from the courtroom bench

From my seat on the courtroom bench I calmly, and frantically notice you.
For two people hell-bent on self destruction, we are so tame now.

Ten years ago, when we were still in our 20's and we still believed in fairytales, you would say to me,
"Tell our story.  You've gotta tell it.  Promise me you'll write it."
With equal desperation I would promise you, of course I will.  How can I let this fade, evaporate like a dream on the shores of consciousness.  Let's just stay unconscious.  Please.  Can we do that please?
Without making a deal, we made a deal.  We agreed to run it out as long as we could and suck up every last bit of one another's juice.  We savored it in the form of gin and intellectual rants and drunken fights with broken glass.  Like Mary Poppins' chalk pavement pictures, we superimposed ourselves onto movies starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson and got lost.  We listened to Ryan Adams and Pj Harvey until our bodies melted.  Poetry, we lived it and ate it and exhaled it's smoky tendrils.

I just flipped through an on-line album of pictures from Kurt Cobain's suicide.  They were lame images of a pair of sunglasses lying next to a cigar box of heroin rigs.  I saw his note written in tiny penmanship with a red pen stabbed through the middle and stuck into an empty planter box.  I saw the corner of his black Converse all-star shoe, and the driveway to his house up to the garage.  Then there were pictures of cops lazily standing around in pot belly suits, with limp hands and unimpressed faces.
Those of us who rage hard die so small.
Regardless of our internal experience, how massive and crushing and desperate it feels, we are confined to this one body.  It isn't much.  When we go, few people are impressed by our theatrics.

Now I am sitting in a court room holding the hand of my friend.  It is shaking.  Perhaps mine would be too, but I am here for her.  Her fear trumps mine.  Her husband was just convicted.  He is walking away in hand cuffs and a pin striped suit.  As he is escorted by the bailiff, he looks over to flip her a weak smile.  I am in the eye of the hurricane.  In your suit and tie you walk back and forth, doing your lawyer job.  I won't let myself make eye contact.  We do each other this courtesy of not seeing one another at the same time.  When you are not looking I notice that you have aged.  Your hair is going grey, and your curls have relaxed.  I also note that you still stand perfectly erect as a statue, as one who will not be swayed.  I wonder if you are still you, or if you have given it all away.  But your posture tells me that you have not.

I still want to tell the story, but it is not the one I promised to you.   I doubt you would want that one anyway.  Our story only counts because we didn't die.  Otherwise it would be a very short and predictable tragedy.   But I only know my half of it.
Just as I won't trivialize you by waving a dopey hello from the courtroom bench, I won't let our story be another Romeo and Juliette love jaunt to burn hot and die fast.  You were my friend and my guardian and my soul's gateway. You knew me before I knew me.  I lived and died with you. Your arms are the bars of a phoenix cage.