December 1, 2012 | Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

The top of the bridge has always been my favorite place in the world. You might not realize it at first, but it is eternally, unspeakably beautiful. I can be alone there, when the night is vast and infinite and the concrete is solid beneath my feet. I can sit in silence, half hidden by shadows, my forehead pressed against the cold metal railings as they shine against the moon. Twenty feet below me seems a world away as I gaze down at the lights of speeding cars. It is dazzling, enigmatic, and inexplicable. Lifetimes seem to pass before me in the blink of an eye, as headlights burn like comets’ tails and the world rushes on beneath me.

It is different underneath the bridge, though. Filthy, dank, and shadowed—the moon hardly shines where the earth is so close. Charlie loves it here, but I do not understand why. I cannot love where the brilliant lights are gone: where all of the pain and discontent of the world screams at me from graffiti-stained walls. I hate it down here, where anger is so present. But perhaps it is fitting. After all, I did not come to see the beauty of the passing world. I did not come to find solitude or peace. I came because I am afraid tonight.

I sit alone for what seems like hours. Suddenly, I see her coming towards me in the in the night. She walks in total silence, her ever movement graceful and discreet. I have never truly understood what Charlie saw in shadows. Perhaps she is at home looking up at the faded sky, but I know that I never could be. I will never belong to this place of small dreams and broken homes and limited ambition. I am at home twenty feet above this spot, looking down upon the world. There seems to be no place for me on the Earth.

The glaring lights from passing cars briefly illuminate her face, and in that instant she turns toward me.

“Hey Leah,” she whispers, smiling slightly. “I thought I’d find you here.”

To anyone else, she would appear a ragged seventeen-year-old, strangely lovely with her wide green eyes gleaming in the darkness. But as she comes closer I can just make out the light dusting of freckles, the dirt-streaked skin, and the chestnut hair hanging past her shoulders in lank, unkempt strands. In the half-light allotted by a shadowed moon she is dangerous and engaging: an embodiment of unkempt, feral beauty. A moment passes before I find my voice.

“I thought you were with him tonight.”

“I was.”

She kisses me before I can speak; sweetness mingled with cigarette smoke. Her fingers intertwine in my hair. That fierce, inexplicable joy ignites inside of me: that hunger that awakens only for her. I never want her mouth to leave mine, and yet suddenly, I break away. Charlie frowns as she steps back, her intense green eyes studying me carefully. One hand grips the neck of a whiskey bottle: a cigarette is tucked behind her ear. I want to say something, but I cannot seem to find the words.

“What is it?” she asks me softly.

When I do not reply, she leans in to kiss me again, and the bottle slips from between her fingers and shatters against the asphalt. The sound splits the silence, causing us both to flinch.

“Damn it, Charlie.” I say, breaking my silence at last as step gingerly away. My bare, dirty feet edge across the rain-washed pavement, trying to avoid the broken glass. She grins at me, that strange half smile dancing across her face as she kneels down amidst the fragments of the bottle. She picks up a shard and tosses it to me. I catch it instinctively, turning it over in my palm. It is small and jagged, and the edges are viciously sharp.

“I’d rather be with you anyways,” she tells me almost playfully. “You kiss better.”

“What are you doing, then?” the question is torn from me before I can stop myself. I know that no answer she gives can console me.

She offers no response, however, except to kiss me again. I cannot bring myself to pull away this time. She is beautiful, intoxicating, and dangerous, and I love her more deeply than she will ever know. I want to stay here with her, underneath the bridge, for the rest of eternity. But as one of my hands moves to the back of her neck, the other clenches around the fragment of glass. I feel its bite against my skin, and in that instance of pain, I find a moment of clarity. I finally realized what she had known all along.

I break away from her again. I allow my eyes to meet hers, and I know that she can see the pain and recognition within them. Now we both know the truth. The beautiful girl standing before me was never mine to keep. She would never belong to me, would never sacrifice the life she led by day to wander the night with me. I do not need to speak a word, because in my eyes Charlie has understood everything. And so the girl I love turns and walks away from me, head held high, without a backwards glance. She makes her way down the dark street, disappearing again into the shadows.

When she is gone, I finally relax my fist. The glass shard drops to the pavement again, and I feel blood running down my hands. I am alone again in the darkness, and for the briefest of instances, unspeakable rage consumes me. I slam my palm hard against the wall, leaving an image of agony and love in the imprint of my hand. It gleams slick and red upon the rough grey stone. I almost smile. Now my own pain screams at me from the walls under the bridge, which I have branded with my own, personal form of graffiti. I wonder if anyone will ever find it here. I wonder if anyone will ever know what it means.

A silver moon is just emerging from behind the clouds as I make the climb to the top of my bridge, where the silence calls to me. I do not why I am out so late tonight; do not know when I chose to live among the angry, the restless, and the utterly forsaken. I think of Charlie who, like myself, has been cast aside by society. I turned away from what this town never offered us, and chose instead to wander the night. She lingered in her ever-present reality of small towns and broken dreams. It is hard to say who has made the right choice. I think of my home, of my bedroom, where traces can be found of the life I live by day. There is a pile of textbooks. There is an old guitar. There is a razor on the nightstand beside my bed, where it has remained since the last time Charlie stayed the night.

I cannot deal with the pain of it any longer. I press my forehead against the cold metal and stare down at the road so far beneath me. The blazing lights of cars consume me in their brilliance, and elevate me far above the streetlights and desolation of my town. Suddenly, the pain of my life seems behind me. In my mind, I am not in a small town anymore. Instead, I am in a city. I am a thousand miles away, in a place of possibility and life, where passion is accessible, where life holds some higher promise, and where vitality can be drawn from somewhere other than the shadowed viridian eyes of a girl whose love was never mine to keep. These lights are my salvation, and strengthen my resolve. I will not play this game any longer. I will escape in whatever way I can.

I light a cigarette and stare out into the darkness: knowing full well what I have to do tonight, and wondering who will find me in the morning.

As the eternity of darkness overwhelms me, I swear I can see her shadow against the moon. But as my eyes widen, drawn to cold ethereality of the scene, she is gone again, and I realize that I am alone in this vast expanse of night. There is no love, no passion, and no beautiful green-eyed girl. There are only the cars below me, and the moonlit sky above. All illusions have shattered and all desire has ceased, as the beauty and agony of the world surrounds me. For a moment, I almost smile, and at long last I am overcome by the inevitability of my destiny, the reality of my nightmares, and the musings I contemplate in my city of lights.

musings in the city of lights

Drunk with a cigarette,
Smoking alone
While she’s off with him
As if I hadn’t known.
Four hours north
Feels like lifetimes away
Fuck it, one more drink
A lover’s cliché.
This time I’ll go bold
Won’t cop out with mint
It may kill me faster
No rose colored tint.
I’ll live just like smoke
That’s not asking for much
A vital illusion
That’s empty to touch.
I’ll keep myself empty
And light in the head
Every calorie skipped
Is one closer to dead.

“And it’s true we are immune / When fact is fiction and TV reality,
And today the millions cry / We eat and drink, while tomorrow they die.”

Before I really get into the issue at hand, let me make it clear where I stand on gun control. Although I am usually pretty far to the left on social issues, I tend to lean towards the center on gun policy. Some people believe that every citizen should retain the right to own a weapon with which to defend his or her home and family. I am willing to hear that argument out.

However, Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner Wayne Carver reported that all 20 children succumbed to multiple gunshot wounds from the “long rifle,” which was a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle. Although reports still vary as to whether or not the shooter legally acquired this particular gun, the weapon in question is legal to own in the United States. To me, this is mind-blowing. There is no feasible reason why any person outside of the armed forces would need to a gun so powerful. This weapon was made with the express intent of slaughtering as many human beings as possible in the shortest space of time. This is a not a defense weapon. This is a killing machine.

It is an embarrassment to our country—where in the past year alone, we suffered 10,728 handgun related deaths in contrast to Canada’s 52—that it required the brutal murder of 27 innocent souls before we even began to consider having this discussion. When our second amendment was written, it was written with muskets in mind. Our founding fathers never considered that the human race would create machines that could kill others with such efficiency. When children are dying, it is time for something to change.

As a friend of mine said before, we cannot legislate away insanity. We cannot administer a blanket ban on all guns and expect that to be the answer. I do not think we should take a measure this extreme, as I believe it would be both largely ineffective and detrimental to our civil rights. But people need to talk. Clear boundaries must be set to ensure the safety of our people. Following this tragedy, there hasto be some sort of rational discussion in Washington regarding this kind of issue, as well as another important point: mental health care.

The funding and beneficiary requirements of mental health care are subject to the whims of governments, and people often do not know when they are entitled to mental health care services. I know from personal experience that finding any kind of therapy, never mind the level required caring for someone as sick as the Newtown elementary school shooter, is extremely difficult. It requires money, research, and exorbitant amounts of time. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a mere 7.1 percent of all American adults receive mental health services, and most of these Americans’ care is covered by private insurance. Children, poorer, and more elderly Americans are covered through public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and an additional ten percent are uninsured. And even with health care insurances, out-of-pocket costs for both inpatient and outpatient mental health services remain staggeringly high. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that Connecticut’s public mental health system currently provides coverage for less than one in five Connecticut residents with a serious mental health problem. The other four may not be able to afford to pay for those services on their own, particularly since mental health issues tend to disproportionately affect poor people.

On the other hand, a typical handgun can be purchased for anywhere between $250 and $500. The semi-automatic rifle in question costs between $700 and $2000. And contrary to gun lobby hysteria regarding President Obama, gun ownership has actually been rising over the past four years, as has the use of guns in violent crimes. And the Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle in particular—the weapon that gunned down 26 innocent souls in an elementary school yesterday—is available all over the Internet. My eighteen-year-old brother could buy one tomorrow.

Does anyone else see a problem here? Because I truly believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with a country where instead of offering easy access to mental health care, we offer easy access to guns.

And now I want to make my final point: the necessity of politicizing human tragedy.

The first prediction Dudley Brown of the Denver group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners made upon hearing of this tragedy was, “They’re going to use the bodies of dead children to push their agenda.”

I initially could not believe my eyes upon reading Dudley Browns words: I consider them a disgusting and twisted take on what gun control advocates are actually trying to do right now.

By blatantly attempting to shame us into silence, Mr. Brown reveals a tactic that has been prevalent in the Right for several years now. On an interesting Daily Show expose around a week ago, political commentator and Comedy Central satirist Jon Stewart presented his audience and at-home viewers with a lengthy montage of Fox News video clips, where guests and anchors expressed all of the reasons why, when discussing gun control, the timing is always inappropriate. Mr. Stewart voiced his concern that if the Right continued to tell their viewers over and over that “Now is not the time,” we would face another tragedy before gun policy discussions had even been brought to the table. One week and 27 dead later, we can all conclude that Stewart was correct.

Although the scope and magnitude of this tragedy should never be undermined, that does not change the fact that now is the time to speak. Otherwise it will first be too early to talk politics, and then too late. In a country where our media thrives on emotion, the timing will never seem right: this makes it simple to just keep pushing the political aspects of this issue further and further into the background, which is exactly what gun associations want us to do. Even now, in the wake of such horror, it is too easy for my generation to log onto their Twitters, type 140 sad characters or #PrayForNewton, and consider their work to be done.

It is the holiday season. Who wants to talk about gun control? Why not leave the “heavy stuff” to the politicians, while we catch up on reality TV and gossip? This is why it really drives me insane is when people like Brown try to imply that by politicizing this issue, we are somehow disrespecting the deceased and their families. This is the sort of backwards thinking that entirely undermines progression, and makes it laughably easy for associations like Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and the NRA to bully others into staying silent on these issues. And in our silence, they have won.

So if you are somebody who believes that by turning this tragedy into a political point, I am the one dishonoring the dead, I say to you this:

The people pushing for gun control today, in the wake of such tragedy, have not let anybody down.

You let these families down, as you looked on through years of school shootings and movie theatre massacres. You, as voters and as the American people, chose to turn a blind eye to these tragedies—you mourned them for a day, or maybe a week, but then you carried on. The mainstream news outlets turned their focus away from these tragedies, and subsequently, so did you.

I am not dishonoring the dead by politicizing this issue. You have already dishonored them by not ensuring them safety in their schools, by not offering adequate mental health care to them or their families, and now, by indirectly administering Adam Lanza the assault rifle and other weapons, with which he took 27 lives, ended 27 futures, and killed 27 dreams.

Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

XXV

Month: December 2012

Musings In The City Of Lights

Honoring Newtown: The Truth That No One Wants To Hear

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