Chinese Food Sunsets
I had spent the afternoon lounging about the premises of my mother’s sewing school back in the old country. I was feeling particularly content as I had my snacks and sipped from the straw of my green juice box. Leaning out of the window, I watched the trash fire slowly start to peter out as it burned the last of whatever it was consuming when my juice box started making that hollow irritating noise indicating the tragic end of my juice supply. I threw the box into the fire and miraculously, THE FIRE TURNED GREEN!!!! I immediately understood that the dyes and chemicals on the box were responsible for this effect, but still, I was amazed. It would be very accurate to say that my mind was utterly blown. I have a faint sense that I ran around and grabbed a few more things to throw into the fire to see what other colors would erupt from it but I’m not sure if that really happened. I can’t seem to keep track of when things happened in my childhood very well, despite remembering all the major(and mostly harrowing events) quite distinctly. Everything feels like it all happened in one month oddly, but I digress. Whether I fed the fire or not, more colors did emerge. Orange, green, purple, red, blue, pink even! I didn’t know fire could be so much.
When I think back on it now, I realize the sky looked exactly the same as that fire from so long ago on the evening of my first day back in school after an extended stay at Providence Behavioral Health, an inpatient institution for the “mentally unwell” in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
I was walking with my two semi-new best friends Mike & Brad. Mike’s family owned a Chinese restaurant 10 or 15 walking minutes from our highschool and occasionally, we’d head over there after school for some free food while we talked about the current state of League of Legends.
The walk was actually quite miserable, the New England winter cold comes swiftly and quite bitterly. On top of that, the city we lived in was known for being an incredibly hilly area (this was quite good our teachers always told us, because it apparently made us nearly impervious to tornadoes, which need flat ground to grow big and strong!) Up and down these awful fucking hills we went and usually, I’d take every opportunity to complain about it all but on this particular day, as I got the top of the last hill, and gazed over the horizon at the fiery sky I had the thought: “man, this would be a perfect moment to die”.
This wasn’t the first time I’d had such a thought. Years before, (at least I think it was years before) I was hanging out with a particularly interesting friend of mine. She and I had gone to the same middle school but never really interacted, partly because she was absent for a large majority of the school year (she was very troubled you see.) One day, while skipping out on the sermon at church, I went to my usual spot where the swings were, and there she was, sitting on my swing.
I think that’s when we became friends, and we stayed friends for a long time afterwards. She was my favorite person. She taught me how to cut myself, and smoke cigarettes, which on bad days she would pick up off the floor and light. She had been brutalized and traumatized in a lot of the same ways I was so naturally, we trauma bonded quite intensely.
One day we were caught out during a winter storm and ran back to her mom’s house nearly freezing to death. We settled on the floor of her fireplace . I stared at the ceiling while she put her earbuds in. While she listened to some angsty dudes scream over some guitars, I listened to the blizzard howl outside as it shook the entire house, causing it to creak as if it were screeching in protest.
It was a little terrifying honestly but at the same time, laying there in front of the fireplace, I felt incredibly cozy, entirely at peace. I had that thought then: “man, this would be a perfect moment to die.”
Nearly another decade later, when I reflect upon it, I think what I meant was that, after all the horrible things and unfortunate events that made up the culmination of my life so far, if it was all leading up to end with a moment like that, then it was all okay.
Everything that’s ever been majorly transformative for me in a positive way has been fueled by that sentiment. When I met my latest failed love for example, I really and truly believed with all my heart, I simply KNEW that everything that had ever happened to me, to cause me to have all these problems and disorders, to fail at every relationship prior, every time I’d gotten cucked, or lost sleep, or just fucked over in general was okay. It was all worth it, hell I was even grateful for it because it all led me to the moment where I met that person.
That kind of peace, that kind of assurance that everything has been for a reason and all part of the plan. It was the antidote to the great terror of living in an otherwise uncaring and empty universe. I am desperately trying to cultivate that same sense of peace within myself always but golly, I mean, I sure am asking for a lot with that one.
Some days, not always, just some days, it seems like I’m regressing back into my sullen, dark, angsty, edgy ways. “wahhh I belong to the dark!!” (get a load of this guy) “ooooh I'm not made for love, I'm too damaged and mustn’t inflict myself upon others” (gimme a break!)
I’m aware of how ridiculous it is these days, so I don’t reach the same depths I once would. Nowadays I just have no energy to do or feel anything with vigor, and it’s actually mostly okay,but still, some days I wonder if I missed all the good moments to die. It’s never just about losing people is it? All the good things they came to represent, the potential of an entire life, romantic or otherwise, and the generations born from it. Tens of people, hundreds of years, millions of moments, lost.
