Disco Days

It’s like you said, “no one is mad enough to love.” And yet you stood by me, through even all the bullshit you put it up. Some day’s life is full of zest, and brilliantly colorful.

Sometimes I feel lost-just floating in myself with no where to escape while the voices whisper sour nothings in my ear. There are days where I weep because my life is one big roller coaster.

But none of that matters now because they left us alone, some privacy, and its only me now to watch your tiny breaths. Only us and the silence in this wee room.

I can’t really talk to you when you’re so still but can only barely breathe.

I remember the first time I saw you, standing near the barstool in the corridors of the night club. Your lips were red, matching your tight shirt with a sign of a cross - so tight; I could see your cute nipples. Your bulbous eyes were those stolen from an angel or a fawn. Your wild curls that framed your face, raven black, did it for me. A young girl of eighteen with wings on your feet, dreaming for a lover.

The next moment, I found myself snorting white cocaine besides your beautiful face next to mine, hearing the ‘I feel love’ song playing in the background. I was a bit embarrassed to come up to you with my cheap suit that stretched across my shoulders and the smell of weld that couldn’t clean from my skin but you smiled anyway.

We too made a couple through the quicksand of wanton escapades, soon lovers, then wed. You twist the world to make it so goddamn easy for me. We were crazy back then; it was great.

I was crazy. I’m still fucking crazy.

The voices became increasingly louder, telling vulgar and mysterious things to me. I’ve grown too familiar with being honest as I finally admitted my brain disease when my schizophrenia reared its uglier head around you.

Then I was admitted to that bedlam asylum for a while, receiving daily medication to render the voices silent. After your stomach protruded enough to place ear phones on it for little Daniel to listen while inside the womb, I got better.

One day, you woke me up in the middle of the night that you could no longer feel Daniel swim within you. We went to the hospital to discover you miscarried our little boy.

Once upon a time, I saw the desperate, devastated look on your face as if someone had ripped your soul away in pieces, losing twenty one grams in the process. You did not cry, tearless with faraway eyes, but I did, sitting there with my mitts so clenched. I felt like I failed you.

Then my demons told me slit my wrists and so I did. I was swimming in my own bubble bath of blood. I didn’t die but I wish I could experience the same death little Daniel did. Again, I failed you.

Now you are thirty, stricken with cancerous demons. How quickly things happen, our lives typed so fast across the page. And now we’re here in this wee room and suddenly it’s just me. How we aged so fast. I’m going to sound banal but I think life is a brief walk over a bumpy road after all. Such a life couldn’t happen today. No one would have stayed as you did.

The hospital sheet across your chest has stopped its rise and fall: you are gone.

For the second time as a grown man, I cry, but these are no tears of joy. The doctors hover by the door, feeling sorry for the stooped crazy man who’s lost his wife. They think I am crying for you, but these are tears of shame. I did not love you.

I did not love you enough, for if I did, you would not be dead nor would Daniel be dead. I should have just left you be but persisted in my own self-interest; galvanizing my own lust.

You haven’t just left the hospital just now. You left four years ago in the same hospital room. I bet you’re with Daniel in the Lord’s kingdom now while you left me to this hell I’m burning in. My psychosis must have rubbed off against you, driving you sick, seeking for drugs to numb the pain. I sit here, sauntering back and forth, moaning and grieving for the love I did not cherish because my foul demons commanded me so.

Pity, every time I close my eyes to sleep, I will see your protruding stomach. Searching through the crowds in the night club, I saw your red lips to match your shirt; then you saw me in those disco days.