I've got a new friend.
He's a seventy-five year-old who looks
55.
He's an old classmate's father.
He's a pothead with a PhD.
A once ex-pat who sowed
his wandering oats in a Thai hotbed.
A philandering man
whom I met in a movement workshop.
I give the old coot props, since our first meeting
he has made his intentions clear.
The cabron will even try to sleep with me.
Lacking shame,
no guilt -
just him
being him.
I can appreciate this.
Our Friday afternoon conversation
turned to the experience of losing a friend
to suicide.
"What do you think happens when we die?"
Smokey the Jer inquired.
"Escape," I responded.
"A release from this jail of thought that keeps
the human spirit enslaved in skin and bone."
"What do you think happens when YOU die?"
he pressed further.
"The contained energy is released from this container
and sent back out into the cosmos. Perhaps, one day again, coming
back together to mold and form into another mass."
"So, you believe it's all energy, then," Jer inferred as smoke poured
out of his nostrils and the lit spliff burned between his right forefinger and thumb.
With the poise of a thirty-three year-old, I sagely
shook my head - my thick brown curls hiding the accumulation
of gray hairs that the turbulence of my recent past has brought upon me - "Yes."
"The act of taking one's life is violent," Jer admonished.
"What happens to that impulse when the taker dies?
"What happens to that energy, Cara?"
I inhaled sharply on a quick breath.
"Uh," the realization finally hit me like a 2x4 right between the eyes, piercing my consciousness,
pricking my third eye.
"It doesn't go away," I whispered as my head shook.
"The pain, the shame, the hurting. The sadness, anger and fear.
It doesn't dissipate ~ there is no escape."
Fuuuuckkk.
(Now, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.)
Truly,
the old adages sticks:
"No matter where ya go, there ya are."
