A Blue Door Opens, Closes, Opens (in memoriam)

Last Friday was the birthday of a friend of mine, a girl I've known since I was thirteen and who, for reasons which make no sense to me, passed away last October while I was living in Montana. It’s been just under half my life now that I’ve called a city other than Eau Claire my home. I’ve lived in Kansas City, in Missoula, in the basement of a church outside of Downsville, in Iowa City, in Missoula again, and soon, in September, I move to Bangkok. In hindsight, I did and continue to do a pretty poor job keeping up with people, even the one’s I’m closest with, perhaps especially the one’s I’m closest with. Jess was one of these, a friend from that first real core of friends with whom many of my important “firsts” were shared. Many are still my friends.

When I turned eighteen I moved out of my parents house and into the basement of a house that Jess and my friend Hannah were living in, a three bedroom first floor apartment on Balcom Avenue. There, among the general mess and excitement of being young and on my own, I fell in love for the first time with a girl from High School a couple grades my minor. After the Balcom house, Jess and I lived for a year together as roommates in a different apartment on Fifth Avenue where that girl and I continued dating. At least we did until we didn’t. In the wake of that relationship, I left Wisconsin in the summer of 2000, August if I remember right, and I never really came back, at least not permanently. Though it wouldn’t be the last time I tucked my tail between my legs and fled a place because I couldn’t handle the responsibility of having a heart, it feels important, especially here and now, over half a year since Jess departed, to remind myself that she, more than almost anyone else, was there with me, watching me for the first time blindly trying and failing in the ways I did.

Part of the reason it’s important that Jess was there is I don’t think there is any way, not really, to fall out of love for the first time with either grace or dignity. I did things, said things, and in the last few months of that relationship, I conducted myself in a manner for which I still to this day have not forgiven myself. Jess saw almost all of it. On more than one occasion, she sat me down and told me I was being a dick. She had no reservations about offending me, or hurting my feelings. Once she even hit me. Always emotionally invested in the lives of her friends, always concerned, she was acutely honest, stern, and more directly critical of my conduct as a boyfriend and as a human being than any of my other friends. Boys, I think, or at least the boys who I grew up with, are generally quick to let each other off the hook, especially when it comes to fucking up with women. Maybe we expect each other to fuck up, I don’t know, but when do, for better and for worse, we forgive each other almost instantaneously. If I have made less mistakes over the years, if I have learned to navigate the specific difficulties and  awkward habits of my own heart in a way that is less damaging to myself and others, it is partially, I think, because Jess was the kind of friend who always held me totally accountable. I owe her one for that. I owe her a lot of things, perhaps especially an apology.

When I walked away from Eau Claire for the first time after that first relationship imploded, it was in an impulsive and selfish rush. Apparently, when the heart breaks, the self seems suddenly and tragically important. If I am honest with myself, at the very least I have wasted roughly three years wallowing in this specific type of narcissism,  romantic in nature, in which the subject attempts to replace the loss of the other with a renewed and radical investment in their own personal despair. While not unique to poets, it is a tendency to which I find myself more susceptible than others. I have written entire notebooks of incredibly bad and boring poetry from this position, easy and predictable poetry, total shit. More importantly, however, I lost track of people who were not me, good friends and members of my own made family whose individual lives and troubles, whose hard earned victories and defeats seemed incredibly less meaningful than my own. Jess was one these as well.

Over the twelve years I was away, I spoke to her less and less, and then, I'm not sure why, we hardly spoke at all. Years went by. Granted, this happens. We go off to school. We fall in love, and get distracted. We fall out of love, and get distracted. We get caught up with ourselves. We make friends in more immediate vicinities. Some of us get married and have babies. Eventually, we change. I’m not sure how much Jess changed from the girl I grew up knowing, or how much I did, for that matter. Likely, a lot and not a lot. I wouldn’t really know, which was a quiet guilt I harbored before she died, but now that she has, it is something else entirely.

One of the last times I saw her, strangely, was on her birthday a couple years ago. Back in Eau Claire for a brief stay, visiting from Iowa where I was going to school, I was sitting at the Joynt with a group of girls I didn’t know that well, one of which I was trying to sleep with. We were talking, drinking. Jess came up from nowhere. “Terry!” she said, “it’s my birthday!” I hugged her. She sat with us for a while, but it was awkward. She didn’t know the people I was there with, nor did they know her. Plus, she had been drinking pretty fierce that night, or at least it seemed that way. She told me to buy her something, which I did. We hadn’t been in touch for an uncomfortably long amount of time, we both knew this, and it made us hesitant. She was an old friend, and it was her birthday, and she was alone at the bar. We knew this also. Had things not changed between us in the way they did, had the years not bred so lukewarm a distance, I would’ve excused myself from the table I was at and talked with her till bar close. I would’ve asked her how she’d been, what her plans were. I would’ve inquired about her parents and her sister. We would’ve, in some way, tried to make up for time. But we didn’t. She was drunk and I was trying to get laid. When the girls who I was with stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, Jess looked at me directly and snipped, “How old are these girls?” She knew exactly what I was doing, the lonely, boyish reasons I was doing it. Furthermore, she knew that it was, by and large, at least for me, completely out of character. Thinking back on it, I should’ve seen this for what it was, a moment in which Jess was holding me, yet again, to the standard of the person she knew me capable of being. Because of this, for this one quick moment we were, despite whatever space had grown up between us, closer. Shortly after the girls came back, Jess got up and moved to a different part of the bar. Eventually the bar closed. I don’t know when she left, or how she got home. We didn’t say goodbye. I wish I had a different memory, a different final point of reference, but I don’t. I walked home alone that night, drunk and a little sad.

In October when my friend Drew from Minneapolis called me to tell me Jess was in the hospital, there was a part of me that felt I should’ve seen this coming, or that wanted to see it coming so as to stop it from happening, which, of course, I couldn’t have. Now I mostly tell myself I should’ve, at the very least, known how she’d been those last few years, if she was happy, what moved and mattered and made sense to her, what she missed and didn’t miss, what she looked forward to or was afraid of. People tell me things, people who were still close to her, but it’s not real for me because it wasn’t her telling me it was real. Nothing about her dying feels real to me. That night, Drew and I talked for a long time. Then, I called my friend Kiva and we talked for a long time. My friend Nick in Seattle called, and we talked. I talked to Molly. In the days we were all together in our separate parts of the country waiting to find out what would happen, I think I logged more hours on the telephone than I had in the entire twelve years prior. I spent a lot of time telling people that I loved them. Death, I guess, is like that. It leaves a space to fill, and so we fill it.

At the memorial service in Eau Claire, Jess's family asked that I read something. At first I didn't want to because I hadn't earned it, but I did my best. I wish I could’ve done better:

monument

Saturday the mountains, light ripened. Have stayed at home the afternoon’s entirety. Have near-slept. A swinging bench from which the sky in increments disfigures. Off & on between the clouds. Cigarettes & guesswork. How often do you remember days I didn’t speak to you were wrong?  Here, the north is honest. A brittle wind believing maybe, believing young & this not adequate a feeling left to keep. Closer, closer. In what are we apart enough to strange our falling into wreck? Every now & then the cars along the street are sparkle. Pedestrians & plane-streak. Across the sky the faces you are not unseen among, so barely recollected, flown. Discarded seed & garden. Memory, collapse. I want to tell you everything. If you are certain where you are, don’t hesitate. Make of us instead a burning middle west without you I would build again the home you haunt by staying pretty. I plant the desperate parts, forgive me. As if we ever wanted it to finish. A river through the city I could show you forests left to harvest ardor in, the wooded climb of hills a mile south of where our voices couldn’t. What is the root of the word that means it hurts to say the world where you are not is only almost beautiful? Some days, the mornings happen utterly. As if the form your body shook in windows lit at night as I remember it went absent, out. Further, further. Some days, what washes past us washes us away.

There's a reason, I think, that people turn to poetry in the moments that they do, though I don't know that I could explain exactly what that reason is except to say that these moments tend to somehow simultaneously feel incredibly abstract and  immediately real, which is the way it feels to know that Jess isn't here anymore, or at least her not being here has changed me in a way that makes her gone and not gone at the same time. If there is anything of which I'm positive poetry is capable, I would argue that it is somewhere in the medium's ability to hold together that which cannot, at least not logically or by literal definition, be equally true at the same time in the same real space. And yet the world is like that, or at least my experience of it is. We must, as Keats demanded that we must, at some point, become negatively "capable of being in uncertainties," of existing liminally in the space between competing and negating truths. It is not an easy task.


In a poem I've been working on for the last few years, there's an image I keep returning to, even when the rest of the poem changes, of a blue door opening in the wilderness. I've never understood why I like it so much as an image,  or how it haunts and calms me in the way it does, or what the reasons are I always want to start the poem there and change what happens afterwards. I also don't know what happens when a person dies. I know what happens to the people who loved that person, they fill the space, but the person themselves, that remains, thankfully, a mystery. For me, when I think about Jess dying, I like to imagine her waking up in the middle of a half dark woods. She's wearing the patterned dress she used to hang from a lamp in the  living room of our apartment, its pooled around her on the grass. Not far from where she first starts stirring, the blue door is closed. But she isn't scared, and she doesn't miss me. I like to think that she simply gets up, that slowly, as if on sand, she walks right through it — a little light in the trees above the both of us — She leaves it slightly open.