A SLIGHT RESEMBLANCE OF LIFE. based on a true story
For the people involved, the best wishes.
4 I woke up in a whirlwind. My eyes still fuzzy with sleep as I threw clothes into a small black duffel bag. Jeans, shorts, and a pair of pajama pants fell from my hands in loose and lazy folds, gently passing through the open top. Next came socks, underwear, deodorant and an old toothbrush I wouldn’t care to forget. I would have placed them in a plastic bag just in case of a rough journey, but I was already behind in packing and, as I had just received the warning phone call, my parents were a few blocks away and we had no time to spare. I paused, still dreary from a night of little rest, staring at my bag. No, not at, into. I was inspecting the articles I had hastily chosen; shorts in case of a warm day, jeans for the probable cold. It looked like rain outside. Clouds, billowed and grey, crouched at the starting line, waiting for the bell to sound, signaling the release of the rain that was just pooled behind the surface.
6 The temperature hung around fifty on this Friday morning, rather typical for an early October day. There was something missing from my bag though, I slowly realized. This was not a normal trip home. I was not going to get into the car, relax with a book and joke with the family on the long drive toward a relaxing weekend: A bright orange t-shirt, three pairs of socks, two different belts. With the morning still clouding my mind I turned from the duffel bag to the closet. A pile of jumbled shirts and shorts sat lifeless, a terribly sad excuse for organization. Scanning the clothes, taking my time, my eyes fell on the one thing I couldn’t forget to bring. It wasn’t flashy and it isn’t the type of clothing that one has the desire to wear. In fact, it hung in the same place from the same hanger it had been on since the last time I needed it well over half a year ago. Just a normal, plain, boring, and solemn white button up shirt with a black tie to match.
8 I had received the original phone call the night before from my mother. Expecting the pedestrian ten minute “How was your week?” discussion, I haphazardly picked up the phone and blurted a brief and heartless “Hello” before the phone ever reached my head. Nothing pedestrian came from the other end of the line. My friend, who had been troubled for some time, had gone out the night before and never woke up. He had died of an overdose. It was not the type of friend who I knew particularly well anymore. We had played together when we were younger; the two closest in age of the daycare, but as time went on we hadn’t seen each other for a very long time.
10 It was the kind of bad news to which you just don’t really know how to react. I was sad, but not so much for the friend, I hadn’t seen him in years and he had become more of an acquaintance to me, but more for his mother and sister. The mother, sitting on the El on the way to work Thursday morning receives a call from her ex-husband that their twenty one year old son had died of an overdose. The sister, younger, is returning home for the first time in her freshmen year, not for a loving reunion with parents and family, but for the death of an older brother who she had just moved away from for the first time. I took the shirt and tie, and with care and patience folded them and pressed out the creases so they would not wrinkle.
12 I stood in my room. Body surrounded by the morning light streaming through the breaks in my shutters. I could tell it was raining now, even with the blinds closed. The rain dripping off of the windowsill reflected the light, casting it across the room and onto the far wall, dancing as the drip wavered and wiggled. There is a strange beauty in falling water. Whether it be a simple raindrop, running along the edge of a windowsill, calmly growing and growing until it releases its grip to splash on the ground below or the emotional glow of a tear which wells at the eyelid, the eye quivering as the mind tries to hold back. At some point it, like the person, gives up its restraining act and the tears pour forth, streaming down the sides of the nose and over the lips, dropping onto the shoulder of an embracing arm. As if for some reason they need to stop, the eyelids close furiously, jamming together in an attempt to keep the rest of the tears from exiting; a futile attempt at self control in which not even the strongest of people can succeed.
14 I turned away, moving into the living room and into the cold breeze of a window left open in the night. Beer cans lay strewn across the table, a perfect example of the ease at which we turn away from a trying situation. Like someone trying to clean up the effects of a wrongful deed I bagged the cans, still cold, some still full. Each can stung as a reminder of dependence. Like my friend, turning his back on family to find an easier way through the hardships of life, I broke through the barrier of immediate sadness through the comfort given by games and beer. Almost ashamedly, I poured the remaining liquid from the old cans and took the full bag out to the dumpster behind the house. The chilled rain nipped at my face and hands as I walked, and kept my pace with a quiet patter on the taught plastic trash bag hanging from my hands.
16 While I tried to shut everything out, the world would not allow me the pleasure of peace in such a horrible mess. I shut the back door and turned the deadbolt. The metal clanked and I winced as the bolt pushed and grinded against the wooden doorjamb. Two stubborn objects, fighting for its own goal. They grabbed and poked, scraped and scratched at each other until the bolt broke through. The wood, once the flesh of its own character, now a slave to the whims of a stronger object, fought with vigor and intensity. The type of effort you would expect from an object so used to life. It had fought for so long, for such a long amount of time to grow in such a harsh environment. The wood of the tree had worked, slowly but surely through the decades, growing, and expanding, and then, with the swipe of a blade, falling for the benefit of mankind. A once proud and mighty being reduced from life to a doorjamb catching a deadbolt. A shadow of its former self, still fighting for whatever it had left, clawing for every inch it could call its own, finally gave up and conceded to the metal bolt.
18 The van sat outside now. My parents were dialing their phones as I walked back into the bedroom. The bag still slumped open on the bedspread, pant legs spilling out, resting on the bare white padded mattress. That somber white shirt lay pressed and folded, crisp and clean to the right; a stark contrast to the deep blue of the lumpy pillow below it. Like the shirt, this day stood out among the carefree days and weeks of the past five months. The games and fun that had come and gone, the friends and family that I had greeted and just as easily left behind lay wrinkled and forgotten in the recesses of my mind while this weeping morning of this solemn and unexpected occasion crept into every aspect of my understanding and glowed like an inescapable glare. I gathered up the shirt and tie and placed it on top of the stained, sloppy packing of the rest of the weekend’s clothes. My phone rang in my pocket. No doubt my parents, waiting in the rain soaked car just across the street. I answered it and quietly responded, “I’ll be out in a minute.” The phone call ended. The screen went dark and I threw the shoulder strap over my head. I walked to the door and glanced down into the bag once more. The white shirt sang from the blackness of the bag. I pulled the zipper closed and shut the door behind me, relieving the shocking stare of that bright white shirt, but setting out into an unknown future.
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