Dear Life
By Jardana Peacock
The car came out of nowhere. You and Joe had just returned from a party. A party? A gathering. An adult affair. Only interesting because of the drugs. You were barely an adult. You were an adult before you were a child. Your nose burned from the cocaine. Your body felt cotton soft. From the driver’s seat, you opened the car door.
Behind you, a dragon in the early morning. It opened its mouth, bit and then spun you against sky. Your body crashed against pavement. From the passenger’s side, Joe ran in a semi-circle around the car. To you. You heard his shoes. His gasp. You watched his wide eyes, his even paler than normal face. He hung over you, a second moon. You were both certain you were dead.
Joe called your name. You heard the syllables mash together as though they were scrambling through a far-off tunnel. You lifted your body from the pavement. You were shocked that your limbs moved.
Poor Joe, what a scare. He was your blond haired, blue-eyed older boyfriend. He kept you at a distance, which made you want to be closer. He was aloof and passionate. More passionate about art than about you. You told yourself you liked your lovers unattainable. Another reason to remain unattainable yourself. You also wanted to matter despite pretending no one mattered to you. You were always trying on not caring outwardly despite all the caring you felt inside.
Joe wrote and directed plays and you starred in them. He produced theater in formerly abandoned buildings, now being renovated in Cincinnati’s rapid gentrification. Those nights, you performed in silk behind scrims. You played the nymph Echo, you played a woman who lost her arm, you played a girl who hid food under her bed instead of eating. You played many roles.
You felt like a shadow. Too many men used you when you were young. Your body often did not feel like yours. Before sex, you told Joe, “I undress in the dark.” You were a disappearing act. You disappeared in the background so he could not leave you. You had perfected that kind of magic. An illusion--there one minute and then gone the next. Like your mother.
Your mother left your father. Except that your father was never completely there to leave. He drank whiskey and you snorted coke. Disappearing was easier than feeling in this strange and overwhelming world. Did you learn that from your mother? Your father? Was that passed down in your DNA?
In the yellow-lit freight elevator up to his apartment, you and Joe stared ahead in disbelief. You didn’t have a scratch or a bruise. You were alive.
“Shouldn’t we go to the hospital?” He asked. You shook your head.
“I’m not hurt.”
You would have bad sex later. You were both reaching for something that neither of you knew how to give. You had almost lost each other and it mattered more than either of you wanted to admit. It also didn’t matter enough.
Your mother raised you to believe that people who are hit by cars and walk away without a scratch are saved by angels. Your body was full of drugs. Maybe the drugs saved you. Maybe, an angel.
*
When you were nineteen, you lived in a 700-square-foot apartment on the second floor of a red brick building in Cincinnati, Ohio. You counted quarters to purchase plastic jars of peanut butter from the corner store with iron bars across the windows on Twelfth and Walnut Street. The chunky peanut butter glued to the roof of your mouth and gave you gas. It was your primary sustenance most days.
You scored squares of cellophane wrapped cocaine in bars and perfect circles of ecstasy from strangers at concerts. You swallowed and snorted them in your apartment, in the bathroom, in your work locker room. Powder white and pale pink pill euphoria, release, aliveness in a way you rarely experienced otherwise. Your regular life was waiting tables, drugs, drinking and boyfriends. The pretty brown-haired hostess and the well-dressed servers at work told you: “You are too smart. You are too talented. Stop the drugs. Stop with the looser men.” You heard their words but you didn’t stop. You had a shameful secret.
Most of your tips went to Madonna’s, a local dive bar. You drank orange and vodka, cranberry and vodka, grapefruit and vodka. Drunk, you made out with women in the bathroom. Sometimes you’d leave your friends for forty minutes. Sometimes, longer.
The women let you press them against the stall. Your clumsy fingers found their warm folds under pants and cotton shirts. Their moans vibrated in your ears leaving you elated for a moment. Outside the bathroom door you passed as straight. You were ashamed of your desires. Of bathroom stalls. Of kissing women. Of what that meant about you.
After the bar closed, you unchained your bike from the street sign and rode to the fountain where an iron lady stood over golden lights. Water sprouted from her downward facing palms. A grayish man with a navy beanie walked over and whispered, “Want some blow?”
You nodded and followed him into the elevator of a parking garage. You thought to yourself, This is not a very smart idea, Jardana, being alone with this man. What? Would his car be a magic shop of drugs to choose from?
Your mind warned you, but your shame required punishment. You followed him into the elevator and onto the fifth floor. He chose a landing between two flights of stairs, tucked from what you could only assume were the cameras. Had he done this before? He stepped closer to you. You held your breath.
“I will give it to you, I will give it to you for free.” He held up a small bag of white powder. You exhaled. This is going to work out, you thought. “All you need to do is take off your shirt. I wanna snort it off your titties.” You froze. You shouldn’t follow people you’d just met at one in the morning into parking garages. You shouldn’t. But you had.
You hesitated. He stepped closer. I deserve this, you told yourself. Your body concrete like the garage. I am dead, you repeated over and over again. But then you remembered you were not a wall or a ceiling, you were a body and you could move. You moved. No. You bolted.
Down the stairs. On your bike, you flew through the empty streets. Away from the parking garage and finally, inside your apartment. You ate peanut butter and attempted to calm the beating of your chest. A different kind of vibration than the one that had buzzed inside you from a woman’s sigh. You had more morning and day and evening left until you would be back in the bathroom stall of the bar again. Under the fluorescent lights. A woman’s soft mouth over yours.
*
In Tucson the air was so dry it got in your bones. You locked your dusty bike onto a signpost and entered a bar called Tuckers. Tuckers was like Madonna’s but also not. The floors were covered with peanut shells, marker quotes and love notes were scribbled on every corner of the walls.
You wore a cream dress from Urban Outfitters with a peony-frayed flower at your left hip. You had taken up with a lover named Bruce for your summer in the desert. “Hello angel,” he said. You kissed him and then swung onto a sparkly red plastic bar stool.
Bruce had green eyes and large hands. You met Bruce in a parking lot after you called a friend to help you fix a flat. Your friend brought Bruce. The moon had been yellow. Bruce had looked at you and you had looked at Bruce and you both knew you carried the same kind of ache. Large enough to fill a night sky. You would fill each other instead.
At Tucker’s the click clack sound of the foosball tables blended with the rising chatter from college kids and desert regulars. You ordered a beer and a Jameson. You were drunk at least four times a week and wasted at least two more. Drinking was common. The acid, every now and again. Cocaine, the other main dish in your diet. Later, in the bar bathroom, you shoved the powder into your nose with your pinkie finger and inhaled. Your eyesight sharpened, your confidence heightened. You pushed open the dirty door into the bar’s buzz.
You drank and took drugs to forget. You drank to be more open and fun. You drank to feel more comfortable. You drank to feel like you belonged. You drank because your friends drank. You got high because you liked the floating feeling of bravery after the third hit. You got high because you wanted to feel alive. You drank to escape disappointment and fear. You got high so you could get ahead of the memory, the years of the leaving and coming of your father, the disappearing in plain sight of your mother, the girls you harbored secret and shameful crushes. The men who touched your body into numbness.
As you sat with Bruce on the plastic stool, you wondered if he would be more than a summer flame. You wanted closeness but you could not admit that out loud. You wanted love but as a child you had not asked your mother for it. You had wanted your father to be around but you and your siblings had become used to his absence in your life. You never learned how to name your missing. Despite all your drinking, all the sex and all of your snorting and pill popping--—you still felt the ache in your body and it scared the shit out of you. You asked for another whiskey. You drank and got high because you felt too many things you did not want to feel.
You had recently become a frequent meditator at twenty-six. That morning you had rolled out a green rubber yoga mat under the shade of your apartment’s awning. It was over a hundred degrees. Sweat dripped from your underarms making them squeak. Your skin burned but your body relaxed after a few minutes in silence. In the quiet, you had started to understand why you were drunk and high all the time. The questions you were grappling with were on constant loop. The pain you rarely confronted in everyday life demanded you listen. You needed to escape when you were younger for survival but did you need to now? Now, when you were applying for graduate school. Now, when the essays you wrote were being published in feminist magazines. You knew something needed to change with your boozing and using but you kept boozing and using.
Inside Tuckers, the bartender rang a brass bell to announce closing time. You squeezed Bruce’s hand and promised to see him later. You left the bar. You were drunk but decided to ride your bike home. You weaved through the street and bumped against curbs. The desert city was empty. You flew to the opening of the underpass where the train rode through town. You often made wishes when you entered. Wishes for love, wishes to erase the ache, wishes for ease in your body. Wishes that you imagined would grow from your stomach, your chest and finally root you solid and safe.
At the tunnel’s opening, you hit a rock. Your body flung into the air. Then, you were a heap of twisted limbs on the dark street. Your chin was all scrapes and beaded blood. Half a moon. You were shocked into a sober alertness. You whipped your bike onto the sidewalk. A car shot out of the underpass, sped without pause over the very place you had crashed.
*
Bruce brought you to visit his family’s trailer at Gate’s Pass; the Jenga of cinder blocks, metal and stucco embarrassed him. You held his hand. His mother had wiry blond hair and blue eyes. Her copper skin glowed like his. She took your face in between her palms. She was dying and you both felt her slightness. “Thank you for loving him.” You wanted to look away, ashamed that you couldn’t love him more.
You and Bruce did not have a plan, beyond the summer. Beyond his Craig’s List obsession of securing a sailboat and docking it in San Francisco. You couldn’t tell her you weren’t sure you could construct a happy life with a man. How you wanted the softness of a woman.
He gazed at you, a wisp of a smile. He was your best friend. He wasn’t like the older boyfriend Joe who kept you at a distance. Or your absent parents. He was the first one who loved you without pretending he didn’t. He welcomed your queerness, accepted your faults, your avoidance and stayed. Your baseline with him was an exhale and you were usually holding your breath.
“I have a woman’s heart,” he often told you. You smiled but the desire for something beyond him remained.
That night you slept on the roof bathed in a full moon. You lost count of the shooting stars; he squeezed your hand each time you gasped in delight. His mother slept on the porch below on a weathered sofa. She curled into herself--—bones and taut skin. She died several months later. She was his first love and you were his last.
At the 1000 block of Portola Drive around 9:15 pm on a Wednesday in San Francisco, Bruce W. Romero died on a motorcycle. You imagined the swerve of his silver Honda. The pink of the clouds above. His white T-shirt ballooning behind him, temporary wings.
You remembered how a few months before you had visited him in California. You had revealed over coffee and a sticky bun that you’d fallen in love with a woman. He’d smiled and squeezed your hand. “Life is short, be who you are,” he said. You rode the steep San Francisco hills on his motorcycle, a tightrope between sky and the rocky sea below. Terrified, you had held onto him for what felt like dear life.
You knew he was not afraid to die. He was only afraid to have not loved. It was the same thing you were afraid of.
After Bruce’s death you returned to Tucson. It was a hot afternoon and you allowed yourself to meander, to imagine yourself holding his hand. You could feel him. He led you to a public altar. Faded plastic flowers were stuffed in between the cracks of dull orange clay bricks, worn with time. Weaved throughout the structure were folded white notes, like angels inside each slit. Notes of remembering, prayers, honoring the ones who had passed into the beyond beyond.
Tears washed you as you shuddered in the heat. His death had hollowed you. Under the glare of the desert sun, you were sweltering and sweating. You cried for hours. You mourned all you had been running from, all you had been hiding from. Every ache. You finally felt it all.
Jardana Peacock (They/Them) is a queer, nonbinary writer and activist. Their writing has been published in Nashville Review, YES! Magazine, and more. In 2022 they won The Porch Prize in Creative Nonfiction. They live on the original homelands of the Shawnee, Osage and Cherokee (Louisville, KY), with their two kids, cat, snake and chickens. Instagram: @jardana.