I've Gotta Get Message To You

Chapter 2

"It frequently occurs to the amorous subject that he is or is going mad." ---From Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, "I am crazy"

1967

Gel,

Hello. I would ask 'how are you?' but then I'm not sure if I'll be around to read it by the time you get this. Let me start this letter by taking you to the very end because we always seem to do things in kind of a weird order, don't we?

I was havin a bad dream and woke up to find you trying to keep still in the corner of our cramped and stuffy bedroom. I lay on the floor on a mattress. Maurice was on top of me like a dead thing, snoring softly while Barry slept in a foetal position and took up much of the space. Everyone else was in their designated place. (I keep rhyming. I don't know why.) It was like skipping landmines the way we made our way out of the house.

We were at the chapel garden in the middle of the night, the only place safe from the constabulary and pryin eyes. I remember lying there, looking out in the distance to the river as the moon above illuminated your face. We were barely adolescents and I held your small frame in my arms to keep ourselves warm. I told you about the big move and you asked me what I would do if you went back to your own time and place and forgot about me. I told you that would not happen. You told me that I need to think about it because we can't be friends anymore, that it was getting difficult for you to stay normal in any time. How can the two of us possibly dream of growing up together, you said. I want you to know that when you left me, it hurt more than anything else I had to do in my life. How could you leave me like that? And even now, it still hurts when Maurice perplexedly asks me about you in some form or another. To tell him I don't know what he was talking about was excruciating. You have to understand, at the time, the only consolation I had of leaving home was that I get to keep my best friend with me wherever I go and I couldn't even have that.

I woke up to the sun in the horizon and I looked at your face in the pink haze. The most peculiar thing happened. It was like the sun wasn't shining on you, rather, that you were a pulsating torch that shifted in my arms. I think I saw you older and younger at the same time but I'm not sure. A serenity I have never known had settled in my very core. But then I watched you---your smile, your shifting features, your face framed by your long black hair---slowly fade away into nothing in my arms. It was the last time I saw you. I still remember it vividly when I am by myself.

I still remember it now, years afterward, feeling like a couple of chips short of an order. Did I really just dream you up? Did my song writing prowess include a mad schizophrenia to base my stories upon? I know you are real. I tried to keep this phrase for as long as I could. I kept your memories alive for as long as I could but you leavin me was too much, Gel. It was too much. I guess I never realized that you meant much more to me than I had let myself believe.

I remember wanting to fink out backstage at the Chubby Checkers concert and feelin an instantaneous wave of relief as they started calling our names. I know you had something to do with it. You always have something to do with it. When my brothers and I broke the record at the Gaumont, when we started singin on the ship, performin, and the passengers started noticing---the numerous times I felt even a bit scared---I have always felt better a few moments afterward. You know you have a hand in this and you cannot even reply to deny it!

I don't even know how I'm going to send this letter. You've been gone eight years and I don't even know to what purpose I write this. I guess it's a form of goodbye, a form of closure for me. I realized I can never stay mad at you, and maybe it isn't your fault that you couldn't go back in time for me, and that all the other times were just imagined feelings that come with getting used to experiences.