Your friend dies in a random hotel room in Idaho.
You convince yourself that maybe you’re paying homage to him by living like he did. You drive recklessly and treat the people who care about you like shit.
CONSUMPTION BY NADA JABBOURI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 137
Okay so your friend dies in a random hotel room in Idaho. In the way that young people do he did too much.
Five years later his girlfriend at the time, who kind of hates you now, lets you know that the situation was much worse than you thought and that the pieces of shit kids who should’ve been aborted that were with him that night were 100 per cent to blame.
Small-town politics allowed for these kids, whose futures were as bright as the inside of your actual fucking asshole, to skip it away a la Wizard of Oz and disperse across the country to do jackshit with their lives. Cool. Now what?
You cry about it and think about it endlessly. Well, not endlessly.
You get a job and a boyfriend, and you dump that piece of shit and get a new one, and you bawl.
Thoughts of his mother creep into your head. And you think about how much you want those piece of shit kids to feel suffering.
And then you feel guilty about that. But not really because nothing matters and wishing death upon people helps, contrary to what White Respectability Politics wants you to believe.
You let it fuck you up for a bit. You do whatever comes to mind. And you don’t really feel all that bad about it because your friend did things in excess, and just because.
You convince yourself that maybe you’re paying homage to him by living like he did. You drive recklessly and treat the people who care about you like shit, and random men much older than you like kings.
You have weird dreams. You can’t sit still. You make it all about you.
You cornily wonder if he can see and watch you. And if he was scared.
Matter cannot be created nor destroyed, and the world despite all of the bridges and skyscrapers and crack dens and prison labor camps humans have built on it, weighs the same as it did when we were on all fours and died from eating our own shit.
Annoying “spiritual” people with no strong religious conviction and/or backbone say that your soul is matter and when someone you loved more than anything dies, they’re simply beyond what is visible to our eyes but still they are here.
That they are a butterfly that lands on your face or a breeze in the still.
I think he is in a shittily rolled joint you smoke in the living room of someone who does not care if you live or die. He is the half-shot you take before you black out and make a total fool of yourself. He is the crass and terrible joke that would make your mom disappointed in you that you are barely able to spout off to your friends between rib-crushing laughs. He is the worst rumor you will ever have a hand in spreading.
It is interesting that I can only think of him as things to consume, in this self-obsessed dreary, indulgent piece of shit composition.
In a way, I am no better than the people who let him go on their watch. Who googled how to do sternum rubs while he was bleeding. Who showered him instead of taking him to the hospital that was in the parking lot of the hotel they were in. Who used him up until he gave out. Who let blood spill over one of his favorite sweaters.
The last sputters of a party bus.