Last night, an old friend appeared out here, shivering, in PDX.

posted by jeremy on November 13, 2002

The sky was all urgent rain & tearing wind. The trees were trembling, weeping... I should have known.

This friend of mine, she was as beautiful as on the last day I ever saw her. She had come to tell me that the last time (& the first) we had made love, done the dirty, fucked like weasels, she had become pregnant. I was gone by the time she knew. Off to where-ever, doing what-ever, ending up how-ever. She had kept the kid.

I stood there, looking into her tore blue eyes, locked forever within in this re-union, utterly silent in my astonishment; My swift & leveling responsibility.

& then she erased everything... Then she told me, "He's dead, now." She reached into her pack & pulled out some photos of him. She started crying her shattering tears, breaking my already... oh fucking Christ... my stupid & broken heart. This beautiful kid, this happy dead dead dead kid in these photos, blond-haired like the both of us. Hers. Mine. Dead. I saw it now: His eyes were the clearest blue.

"Fuck." was all that I could say. Fuck. I would have asked his name but his name no longer mattered.

In the real world, whatever that is, we have never fucked, never copulated, never even kissed. Slept together a couple times, hoping only for warmth. This beautiful friend of mine, now an actress in NYC, last I heard. None of this stopped me from waking up startled & terribly sad. The child I never knew I had, dead at two & a half years old. It tore me up. Tore me up for hours. I've never even wanted a child, but to learn of your own after his death...

& to remember a friend, in a dream like this? Razor-blade nostalgia. What can you do with pseudo-info like this? It's useless but yet, you remember... The way she laughed, the way she talked, joked, stalked, cried, danced... The way she was. I remembered all of those things suddenly & to think of her loss, my own sudden unknowing parentage. My dead child & this beautiful woman, the mother of my dead child: So so sad. So sad. So sad. So goddamn sad.

I crawled from bed after telling Rachel of all of this & I found that I could not shake it. I don't know but that I'll ever forget this dream. In my world, I really don't ever want a child. House-plants & cats are enough of a challenge for my idiot alcoholic self. But if I was ever to father a child, I would like to know about it & if I ever lost him or her, I don't know what I would do.

So I'm just pacing about in this vast room, listening to this slipping music, & I'm terribly depressed just thinking of this concept, this stupid mean-hearted dream. I'm just sitting here, trying to imagine the reality of losing your child & even tho I think I can... I know that I can't.

For everyone who has ever lost a child, for everyone who ever will, I'm terribly terribly sorry. I hope it all works out OK, but it won't, will it?

I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry.

Envoy: I saw a picture today, from the latest edition of the Covert Action Quarterly. A picture of a Israeli settler whose two children & ex-wife had just been killed by Palestinian militants. The look of anguish on his face... Incredible fuckery. The flash of that cruel camera capturing him, forever, in the exact center of his terrible cry: I don't think his life will ever be OK. & the sound of it, however imaginary, consumed me.

I think that whoever this man is, or was, his life is gone in the same shots that vanquished his children, his once-lover. Whatever he was is as dead as they. What he is now....

I hope I never find out.