You a City

I’m standing on the roof of a four-story building downtown in a city.  I’ve just taken Ecstasy.  I don’t feel ecstasy.  I feel what I learned later to be verging on psychotic, panic.  I’m going to jump off if someone doesn’t stop me, if someone doesn’t touch me.  These arms aren’t mine. The sky is clear.  Alisha spins and spins, her arms out “Amy, oh Amy I love you,” her red hair flashing.  I feel like the roof is going to tilt and my body will let itself slide to its death.   I’m too embarrassed to speak, the stars pulsating in time with the veins in my temples.

It intensifies.  I feel the depth pressure when I look over the edge and then run back to the center and fold, wrapping my arms tight around my legs.  Alisha is sliding all over in smooth colors.  She’s scaring me.  I am a bottomless void.  Nothing can fill me.  I take and take and take until I reach near death, until my body cripples under the pressure, and once that passes, I take again.  I’m a train.  I need the ultimate climax in everything I do until I’m repelled by fear.  And it’s hard to scare me.  Alisha takes my hand and pulls me through the thick air and into the stairwell and kisses my cheek “Let’s go,” and I hold her hand and crash into another night.

I find myself rocking in the dark wet grass behind my apartment.  I don’t know how much time has passed since the rooftop.

…this is too much, this is too much

The night is warm but the grass cool beneath me.  I comb my fingers through it like hair and it waves and gleams.  I had demanded that “Jason” come outside with me because I was freaking out.  Again I’m a train rushing toward a peak I’m too weak for.  “Jason, Jason, Jason,” I can’t speak lovely enough in that beautiful fucked-up way back then.  “Jason, I need you to take me inside I need you to touch me hurryupJasonI’mnotgoingtomakeitJasonIcan’tfeelwhenpeopletouchme-did-you-know? I-want-you-to-help me talkmethroughitJasonmake lovetome.”  He takes me to my room and plays Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and spends the next four hours talking me into a peak neither of us had ever known.  My body a city beneath his, an empty city with all the lights on.   And I find myself lost in the tone of his voice, “now I’m going to…” I’m a train again, finally hushed on a long, lonely track beneath the cold stars.