Pale Fragments

Jesse

Suicide note continued:

I've told you guys about my roommate Jesse, right? I want to tell you a little bit more.

There was a dissonance to the man, a deep conflict and lack of resonance in the soul. We all like to believe that personality is pure and constant, but in this man it was so evidently a charade which he himself was unaware of. The insulting lack of awareness in his entire demeanor caused many who looked on him to be struck with a kind of fearful discomfort. Sometimes we would drink together and he would pull out a kitchen knife from the drawer behind him and ram it into the table with the quiet contemplation of the scientist testing to see how a poison affects certain rats at different stages of development.

As is true with many people, you could see hints of evidence for his brokenness in the way he walked: with self-importance which sought to prove itself to you. He walked slightly leaning forwards and much too fast. There was an intensity to his walk which was almost never warranted, and all the while his big eyes stared back at you as if daring you to question the authenticity which propelled him forwards with such an eagerness for life.

When he stopped walking, he almost always was coughing, and sighing, and wiping his forehead slowly and meticulously, and staring with a blank seriousness. It was as if each step was for him the easiest and most impossibly challenging thing to do. Whenever he sat he lit a cigarette and took such a momentous puff that I could hear him in the kitchen from my room and thought it was a gas leak.

Can you feel what I feel? Fuck this guy, right?

Sometimes me and Jesse would drink together. Not too often; we were smart with our addictions, or at least I tried to be. One night he and I were drinking together and he wept. I can't remember how we got to this point in the conversation. When I have gotten drunk in the past (I haven't had any substances for exactly two months back from the date of this letter), I have often found myself in situations which, as Fitzgerald put it, made me "privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men".

Jesse told me, then, about how he had taken care of his brother with cerebral palsy his entire childhood. He had never had anyone take care of him. The pain, the pain, the pain in this man's great eyes! The sincerity, the hardness of the face which surrounded the pain-filled eyes, denying the reality of his brokenness for fear that someday his brother might need him again—and weakness could not be tolerated in that inevitable event.

He told me that everyone else was more important than him. It was his duty to take care of everyone. He said he hated attention. Later that night, when he was way too drunk, he kept calling me and calling me and calling me. On the car ride home (I drove, not too intoxicated, having stopped drinking as soon as he fell into the fire the first time) he said, the slurring of his words almost certainly embellished, "I hate attention. I don't like taking people care of me. I don't like it. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Let's just go home. I don't like how this feels. I really don't feel good."

"Dude," I said. "Of course you like it."

He sat up slowly and said nothing. It was not the response he wanted, and he seemed to be grateful to me for that.

"Yeah dude, come on, I see that clear as fuckin' day. You were denied attention and care your whole life. We all need to be looked after. We need to be affirmed. There's no need to pretend that you don't like it, that you're not absolutely desperate for it. I see that you are; I see in the way that you act, man." I was upset at him for the games he felt he had to play. "You're fine, man. It's okay to want attention."

"I'm sorry...I'm sorry..."

"I promise, you're just fine. No need to apologize." My anger came gracefully and went quietly, like a lightning strike which, seen from a mile away, expands exponentially throughout the whole cloud before it crashes on the blinking shore of the Earth. "I'm sorry for saying it like that. I'm drunk too, alright? I'm pissed how that party went, too."