Dead.
[2.]
I didn’t understand why he had to lose as much as I did; why did my sins have to damn both of us? Why tear his life away from him like that, when he never deserved it, never wanted it, never breathed the words “I want to die” into my skin at night and tortured me with apathy like I tortured him. Maybe there was a time when he was tossing his life away, but it had been another fucking eternity– he wasn’t drinking when he got sick; he wasn’t a Xanax zombie spilling his guts and his beer and his whole hopeless legacy… I was the one who cried at night and begged Gerard and God and anyone else who would listen for death or a coma; anything to assuage the guilt and the hate and the fine fucking line between not caring and caring, feeling, far too deeply. Gerard just listened or something like it, holding me tight through it all and reminding me that he loved me; that really, I was just living for him.
When he told me he was dying, that it wasn’t asthma or pneumonia or any of the oh-so-believable candy-coated lies I had been painting all over my face from the beginning, I blamed the angels; twisted my fingers into the front of his t-shirt and let the words claw their way raggedly out of my throat, screaming that they could have taken me instead. He stood there and let me shake his body, which was still lying to everyone, still healthy on the outside when he wasn’t coughing up his decaying lungs, setting the pattern for our remaining future together. He always just let me push him around, past resisting my pills-and-alcohol outbursts, watching with those bright hazel eyes that still held life in them as I spat profanity and choked up questions that we both knew perfectly well he couldn’t answer. I was just trying to get them out before he did.
By the time they told him that the treatments hadn’t worked, the anger had faded. The intense resentment and hatred which had packed my chest full like an attack on my heart during all of those one-sided arguments and brought all of that force to my bitter words were trickling slowly out of my body like thinning blood, but as days passed and the fluorescent hospital lights slowly began to bake me into an anemic ghost, I was left stripped and hollow-veined. Afternoons crawled by, lying apathetic on the dusty hardwood floor of my bedroom and concentrating on every breath just as he lay and choked on the tubes with each exhalation in a sterile white wasteland hospital miles away. We had shared the same heart once – maybe – but we couldn’t have been more detached in those routine hours, as he watched the ceiling and I watched my eyes blur with the same unfeeling tears of exhaustion and hopelessness that he had once kissed away at night.
And from there I just watched him die.
Dead.
Dead-face.
Fireworks and little mini confetti Frankies exploding all over the room.
I didn’t know what his last words were because I hadn’t thought to listen hard enough in the beginning, and at the end, his morphine-induced slur made everything that squeezed by his pale split lips unintelligible and incoherent. And after they put the ventilator in, talking was hopeless.
I would like to think the last thing he told me was “I forgive you.”
I forgive you, Frank Iero, for not dying instead of me. For being the apathetic zombie holding his breath at the side of my bed because everything smells like it’s rotting. For never having the fucking answers, and for screaming the questions at me as if I was expected to. For staring at my ice-cold passed away-gone-left the room-dead corpse lying motionless on the bed without even a whimper. I forgive you because I fucking love you, Frankie.
Dead!
After leaving his dead skin-and-disinfectant-laced bedside for the last time, I went down to the hospital café, lay my head down on the cool plastic surface of the table and cried. The rusty sobs came slowly at first, caught raggedly in my shuddering chest like I was coughing up bullets, and then everything spilled over at once, my tears and my heart and my guts lying in a raspberry-and-ashes puddle on the tile floor. I cried for him, for myself, for everyone in the whole fucking hospital, the decaying ghost lives and the new ones; until my raw lungs hurt as badly as I imagined his might have, until I thought I would vomit. The tears were coming hot like acid for every cigarette I had ever smoked, for all the cigarettes I would still smoke. I hadn’t learned anything, I had only lost.
The realization hurt, but as I lay there slumped forward on the tabletop, the pain that had been lodged firmly in my chest for what felt like forever slowly began to loosen. The absolute horror of the reality that he was dead, but more awful still, that I wasn’t, relaxed to a dull throb, and the neon broken-heart confetti started to settle around me as my tears slowed to only a silent trickle of water and salt from worn-out bloodshot eyes. There was a bloody, gaping hole ripped out in my chest; my whole body was aching much deeper than the bone with the overwhelming intensity of loss, but suddenly, desperately, there was an intangible hope in the air; the hope that maybe, things would really be alright.
After a while, a thin woman with the same pain in her eyes that I knew mine had held for a fucking lifetime sat down across from me, a plastic fruit cup sliding precariously on the plastic tray she was gripping in her white-knuckled, trembling fingers. I wondered vaguely if I should tell her something; remind her to value every moment, to always say “I-love-you,” but I realized that nothing would make a difference. It fucking hurts, and it will never be okay, never right up until the moment that monitor flatlines and everyone waits for you to explode.
I watched her watch me, and slowly, a trickle of sympathy accompanied the dull pain in her eyes. “Cancer?” she said, like the word no longer held meaning; I remembered that we were in the cancer wing, after all, and nodded.
“Dead,” I whispered hoarsely.
She nodded back. “I’m sorry.”
I wanted to tell her something that would still have meaning later on, when she was the one crying into the unforgiving plastic of the tabletop, mind racing as I searched hopelessly for the right words.
Dead.
Dead-face.
Forever.
“I hope forever is beautiful.”
The End.
When he told me he was dying, that it wasn’t asthma or pneumonia or any of the oh-so-believable candy-coated lies I had been painting all over my face from the beginning, I blamed the angels; twisted my fingers into the front of his t-shirt and let the words claw their way raggedly out of my throat, screaming that they could have taken me instead. He stood there and let me shake his body, which was still lying to everyone, still healthy on the outside when he wasn’t coughing up his decaying lungs, setting the pattern for our remaining future together. He always just let me push him around, past resisting my pills-and-alcohol outbursts, watching with those bright hazel eyes that still held life in them as I spat profanity and choked up questions that we both knew perfectly well he couldn’t answer. I was just trying to get them out before he did.
By the time they told him that the treatments hadn’t worked, the anger had faded. The intense resentment and hatred which had packed my chest full like an attack on my heart during all of those one-sided arguments and brought all of that force to my bitter words were trickling slowly out of my body like thinning blood, but as days passed and the fluorescent hospital lights slowly began to bake me into an anemic ghost, I was left stripped and hollow-veined. Afternoons crawled by, lying apathetic on the dusty hardwood floor of my bedroom and concentrating on every breath just as he lay and choked on the tubes with each exhalation in a sterile white wasteland hospital miles away. We had shared the same heart once – maybe – but we couldn’t have been more detached in those routine hours, as he watched the ceiling and I watched my eyes blur with the same unfeeling tears of exhaustion and hopelessness that he had once kissed away at night.
And from there I just watched him die.
Dead.
Dead-face.
Fireworks and little mini confetti Frankies exploding all over the room.
I didn’t know what his last words were because I hadn’t thought to listen hard enough in the beginning, and at the end, his morphine-induced slur made everything that squeezed by his pale split lips unintelligible and incoherent. And after they put the ventilator in, talking was hopeless.
I would like to think the last thing he told me was “I forgive you.”
I forgive you, Frank Iero, for not dying instead of me. For being the apathetic zombie holding his breath at the side of my bed because everything smells like it’s rotting. For never having the fucking answers, and for screaming the questions at me as if I was expected to. For staring at my ice-cold passed away-gone-left the room-dead corpse lying motionless on the bed without even a whimper. I forgive you because I fucking love you, Frankie.
Dead!
After leaving his dead skin-and-disinfectant-laced bedside for the last time, I went down to the hospital café, lay my head down on the cool plastic surface of the table and cried. The rusty sobs came slowly at first, caught raggedly in my shuddering chest like I was coughing up bullets, and then everything spilled over at once, my tears and my heart and my guts lying in a raspberry-and-ashes puddle on the tile floor. I cried for him, for myself, for everyone in the whole fucking hospital, the decaying ghost lives and the new ones; until my raw lungs hurt as badly as I imagined his might have, until I thought I would vomit. The tears were coming hot like acid for every cigarette I had ever smoked, for all the cigarettes I would still smoke. I hadn’t learned anything, I had only lost.
The realization hurt, but as I lay there slumped forward on the tabletop, the pain that had been lodged firmly in my chest for what felt like forever slowly began to loosen. The absolute horror of the reality that he was dead, but more awful still, that I wasn’t, relaxed to a dull throb, and the neon broken-heart confetti started to settle around me as my tears slowed to only a silent trickle of water and salt from worn-out bloodshot eyes. There was a bloody, gaping hole ripped out in my chest; my whole body was aching much deeper than the bone with the overwhelming intensity of loss, but suddenly, desperately, there was an intangible hope in the air; the hope that maybe, things would really be alright.
After a while, a thin woman with the same pain in her eyes that I knew mine had held for a fucking lifetime sat down across from me, a plastic fruit cup sliding precariously on the plastic tray she was gripping in her white-knuckled, trembling fingers. I wondered vaguely if I should tell her something; remind her to value every moment, to always say “I-love-you,” but I realized that nothing would make a difference. It fucking hurts, and it will never be okay, never right up until the moment that monitor flatlines and everyone waits for you to explode.
I watched her watch me, and slowly, a trickle of sympathy accompanied the dull pain in her eyes. “Cancer?” she said, like the word no longer held meaning; I remembered that we were in the cancer wing, after all, and nodded.
“Dead,” I whispered hoarsely.
She nodded back. “I’m sorry.”
I wanted to tell her something that would still have meaning later on, when she was the one crying into the unforgiving plastic of the tabletop, mind racing as I searched hopelessly for the right words.
Dead.
Dead-face.
Forever.
“I hope forever is beautiful.”
The End.