Resolved the defining challenge of my life.
Defining because, yes, it had ruled me since I can remember. I couldn’t get the sounds in my head out of the cello. I raged, I bit myself—never puncturing the skin, but leaving the indentations of teeth marks for hours. I once broke a bow, slamming it on the strings of the instrument.
I knew it was in there; I couldn’t get it out. And with the rage came the depression. Black days, awful days when the minutes dragged, when no amount of will could banish the demon that lurked in the corner, always crouched, always ready to pounce.
Things I didn’t care about I did well. Teaching, never a problem.
The cello?
An agony that I couldn’t do, and couldn’t not do. I couldn’t breath at the cello, I held my breath until I had to gasp. My shoulders cramped, so tight was I.
I was practicing for hours at a time. There were days it went well. I floated down the street, beaming at strangers.
Most days it didn’t.
Late at night, in Chicago. Raf asleep, Marc alone in an empty apartment. I would be meditating, and almost get through.
I called it the breakthrough. The music would get out, I would get out, the struggle would be over.
I’d win.
Or be free.
I’d masturbate, hoping to use the energy of orgasm to push me through that door. And use Rush, amyl nitrite. I’d see a white light, I’d move closer, the orgasm would stun me. But I never got through.
Last March, I relived the moment I lost my mind, back in December. Had two weeks of struggle, of fierce concentration and mindfulness. It took five minutes to save a document. I washed dishes as if the process were a koan. I retrained myself to do everything.
At the end of the day, I would be exhausted. I’d sit and read what someone else had written.
I’d laugh out loud.
“He’s so funny,” I’d say.
“He makes the most amazing leaps,” I’d say.
I was reading that day’s post in a blog called Life, Death and Iguanas.
“I’m taking the writer to get his teeth fixed,” I told Taí. She was in a storm of worry ten islands down the Caribbean. I made sure he ate. I obsessed about his having water at all times. I needed to take care of him, this gifted guy whom I have nothing to do with.
And everything….
“He didn’t go away, I could have lost him,” I’m telling the shrink. And then, “hey, aren’t you guys supposedly to have Kleenex?”
He gestured to the side table.
Well, they are our confessors, these shrinks. And at one moment, retelling the story, I jumped back, back to a dark apartment, back to a man in agony, back to a man with his brain flooded with chemicals, and a light, a light, a light I could not get to. A light that would recede and leave me so stabbed with alone.
I’m gasping, now, as I was gasping in that red velvet chair, as I was gasping at the cello.
I have just had an orgasm I have never had. Nothing physical, no hands to wash, or floor to wipe. And no, I saw no white light.
I see that white light when I sit in my chair, at five in the afternoon and read the absurd, the tortured, most—the gifted—words he’s written.
He’s filled with that light, and I tell him, “fuck, you’re amazing.”
