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bubblegumsleaze.livejournal.comThis is really a grotty little room. It really is. I can say what I want about it, but the reality is it's a dump and there's no reason I should be here. If I want to claim my own space it doesn't have to look like this. I'm just not sure where I should go. I can't really bring myself to go back to Salem. I went home just to talk to Zack and the memories just surged up in me like some kind of poisonous tide. The sense of loss was just bigger than I knew how to deal with and I only stayed a couple of hours and then ran back here. There are no memories here and I don't plan to create any. It's temporary. The station where I wait for the train to my eventuality. Sooner or later I'll have to decide. Stay or go. Employed or un. Happy or sad. Life or existance. Fulfilled or empty. Dark or light. Alone or together. Live or die. I've never made a concrete decision in my life prior to coming here. Every other choice I've ever made has been dictated by voices and delusions, influencing my decisions or outright yelling at me what to do. Now I've made the first, to come here. And the second, to get a job. And the third, to let Zack stay with me conditionally. Hell, the fourth, to make it conditional. I'm just deciding things all over the place and I can't even be sure if these are good things or smart things or what they are. They just are. I have no guiding external voices to tell me if I'm right or wrong. I'm on my own.
I have a concept now of what Jay felt when he lost Justyn. Some dawning comprehension of just how much a space can hurt. Oh, I realize that what I feel now is infinitely less than what he edures every single breathing moment, because he lost his twin and all I lost was my friend. But I understand to my own limited degree what he feels. And I know that when people say time makes it easier they're lying. I miss Pat more every day, not less. And ever day that goes by just accentuates this horrible knowledge that I will never see him again. Never hear his voice, never hear his laugh, never be in his presence. He's not coming back, he no longer exists. The nonexistance of a person who was as real as I was. It's not as if I've never experienced death. I've lost people. But truthfully I was so caught up in my own bullshit that I never really much gave a shit. I didn't like Justyn and honestly never missed him. Hell I see him more now that he's dead than I ever did when he was alive. He's the only hallucination that hasn't gone away. So while I was aware on some superficial level that I had lost someone, it never actually touched me. Other people never did anyway, their living, their dying, their joy, their sorrow, their pleasure, their pain...I was aware of it on the surface but really didn't care about it. To lose a person was incidental. This though, this is deep, visceral, dug into the core of who and what I am. I feel it in my gut every time I think of it and I think of it often. I wake up every morning and the first thing I feel is this kind of cold adrenaline through my stomach, almost fear, almost pain, and always in tandem with the thought that he's gone. It's the first thing I come to in the morning and the last thing I fall from before sleep. It's the undertone to everything in my day. And it just keeps getting worse. I asked Jay if it ever got better for him. He said no. I asked him how he deals with it and he said "I don't deal with it, Ryan. I just got used to it." He never gives much away about himself, he's one of those people you can't read. But he talked to me one night, while we were sitting here over Zack, wondering if he would make it through the night, and he told me he wakes up every moring solely because he's still breathing and nothing has caused him to stop. That he hasn't experienced anything even close to happiness or pleasure since Justyn died. He said the hole in him is almost as big as he is, and that nothing has even come close to filling it in. It's not that he doesn't want to be happy, he just hasn't been. That every day happens simply because he does not die. He also said that if it weren't for the rest of us, and the fact that we need him, he probably would no longer be alive. That the only thing that's kept him going is us. He sais "Ryan, I could never in good conscience just check myself out when I know you guys would all fall apart without someone to at least keep track of your appointments." Which of course meant a lot more than what he actually said. He's right, we do need him. Our dad's so ineffectual that Jay's the only one we have to help us keep it all together. He's the only one we have period. But I never knew how sad he was. I never knew how empty his world was. He's never said before, and he probably never will again. And now, having lost Pat, I understand just the tiniest fraction of what he feels and if what I feel hurts this much, his strength must be enormous. He stands up under his enormous loss every single day, and I feel like caving in to this one every single minute. I want to do something to make him happy even if it's only for a moment, but I have no idea what to do.
Zack's here now. Conditionally.
We all have this streak of schizotypal behavior in us. Even those of us who haven't been downright diagnosed schizophrenic still are weird and still behave in weird ways, especially when we get stressed out. So it's not as if it's uncommon for someone to be hellish delusional for a week and then have it go away. Or just to get some weird fixation for whatever reason. So we ignore that kind of behavior till it starts to get in the way of life.
Zack's always had this anxiety thing. It's been pretty debilitating for him off and on for most of his life, but he never mentioned the other stuff that went along with. He did a couple weeks in the hospital when he was in school, because he felt like he was cracking under all the anxieity. What he's got going on now is different. The fact that he hasn't been sober for like..ten weeks..hasn't helped. He showed up here a couple weeks ago so drunk he couldn't see. That was the night I called Jay because I seriously thought the kid was going to just stop breathing and die on my bed. It's not like it hasn't happened before in this family. When he lived the night through, the next morning I was helping him get cleaned up and when I took his shirt off he had all these deep deep cuts all over his stomach and sides and chest. Not like cutters cut, but like he'd been trying to fillete himself. There were places where it looked like if he'd gone much deeper he'd be dead. I asked him why in the world he'd have done that..I did it in the heights of my craziness but that was because something was screaming at me to do it, or because I felt like there was something building up inside me physically and if I didn't create some kind of vent it would just kill me, but I never did that whiney stupid superficial cutting that people do.
So when he said "Backpressure" I got this horrible sick feeling. I asked him what he meant and he said that there was some kind of poison in him, that it made him feel like he had too much blood and if he didnt let it out he'd explode. That his veins would explode. He said alcohol killed the poison but only for a little while and that after a while it would still build up and he had to create a pressure release.
SO much like me. So much like how I thought when every thought in my head was moored at some dock of unreality.
The difference between slightly schizoid and full on schizophrenic. I called D and when Zack's hangover was gone I took him down to talk to him. He was really just kind of docile, which is weird for him. He's usually so stubborn, but Pat's death has really unhinged him too. He loved him just as much as I did, they were more brothers than friends. I'm seeing all this now for the first time, how the other people around me are living with the same things I am, feeling the same pain I do. How could I not care before? So I took him to D and they talked. I wasn't in the room with them, Zack very politely told me it was none of my business =P but he came out with a scrip for 20 mg a day of Zyprexa and 300 mg of Seroquel at night. D told me Zyprexa's good for anxiety too, and the Seroquel would help him sleep and ward off the dreams he's been having. There was a lot of talking by a lot of people, about what to do with him, if he should be hospitalized etc, but he's so lucid and so sane to talk to that it just seemed wrong. He said he didn't care one way or the other, but that he had noplace to live so at least if they admitted him he wouldn't have to worry about a bed for a few weeks. D decided that was exactly the wrong reason to admit him. I listened to them argue for a while, and debate and discuss and finally said "If he stays sober he can stay with me" and it was that easy. So he's not drinking, and he's taking his meds, and he doesn't seem that different to me than he ever did. He's never seemed crazy. He's just sleepy all the time now and so he's a lot quieter than I've ever known him to be. That's the only difference. So there are two of us crammed into this grotty little room. Neither one of us knowing what to do with ourselves or where to go or what's next.
I have a job. He doesn't. I don't want one. He does.
Neither one of us wants to stay here and neither one of us wants to go back home, and really neither one of us wants to stay together for too awful long. I love my brother, he loves me, but we both want our own space.
Where do we go from here?
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