/lit/ - Literature

>>14223928
1/3

Do you remember being up in my loft back in Burlington Vermont, watching movies while the world around us froze; when the arctic currents poured down from the Adirondacks and made their way across Lake Champlain, sweeping over the town? It reached fifty below zero and we got these scary blinking alerts on our phones calling it a weather emergency, but it didn't matter because we had plenty of blankets, my crappy apartment stayed warm, and I got to know you better. After that, we’d always have these wonderful little storm parties, just you and me. I used to get all excited whenever I knew that awful weather was on the way, because we’d always wait it out together.

Before I knew it, I had to leave; the realness, the warmth, the sincerity of you, this lovely and unassuming person who stumbled into my life one day out of nowhere, so anchoring and grounding me. You evaporated into social media and other digital platitudes, and eventually faded into silence, but I don’t blame you. It was not your fault or mine that I got sick and had to go, that for twelve long years, some asshole Bostonian Ivy League Doctor had been filling me with poison. From the age of seven I had been used, without my consent for medical research, as is permitted within the bounds of standard practice under Massachusetts common law for pediatric psychiatry. In a state renowned for its world class medical care, you are allowed to say “let’s try something new” on an anxious seven-year-old kid, and his desperate parents. You are allowed to give someone an Iatrogenic brain injury. You are allowed to experiment with drugs on children. So at nineteen years old when my body began to fall apart, what was I supposed to say to you? “Sorry, I love you, but now I need to quit my job and drop out of school, and move four hours south back home because I can’t stop shaking or feel my skin, everything is burning and it’s getting really hard for me to walk right now; and I am getting ready to die.”

Your mom lived all the way in Montana, while your dad was holed up somewhere in a shack off the grid in the woods of Rutland. All your siblings had moved away. You were shy because you’d learned at a very young age that it was easier to say goodbye; that’s what you told me, and it made my chest hurt. You were used to shutting down and letting go, but you broke the rules you’d made and stood by me. When I got sick, you stood by me in a way that nobody ever had before. With a heart free of judgement and full of love you held on no matter what. When I started to decline, I’d get these awful tremors throughout my whole body; and whenever I shook, you’d lie there with me and hold my hand. You chased me down headfirst as I was slowly devoured, until your life became as unhealthy as my own, and I begged you to stop. You are still my hero, and I will always love you.