I Am Not a Necrophiliac.

I am not a necrophiliac. But I can’t help but fall terrifyingly in love with someone who is dying a violent death right before my eyes.

I’m an EMT. I see this every day. Then the last few ounces of blood leak out from their bodies and they go very, very, still and shrink within themselves – or else the doctors wheel them away to fix them up or at least help them die a little more peacefully – and my heart is broken.

When I was very young, my father was taking me back home from the park when he was stabbed in the street. I had to look on as the man with the knife stuck him over and over. His heart, his guts, his throat. My father had told me on various occasions that he did not love me. He beat me. He said he’d wanted a son if he’d wanted a child at all, and he was treating me as if to fashion me from a boy to a man. So I tried to be a son. But he beat me harder.

I didn’t know what to do. So helpless.

There were awful, strangled sounds coming from my father’s mouth. Blood puddled on his clothes, soaking outward, assimilating into each other. In the gathering dusk his blood was black. The knife slipped through his skin like cake.

Does that make you sick?

The motions were so steady, so unflinching, almost mesmerizing. If an earthquake trembled under our feet at regular intervals for the rest of time, we would learn to sleep to it before we knew it. I wanted him to never stop stabbing my father, but not because I hated him.

I loved my father. I would have done anything for him.

Compound fractures screeching jaggedly through skin, the bone forcing into the world like a premature baby. Spilt guts, I am so touched they would do that for a complete stranger. Convulsions, which I understand perfectly. Vitreous and spinal fluid, just like water, the matrix of all life. I love them. I love them. Beautiful people.

I slept in the ER for a long time, in a drafty supply closet. I couldn’t miss a thing; I wanted nothing more than to always be there, ready to speed out in the middle of the night and stare into the face of someone gorgeous, someone sweet with blood, hanging by a thread. While I waited, the alley rats would run up the outside walls and scratch at the little window. I smiled. I still do. My apartment was abandoned, the faucet left to drip and the windows to creak in the wind and the cat to go hungry. Then I called the neighbor, nice woman, and said she could have the cat. But my secret got found out and they said they would fire me if I kept squatting the way I was. So I went back.

Their hardness is wrenched apart; discovered, marrow blinks up and out at the light of day from their helmets, their bone-coats. Or maybe blood will pool in their nose or eyes and cry outward toward me. Organs, muscle, membranes so pretty and bubble-iridescent, unearthed and unendingly precious, hanging by filaments, gasping by heartbeats. Paleness, coldness, the pallid mask of shock as it is seizing – a tiny human at the frontier of death, that dear infinity.

Anything could happen, and therein lies the magic. But what is invariable is love. No matter who they are, I will love them, love them as God loves the world and everything that hurts Him –

Father, please forgive me.