(to relinquish or cast off)
§
“How are you feeling this morning,
Mr. Michaels?”
You don’t need to turn around to
know that it’s one of the nurses speaking to you. They all look and sound the same, blurring together in their
little white uniforms and superficial cheery dispositions. You stay perfectly still, perched on a chair
with your knees drawn up, staring out the window at the rain that’s been
falling for as long as you can remember, which may or may not be very
long. Time is arbitrary. You sigh inaudibly. “I’m fine,” you lie. Don’t any of them understand that you’ve
fallen apart? You wouldn’t be here
otherwise.
“I’ve brought you your
medication,” she says, and you realize she’s standing next to you. Wordlessly, you take the paper cup from her
and toss the three pills in it into your mouth. You swallow them dry, ignoring the cup of water she has in her
other hand. You don’t even know what
they’re feeding you, just that you take it twice every day and it makes you
numb. This is fine with you. Numb helps.
But numb still doesn’t make you
forget.
“What day is it,” you say in someone
else’s voice. It must be the pills
making you sound this way. And it must
be the pills that make you not care.
You finally look up at her and see that her expression is one of
sadness. You fight back the urge to
tell her that she has no idea what it’s like to be sad.
“It’s Thursday,” she says gently.
“How long have I been here?”
“You’ve been here for just about
three weeks,” she replies. “Mr.
Michaels, you ask me this every morning.
Perhaps you’d like a calendar.”
You look at her for a moment
longer before turning back to watching the rain. “Nothing,” you say. “I
want nothing.”
“Will you be joining us for group
today?”
You sigh again, wondering when
they’ll stop bothering to ask. “No.”
For a moment, she is silent, and
you know that she is trying to decide what to do next. You don’t make her job very easy on her, and
you don’t care. “A package came for you
yesterday,” she says after a moment.
This catches your attention and
you look up at her. No one knows where
you are. Hell, no one cares if
you are, much less where you are. “A
package?” you repeat dumbly.
She nods, a strand of black hair
falling over her face. “It’s on the
bed.”
You glance over at the bed and see
a large manila envelope. It’s open, of
course. They open all of your mail
here, to make sure there’s nothing you’re not allowed to have. This is fine with you, because there’s
nothing you want. Everything you’ve
ever wanted is dead and gone. You look
up at her again. “What is it?”
She shrugs. “A book of some kind.”
“Who sent it?”
“There was no return address, I’m
afraid,” she replies. “But there’s a
letter with it.”
You wonder if she’s read it and
decide you don’t care. You turn back to
the rain. “Thank you.”
“You’re never going to get better
if you just sit in your room all day like this,” she says.
You close your eyes. “I’d like to be alone,” you tell her.
When you open your eyes a few
moments later, the room is empty. With
an exaggerated sigh, you pull yourself unsteadily to your feet and cross the room
to the bed, which you sit upon heavily.
You have no strength left in your body, so even this slight movement
leaves you weary and breathless. You
eyeball the manila envelope warily for a moment before picking it up by an end,
letting its contents fall onto the comforter.
Your breath catches when you
realize what this brown leather book is.
It’s Rikki’s diary. You’d seen
it many times, but never touched it, and you don’t feel as though you deserve
to touch it now. Everything you touch
is destroyed.
Eventually, though, curiosity and
emotional masochism force you to pick up the leather-bound volume in your
hand. There is a piece of yellow legal
paper taped to the front of it, and you carefully pull it off, not wanting to
damage the cover. You take a shaky
breath and unfold the letter.
Consider this a gift, or
consider it a curse. I would consider
it both.
The note is signed only with the
letter “B”, and you know immediately that the package has been sent by
Bobby. You idly wonder how he’s found
you, and reason that it probably wasn’t hard.
You let go of the short note and watch as it floats through the air
before coming to rest on the light blue carpeting.
You turn the diary over a few
times in your hands. You suppose that,
like most books, it is meant to be read from cover to cover, front to back, but
that’s not what you’re going to do. You
don’t think you could handle reading, in order, the demise of your best friend. The only person who has ever really loved
you. Instead, you open the book to a
random page in the middle and draw a shaky breath as you begin to read.
…got off more easily than I
expected to. I’ve never embarrassed him
on stage like that before. It would
figure that in my efforts to please him, I only anger him more. I don’t deserve any attention from him at
all.
The cigarette burn on my
stomach doesn’t hurt much anymore. Not
as much as the fact that I’ve upset him, anyway. I can only hope that I gave him some sort of pleasure when we
were in the…
You flip to another page. You remember that night as clearly as
anything, and you don’t need his words to remind you of it.
Tonight I almost told Bret that
I loved him. The words were on the tip
of my tongue and I had to literally bite the inside of my cheek to keep them
from slipping out. I don’t know what he
would have done if I’d told him.
Actually, it’s more like I do know what he wouldn’t have done, and
that’s return the sentiment.
You feel the first hot tears
threatening behind your eyes as you read what he’s written. “I did love you,” you say to the book. “I do.” You shuffle through the pages some more.
Sometimes my conflicted
emotions make me wish that I could just leave myself somehow, or at least turn
into two separate people. The duality
of being the me that Bobby loves and the me that Bret loves to hate is too much
to bear on a daily basis. I almost
catch myself slipping into the wrong role with them. I can’t imagine the consequences of such an action.
This is the first time in my
adult life that I’ve ever really thought about killing myself. I don’t think I have the audacity to do it…
I’m not strong enough to tell Bobby that I’m sorry, or to tell Bret that I love
him, so I’m certainly not strong enough to do something so final. But I can’t stop thinking about how much
better off they’d be if I just left.
You realize that every muscle in
your body has tensed up and you have to consciously think about it in order to
relax. Realizing that Rikki had been
thinking about suicide for so long is more than you can possibly bear at the
moment. Why hadn’t you known? Why couldn’t you have just looked past your
own selfish pride far enough to see that he needed someone, needed you,
to tell him that no one wanted him gone?
You were the only one who had a chance of noticing, and you’d thrown
that chance away for a series of orgasms and violence. You couldn’t have expected anyone else to
know how truly upset Rikki had been.
Bobby? Bobby couldn’t see past
his own love for Rikki, and besides, their relationship didn’t allow Bobby to
see any of Rikki’s true emotions. You
know this, because Rikki was to Bobby as you were to Rikki. Your stomach muscles clench at the thought. And CC?
You certainly couldn’t have expected him to notice, and even if he had,
it wasn’t in his nature to do anything about it. Big John? Smoothie? Lori?
They had too many other things to deal with, too many messes to clean
up.
You were the only one who could
have possibly reached out to him, the only one he would have allowed to
reach out to him, and the only thing you gave him was misery and pain.
You skim through a few more
entries, unable to focus on the words long enough to read anything at
length. The details of his sexual
encounters with Bobby are more than you can stomach. The way that these experiences so closely mirrored those that you
had with Rikki makes you feel as though none of you are real people, merely
extensions of the same collective, twisted entity. It’s like a horror movie, only the ending credits will never
come. You flip through the pages and
find something that catches your eye.
It is a letter to you, one that he’d obviously never intended for you to
see. You swallow hard as you begin to
read it.
Bret,
Sometimes I wonder what I would
say to you if I could have just one evening on which we were just two people,
instead of master and slave, superior and inferior.
I would tell you that I loved
you. I would say this over and over in
the hopes that you would believe me, although I doubt that you ever would. I can’t help but think that if you really
knew how much I feel for you, you would be different. It’s clear that nothing I can do is enough to prove how much I
adore you. Love you. Need you.
I would tell you that you are
the only person, the only thing in the world that matters. That I would give up everything else, my
entire life and everything in it, if it just meant that we could be
together. I would tell you that
everything – all of the money, the fame, the adoration that I receive from
thousands of faceless fans – amounts to nothing when compared to you.
I would tell you that I’m
sorry. So sorry. Sorry that I’m not enough for you, have
never been enough for you. Sorry that
I’m not good enough to please you the way you deserve to be pleased. Sorry that
I’m not who you wish I was. Sorry that
I make you so frustrated and angry.
Sorry that I’m not better. Sorry
that I pale in comparison to you.
Only I will never tell you
these things, because I don’t deserve the chance to say them. I am nothing but a disappointment, a burden
to you… to everyone.
You have to stop reading
there. You feel as though you are
trespassing on sacred ground by daring to read these precious, beautiful words
that were never intended for anyone’s eyes to see, much less yours.
It is you who does not deserve
him, and you never knew that he felt this way.
You never doubted that he loved you, but the words you read now tell a
story much more heart wrenching than the one you’d imagined in your mind. Rikki had loved you on a level that you had
no idea existed.
Just a single kind word from you
could have knocked this self-destructive roller coaster off course. Just one breath of encouragement, just
saying ‘I love you’ one time, and Rikki would still be alive. The band would still be together. Your friends wouldn’t hate you. Bobby was right. This was all your fault.
You don’t blame him for sending
you the diary.
You don’t want to read any more,
but something inside of you is twisting, not letting you turn away from the
book that you hold in your hands. There
is one last page that you need to read.
The last entry.
You flip through the pages,
starting at the back, until you find the last page he’d written on. On the top of the page was the date and
time, and it tells you that he wrote it just hours before he died. You shut your eyes tightly for a second,
willing away the sudden, unwelcome image of the blood covering the couch, of
Rikki’s deathly pale flesh. Then you
force yourself to read.
I can’t do this anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I
can’t.
I can’t sit back and watch the
two of them anymore. I don’t know what
it is that Bret and Bobby have together, and I don’t want to know. All I need to know is what’s obvious, and that
is that they have gone to each other to make up for what I am incapable of
giving them. This was too hard already
when it was just me and Bobby versus me and Bret. With the two of them together, it’s impossible. Seeing them together tonight was the most
painful and scary thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m coming apart.
When Bret comes back tonight,
I’m going to do it. I’m going to tell
him. Tell him that I love him, that all
I’ve ever wanted in the world is to please him. I’m going to look right at him and tell him these things. The cost doesn’t matter. I have nothing left to lose, anyway.
I’m not sure how he’ll
respond. I can only hope that he will
see that my words are true and that I’ve never meant anything as much as I mean
what I say. I can only hope that he
will look back at me and say that he feels the same.
Although I know he won’t say
that. I know that he doesn’t feel
that. But I hope.
If he doesn’t reciprocate the
feelings, then I’m going to… well, I don’t know how I’m going to do it. But this is my last chance, my final
plea. I’ve got nothing left to give, no
more roads to take. I can’t go on like
this. I can’t watch the two of them
together. I can’t watch my world
crumble even more than it already has.
If I can’t have him, I can’t
live. And so, if things do not go well
tonight…I won’t live.
This will probably be the last
journal entry I ever make.
You flip the page over, but that’s
it. The last thing Rikki ever
wrote. With a cry, you hurl the book
violently to the floor.
In your mind, you go back to the
last moments you ever saw him alive.
You hear the cruel and bitter things you said to him and you see the
completely defeated look in his eyes.
You would give anything to go back to that night and say something
different. If you only would have known
that he already was planning to…
But you didn’t know. You didn’t know because you didn’t want to
know, because you didn’t want to care, because you were the only thing you
cared about. Your own needs, your own satisfaction.
You are completely worthless. You really have killed your best friend,
your only love. It couldn’t have been
any worse if you’d held the blade yourself.
Your stomach lurches and you run
for the bathroom, but all that comes up is bile. You’ve barely eaten a thing for weeks.
You stand up and rinse off your
face, catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. Your eyes are bloodshot and your face is more gaunt than you’ve
ever seen it. It is the face of a
stranger. You must have lost fifteen
pounds since all of this started.
You leave the bathroom and crawl
wearily onto the bed, curling into a fetal position. A crippling fear washes over you, your pulse racing and your
stomach tightening. Nothing will ever
change what has happened. Nothing will
ever be the same, nothing will ever get better. You have destroyed your life, and the lives of everyone you’ve
ever truly cared about.
You feel yourself beginning to
retreat into the dark abyss of your mind, pulling yourself down, away from everything
that haunts you. You are helpless
against the demons in your head, the demons that you created.
You know that you will die in this place.