coffee tables, people at the water cooler talking about random things. It was a whole, different world. Stan took me up to the sixteenth floor and into a small room with a plaque on the side of the door that said QuickAd’s Creative Department. He opened the door and motioned me to go in first, I went in. The room was medium-size and messy. Piles of magazines sat atop shelves attached to the walls, coffee cups filled the trash can, magazines splayed across the keyboard, the sink to the left was filled with dishes and styrofoam containers from Chinese takeout, and the mixed smells of chicken and broccoli, chow mein, and other spoiled meats and veggies took me for a loop (even though I’d smelled worse).
“I know, not exactly the cleanest room in the world but it gets the job done once it does get cleaned.” he said, “which is our first order of business. You ready?”
I looked at him and nodded.
“Alright, let’s do it.”
We cleaned the room and began working on slogans for ads.
The first few months went splendidly. We were selling ads like nobody’s business and the company was becoming a known name. Stan said I had the potential to be head of the Creative Department within two years if I kept going at this rate. Every slogan and jingle I came up with managed to be a hit for the clients, especially when they rhymed. When I wrote A little bit of this, a little bit of that, buy Lisa Crafts and keep coming back, the client, Lisa Campbell, reported that her business increased by one hundred percent. When I wrote Looking for a place to get your fill? Try a burger at Famous Grill, the owner reported that he’s booked for the next six weeks at least and gives a million thanks to whoever came up with the slogan.
I got an apartment on West 4th Street through someone Stan knew for a good price, $1,000 a month. I bought a laptop and continued writing poetry when I wasn’t creating ads; Stan would visit on his days off and read my work. He’d often asked if I considered selling my poems to Magazines and I said I hadn’t, he said he knew of a literary magazine called Deadman’s Tales and thought that my work might be a good fit since I wrote about death a lot. I said I’d give it a try but he pushed me to do it right then, in front of him, and that caught me off guard. It also reminded me of Stella, her smiling face on the news moments after her death, those deep-set blue eyes, and those white teeth. I hesitated a moment then found my resolve and wrote four more poems and sent them to Deadman’s Tales.
Stan watched me the entire time.
A month later, I got an email from Deadman’s Tales saying they loved my work and are honored that I chose them to publish with. I showed Stan and he was more excited than I was and said we should celebrate. We did. We went to a seafood place called The Angry Crab and ordered the biggest dish they had, something called The Angry Feast. Stan paid the bill. We went to a bar and got drunk, I told Stan I was only nineteen and he said if an eighteen-year-old can hold a semi-automatic and shoot Iraqis in war, then a nineteen-year-old can have a goddamn beer. He had a point. After that, we went to a free comedy show. The jokes were alright, some were actually funny (even funnier since we were buzzed). I laughed so hard at one joke I fell out of my seat and made the audience laugh and the comedian happy.
Stan was laughing so hard his face turned red.
He took the train with me home because I had trouble standing on my own two and when we got to my stop, he put one arm around me and hauled me down the block and up to my door. He asked me if I could handle getting upstairs and I said I could. He told me not to sleep on the floor and to drink coffee for the hangover and went about his way like a creature in the night, surrounded with a black, shadowy aura.
That was the last time I saw Stan alive.
I woke up the next morning without a hangover. I felt rested and really thirsty so I went to the kitchen and drank a large glass of orange juice. I went back to my room and saw that I had twenty missed calls from Arthur, our coworker, and called him back. I asked him what the matter was and he told me Stan was dead, that on his way home the night before someone stuck him up in an alley and shot him, took his wallet, and left him to bleed out.
Half an hour passed before anyone showed up and called the ambulance but by then it was too late, Stan has bled to death.
I dropped the phone and stood there in shock, the sound of Arthur’s voice calling my name seemed far away, on some distant planet. The room started spinning around and my heart started beating rapidly, I walked with shaky legs over to my bed and sat down.
Stan… is dead? The thought stood alone in my mind in the ringing and deafening silence of the room. Stan… is… dead?
Tears had been falling down my face but I didn’t notice, the suddenness of the news rendered me incoherent.
Stan. . .
I screamed at the top of my lungs and broke into sobs, trying to console myself to no avail. I picked up the lamp on my nightstand and threw it at the wall and it shattered. I tore sheets off my bed, flipped over my mattress, knocked over the nightstand and sat on the floor holding my knees and sobbed into them. I looked up with watery eyes and saw a picture on the floor, it was when Stan and I went to the NASCAR racetrack together and test drove the cars a month before. He was in a red suit stamped with various brands and I was in a blue suit, we were both smiling as the sun shined bright over our heads in the cloudless blue sky.
I picked up the picture and looked at it with watery eyes until the sun went down.
In October 2005 I met a woman name Jasmine Sullivan, an English major at NYU. I quit the ad agency and wrote poetry full time and made some decent money, even won a couple contests with prizes as high as $40,000, I still lived in the place he got me out of respect and because I was still grieving. She had hazel eyes and caramel skin, a wide, radiant smile with pearly white teeth and long, dark curly hair that flowed down to the small of her back. I was sitting in Washington Square Park on a bench, facing the road, when she came up to me and complimented my outfit. I wasn’t wearing anything special, just a simple black v-neck with chinos and suede, laceless shoes from ALDO. Nevertheless, we struck up a conversation; I found out she wrote short stories and poetry and I told her I wrote poetry as well, she asked if we could swap work sometime and, still thinking about Stan’s abrupt death, I said why not (he wouldn’t have wanted me to cry over him forever).
We met at a Starbucks at West Ninth Street, I sat waiting for her with a black coffee and one poem called The Deadman’s Holiday. She came in about ten minutes later with a black leather bag and a colorful assortment of folders held to her chest, she saw me and waved with her free hand and I waved back when she came over and took a seat. She slapped the folders on the table and I saw they had labels such as short stories, poetry, essays, journal entries, research papers. A writer after my own heart, I thought at the time. She took all but the folder labeled poetry and placed them in her leather bag neatly and out of sight. She slapped both hands on her poetry folder, sighed deeply and looked at me with a let’s-get-to-work expression. We did. I read about five of her poems while she read the one poem I had with a red pen in her hand like an English professor. Her poems were rather good; they were clean and concise, no unnecessary words or clunky and awkward phrases, and they talked about things that mattered such as the social and political climate of the United States, the senseless wars and violence, police brutality toward blacks and Latinos. I could tell by her writing that she was meticulous and liked control, I chuckled and supposed my writing would drive her crazy since it’s all predicated on spontaneity and divine muses.
“I love it.” She said, pulling me from the reading trance I was in.
I looked at her and found an expression of marvel stamped on her face. I never really thought of my poetry as good or bad, I just wrote them when the mood struck me.
“‘The snow falls and the wind blows/ specks of hail slice my face/ Christmas will be white again this year/ but the blood that runs down my cheek spells my fate.’” She recited. “Such mystery and sense of dread, I can feel the uncertainty of the speaker in just four little lines.”
I complimented her on her clean and concise style of poetry that acknowledged important social issues and she feigned modesty. She asked me if I’d considered publishing and told her my work was published in a magazine called Deadman’s Tales.
Her jaw dropped.
“You’re published in Deadman’s Tales?!” she whispered loudly. “Rudy, that’s amazing!”
It was my turn to feign modesty.
She asked me if I could write a poem specifically for her and I told her yes and that in fact, The Deadman’s Holiday was the very poem.
“You want me to have this one?” She asked.
I nodded.
“Are you sure?” She asked again. “You can make some real money off this, even enter it in a contest.”
I told her I was sure and that she should keep it.
She relented and smiled.
We started dating shortly after, she’d come to my apartment and we’d swap poems and talk about all the greatest writers and who our favorites were. Her top five were Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and Shakespeare. I told her I didn’t have a top five and that I didn’t read much after my friend and mentor, Stella, died in a car accident when I was thirteen. She said she was sorry for my loss but I waved it away, condolences weren’t necessary. She asked me how often I wrote poetry and I told her when the mood struck me, she looked at me disapprovingly.
Over the next few months, she would come over and make me write at least five poems a day on command. It was infuriating. Not Jasmine, I always enjoyed her company, but the process itself. I felt like I was falling into a void of darkness with no way of getting out or at least stopping my descent. The blank page became an infinite space and made me feel like a speck of dust in the universe, the only time I remembered feeling like this was when I looked at the stars at night and when Bradley used to lock me in the closet and call me a worthless nigger. It took hours for me to write just a couple of lines and when Jasmine saw the sweat flowing from my face onto the keyboard she told me to take a break.
She placed two gentle hands on my shoulder and said I was trying too hard, that I was too tense. I tried to relax but to no avail, the internal chatter in my mind was in full force with no sign of relenting until I was dead or unconscious which rendered sleep impossible. She leaned down and hugged me from behind, the warmth of her body causing goosebumps to rise on my arms, legs, and chest. She nuzzled my neck and gently kissed it, working her way up to my cheek. I turned slowly, rose from my chair, and embraced her in my arms. We kissed for what seemed an eternity, her lips against mine were the definition of ecstasy itself, dopamine rushing from my brain to my groin as her soft breasts pressed against my chest.
I picked her up and took her to my bed.
Jasmine graduated two years later with a Bachelor’s and Associate’s degree in English Writing and Liberal Arts. I attended the ceremony with her family I met a year earlier. The Sullivan’s were nice people, they welcomed me into their home as one of their own. Her father asked what my intentions were for Jasmine and I told him to help her become the best person she could be, he smiled and nodded approvingly. Jasmine was the Valedictorian and graduated with a 3.9 GPA, she said she wanted to be a journalist for the Associated Press and I told her she’ll accomplish it easily. I, on the other hand, still wrote poetry only when it struck me and published to various magazines. One time the editor from Deadman’s Tales called and asked me if I could write a collection of poems by next month for an anthology and I told him I could. That month I wrote five poems: A Deadly Present, “Death of a Friend (Stan), Mentor’s Last Lesson (Stella), Twisted Mind, and A Deadman’s Kiss. Each poem only consisted of one stanza containing four or five lines. That was fine for the editor, he said it was less space and less money.
I didn’t see Jasmine much after her graduation, she was doing internships with various news organizations like CNN, CBS, ABC, among others. She would call every once in a while to tell me how her life was going and that the times we had together were enjoyable. I took that as her way of letting me down easy, that her life had become too full for us to continue our relationship.
I understood.
One night, two months later, while I was sleeping, a surge of creativity hit me like a Mack truck running over a toddler and I hopped out of bed and wrote the most divine poem I’d ever written in my life. It was the culmination of all my trials and tribulations over the years, being locked in the closet, my mentor dying in the car crash, my best friend being shot in an alley, the love Jasmine and I made, and the emptiness I felt in my heart despite it all.
I called it The Deadman’s Gift.
I ran into Jasmine again years later after I’d done an interview, the editors from Deadman’s Tales called me and asked if I could guest star on their podcast and that they’d pay me for my time. I said yes. I went to Times Square and saw Jasmine in a Starbucks on West Fifty-Third Street and went in to say hi. When she saw me she shot up and ran over, we hugged.
“Oh my god, Rudy! How are you?” She asked.
I told her I was well and asked her the same, she told me her father just got promoted to management and that her mother had finally retired after twenty years as a pharmacy manager and is starting her bakery business. She also told me that she had a permanent position with Associated Press and couldn’t be happier.
I smiled and hugged her again.
She asked if we could catch up again at a place called A Night in Paradise, a new restaurant that just opened that’s been getting good reviews.
I said yes.
A Night in Paradise was classy yet authentic, a Vietnamese restaurant that had wooden tables and benches (with cushions) and papier mache lamps hanging from the ceiling. Jasmine and I were lucky enough to get our own table in the corner. We sat down and ordered, she had miso soup and I had a vegetable soup and we called it a meal. Jasmine asked me had I been taking care of myself because I looked awful, and I did look awful. I’d been suffering depression for the last two and a half years but managed to keep a smile and upbeat attitude when Jasmine was around. After she graduated, it had come full force and I hadn’t been able to pull myself out of it. I had bad dreams about Stan and Stella dying in my arms, my hands caked with their blood and their last words being ‘you killed me, your poetry killed me’. I’d wake up in a scorching sweat that quickly grew cold and my hands would be trembling and tears flowing down my cheeks. My heart would ache and I’d spend the rest of the night holding my knees and crying into them until the sun came up.
I told her I was doing the best I could, taking it one day at a time.
She asked me if I still published poetry and I told her I hadn’t been in a poetic mood lately. She asked me what was the matter and I told her I didn’t want to talk about it. Jasmine gave me that look she always gave when she wanted to know something, it was a look that drew your attention and held it there until her will was done, a look you couldn’t turn away from if you tried; it had curiosity, fierceness, motherly passion, and force. Yes, something about that look she gave was definitely forceful. After about thirty seconds of this look, I relented and told her about my depression and how I was having a horrible go of dealing with it. She asked had I gone to the doctor and I told her how useless that would be, that I didn’t trust myself with prescription pills and that I didn’t have a doctor. She said she was taking the day off from work tomorrow and taking me to a doctor whether I liked it or not. I tried to tell her I had no medical records and didn’t have any type of insurance but she waved it away, promptly ending the discussion (if one could call it that).
That night, when I got home, I started to feel light-headed. I didn’t drink any alcohol–that was certain–yet, I felt drunkenness come over me. My legs wobbled, my vision blurred, the sound of my heartbeat pounded between my ears and a hollow, raspy, whisper permeated throughout my apartment. I tried to make it to my chair but fell after taking the first step. The sound got louder and louder, the whisper becoming more pronounced. My legs numbed and my heart pounded like a caged savage, it became hard to breathe and I started wheezing. I crawled pitifully to my computer desk chair and pulled myself up, my heart practically punching my insides like a heavyweight boxer. I felt like I was being strangled or hung, gasping and reaching for air–my hands grabbing frantically at the nothingness that filled my apartment. My eyes started to roll to the back of my head and I fought for consciousness, life, and survival. The will to live and the need for self-preservation along with adrenaline kept me conscious for another minute before my body gave in and I faded out completely, the last sound I heard was my cell-phone ringing.
It was Jasmine, I was certain of that.
I woke up on the floor the next morning with the sun’s rays in my face. My eyes closed to the light and I moved out the way before opening them again. I felt something sticky at the back of my head and put a hand there to touch it then brought it in front of me and saw it was blood. My blood. I looked on the floor and saw a big puddle of it; I didn’t remember what happened the night before, it was only the day I decided to end this pitiful existence I remembered what happened. I got up and went to the bathroom to see if I had a first-aid kit. An exercise in futility, of course, I didn’t have a first-aid kit. I looked in the mirror and saw I had deep red, almost burgundy, spots from the neck down. They looked like blood clots but worse, they were spreading as I watched them. My body became weak again and my legs nearly gave out from under me. When I glanced down to make sure they were still there, I saw the red spots that nearly covered the surface of both legs. I’m dying, I thought.
I took one more shallow breath before I fainted again.
I woke up in a hospital bed, the room was white and the tiles on the floor were gray. I saw Jasmine sleeping in the visitor’s chair by the door, her head rested on her right hand. I looked at my arms and the dark red spots were gone as if they’d never been there. Whether they were a hallucination I would never know. I pulled off the covers and looked at my legs and it was the same, they were gone. I touched the back of my head and felt nothing but gauze bandaging. The nurse came in and asked me how did I feel and I told her I felt fine. She shook her head and told me I was anything but and asked if I wanted to know the test results. I looked at her questioningly and asked how did I get here in the first place, she said Jasmine found me sprawled out on my bathroom floor and called the ambulance. The nurse also said Jasmine discovered a puddle of blood not too far from the door which indicated I had fainted more than once.
I nodded and asked what the results were.
She said I had a stroke and that was what caused me to faint, however, she said I also had stage four lung cancer, that it was progressing faster than most cancers she’d seen and that I only had about three–maybe four–months to live.
I told her I needed time to think and to come back.
She left the room.
I thought as to how I got the disease and it came to me immediately, like lightning when it strikes an antenna. While I was floating around for five years, I’d taken some jobs off the books that required a bit of construction and contact with dangerous chemicals. I also lived near power plants and other places off of the freeways that emitted fossil fuels and air pollutants. That was probably how I came across lung cancer which didn’t surprise me, to be honest. I also thought as to what caused those spots on my body and where they went suddenly. It was then Jasmine woke up, looked at me, then got up and walked toward me. She said she called me and when I didn’t answer the first time she assumed I was sleeping, and when I didn’t answer the second time she knew something was wrong and rushed over. When I didn’t answer the door, she rushed up to see if the landlord was there and he happened to be coming down the stairs while she was on the way up. She asked him would he open the door because she thought something was wrong and he agreed and opened it for her, and that was when they saw the blood and me sprawled out on the bathroom floor.
I nodded and thanked Jasmine for getting me here and that the doctors said I should be fine. I told her that I would be out the hospital inside a week and that I’d let her know. I also asked her not to come to visit, that I’d be fine and that we would catch up again and keep in touch. Jasmine smiled and hugged me fiercely. She smelled like lavender.
Just like Stella and that staff member.
A week later, in the night, I pulled the tubes off my arms and chest and got my clothes then snuck out of the hospital. I didn’t call Jasmine.
My body worked just fine.
Two months later, I was in my apartment reading all the poetry I’d written over the years. Jasmine called every so often to check if I was alright and I told her I was, that she didn’t need to put her life on hold for me. She said she didn’t mind looking after me and I thanked her for her concern. Our conversations became shorter and shorter as I stayed the same and she changed with each passing day, meeting new people and spending time with family and friends. I was happy for her and I took being alone graciously, I was used to it. I was just going over The Deadman’s Gift when I started feeling weak and a sharp pain arose in my left lung and I couldn’t breathe. I fell from my chair but had the foresight not to fall on my head like last time and arouse suspicion. I made wheezing sounds but the pain cut them off harshly. My body convulsed and fought for breath but to no avail, I began to beat my chest like a gorilla, pounding and pounding and pounding until my lungs and airways opened and I was able to take in a large breath of air. My body filled and my chest expanded like a balloon and deflated when I exhaled.
I lay there for two hours thinking about nothing.
The third month was when I’d had enough. Jasmine seldom called me and that was fine, the last conversation we had she was telling me about her boyfriend, Jason, and how they were getting along well together. I told her I was happy for her and that I wished her the best. She asked how I was and I told her everything was well on my end. She then asked why I didn’t come to the house and visit anymore and I told her I’d been traveling (a huge lie). I was in my bed one night, sleeping soundly when both of my lungs closed up on me and I couldn’t breathe. At first, I thought it was just the dream and when I woke up I realized it was real and started beating my chest, punching and punching and punching which became pounding and pounding and pounding until they opened and that large gust of air entered them again. My vision was hazy and blurry, the sound of my heartbeat thumped between my ears, a low, raspy, wheezing came from my throat with each breath along with thoughts of being locked in the closet, Stella dying in the car crash, and Stan being shot and robbed and left to die on his way home from dropping me off.
Cancer had taken my mind off the depression for a while–for two months, in fact. It was then that I had the thought, the thought that would end it all for me; the pain, the depression, the grief and sorrow, and the dying.
It was then I decided.
I stand at the edge of the Empire State Building, the rain still pouring on my black hoodie and khaki cargo pants. The clouds in the sky remain a deep purplish black and flashes and cracks of thunder and lightning illuminate the dark skies. I look down upon the city for the last time and watch the cars and lights dance in the night. My fingers are nearly frostbitten and have been numb for some time now, my legs are still warm and ready to go when I am–the will to live and need for self-preservation having left me long ago. I feel calmer and more relaxed than I’ve ever been in my life, my lungs are working as if they were healthy and the sound of my heartbeat is nothing but a hollow and functional thump. My mind empties itself of all thoughts as if it wants to leave all it can behind, but there’s nothing to leave behind. Not for me, anyway. I’m just an orphan who happened to write poetry that killed everyone I came to care about and would eventually kill me, in the end. I inch closer to the edge until my heels are all that’s left to keep me in the world of the living. I close my eyes and relax my body, releasing the last vestiges of tension that hold me to this world.
The Deadman’s Gift
Rudy Sarabelli
My parents died and I was born,
I grew up in a world that is ripped
and torn; left without guidance I was
not forewarned that what I was inhabiting
was a world burning in the heat of the Devil’s
scorn.
Locked in a closet of eternal darkness,
My heart becomes steel but doesn’t harden.
Worthlessness tears it apart and leaves me
for dead, horror making its home in my
soul, leaving room for dread.
The faith of a writer restored my hope,
brought stability to the rocking boat.
Just when I began to envision the forming
of a better path, the life of the writer ends
in a sudden crash.
Years of drifting in the merciless void,
inheriting diseases that would see me be
destroyed; I met a man that had a plan
and lifted me from purgatory with empathetic
and civilized hands. He provided me with work,
tools to survive. And the thanks he gets for
helping one in need? His life snatched from
him in petty crime.
Grief, pain, and sorrow were all I knew
until she came into my life, her gentle touch
subdued it and we made love into that good
night. My life haunted me while yours gave
you the world, I being a depressed and disease-
ridden creature, you being the beautiful princess
and daddy’s little girl.
My life started with a Deadman’s kiss,
I lost everything and my heart went adrift;
I leave this world knowing I will not be missed,
nothing remains except The Deadman’s Gift.
Leave a comment