One Evening in Wilmington with Chekhov’s Gun
The traffic is at a standstill,
idling sedans belching exhaust and grit,
rage simmering behind the veil of every anonymous windshield;
a dissonant chorus of geese overhead,
and I am driving to the city to buy drugs.
I am 20 and suffering and longing to numb the pain
of abuse and shame; I am my own Lifetime movie,
a cautionary tale about the dangers of low self-esteem
and the catastrophic implosion of privilege.
The streets of Wilmington are cloaked in gloom,
neon signs battling with starlight against the dusky sky.
My blonde pigtails brand me an outsider
in this open-air drug market, a microcosm of supply and demand
which flourishes along the sidewalks of certain nameless avenues.
This is not rock bottom, but it isn’t very far away.
The drug dealer is a boy, a child,
someone who would be otherwise occupied with
lacrosse and SAT-prep back in my safe suburban bubble.
He brings me to a series of row houses,
heartrendingly sparse trees lining a gravel alley;
he leads me further into the darkness.
The gun is buried in my stomach before I see his hand move.
And as I hand over my sheaf of twenties –
eyes wide, body perfectly numb, limbic system locked in
fight/flight/freeze/fold/fawn –
I realize this entire scene has been preordained
from the moment that gun was first smelted.
Later – moneyless, drugless, body still intact –
I forge through the snarl of return traffic;
I feel the imprint of the gun barrel tattooed against the hollow of my waist.
I take a moment to realize
that pistol had every right to fire,
simply on the basis of its existence alone.
I take a moment to realize I should, by rights, be dead.
And I am so very grateful to be alive.
CNN Films Presents Sole Survivor (2013)...Or, It’s Called Survivor’s Guilt and It Never Goes Away
Part One
Amidst the roiling black smoke and the screams of agony/when simple fear has long since condensed into something corporeal and gritty/amidst the suffocating dread which must loom in the vacuum of the troposphere whenever a Boeing 676 plummets towards the Earth/when mortal terror is made incarnate;
Did you know CNN aired a film-length special report entitled Sole Survivor/one Wednesday evening back in 2013?
Amidst the carnage and all of the death/senseless/senseless/senseless/the tragedy an inevitability, according to probability/and an ironically unironic Alanis Morissette song/amidst the profound horror of knowing your plane is going down/what must it be like to then just…walk away?
Sole Survivor (2013) featured true-life stories of plane crash victims/who were the only surviving passengers/on each of their respective flights.
Amidst the maelstrom of danger and the pressure of mortality/the permanent stain which trauma leaves behind/the flashbulbs and interviews and15 minutes of infamy/amidst whatever the hell is left over when all the adrenaline is spent/how can you not ask an absent God/why it was you who were spared?
What a morbid fucking premise for a film.
Part Two
I remember marveling back in 2013/that a sole survivor from the film/somehow lived through an inferno of a plane crash/when he was only a child.
I remember marveling back in 2013/that I somehow lived through my childhood/when I was only a child.
It turns out he grew up to be a guy/just some guy/amidst the existential pressure of being the one in three hundred who gets to survive/he grew up to just be some guy. How anticlimactic/almost like he wasn’t even personally spared by an omnipotent being/almost like things don’t really happen for a reason at all.
It turns out I grew up to be a fuck-up of a former-gifted kid/sentenced to a lifetime of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. How anticlimactic/doomed to a Sisyphean struggle with each and every new sunrise to thwart the darkness of ideation/senseless/senseless/senseless/almost like things don’t really happen for a reason at all.
But you know what?
Fucking rock on, my dude/rock on. Be your ordinary self/because with all of the evil and all of the chaos holding sway over the machinations of this world/to be ordinary and alive is still a fucking gift/and you owe absolutely nothing to anyone/just because you beat the odds.
Part Three
Whenever I recall Sole Survivor (2013), which has stuck with me through the years/whenever I picture the little boy/who dragged himself from the twisted wreckage of a pulverized aircraft/and then grew up to be unremarkable/I cannot help but contemplate the responsibility of survival.
I have also beaten the odds/exactly like my dude, the plane crash survivor/because no matter how badly things might have turned out for me/they could also have turned out so much worse.
Whenever I recall Sole Survivor (2013), which I watched at the most formative of times/whenever I picture my tormented childhood, which was molded at the most formative of times/I cannot help but remember the weight/of the existential debt I owe/to my favorite sibling.
I could be doomed/after all/ to forever suffer the consequences of mistreatment and neglect/just like my younger sister/senseless/senseless/senseless.
Amidst my CPTSD and a complete lack of coping mechanisms/I am just grateful to have emerged somewhat-unscathed/from the metaphorical plane crash of my own upbringing/from the fiery impact of my prepubescent trauma/to be the Sole Survivor in the CNN film of my youth.
Part Four
But my dude/I really do have to ask/when it finally becomes time to contend with the deafening conviction that you do not deserve to live when so many others have died/that you are unworthy of happiness in the midst of such profound suffering/how do you possibly continue to move on?
How can you justify joy when you are the sole survivor/of a toxic ecosystem that inflicted indiscriminate harm with impunity/when you must watch your own blood struggle to exist in this life/punished by birth order and the cumulative damage of cortisol/upon a developing brain?
What do you do with that feeling deep behind your xyphoid process/the sensation that nothing since then has ever been fair/senseless/senseless/senseless/the certainty you could have changed something/and the suspicion that each bit of everything that went wrong/was entirely your fault?
What do you do with all of the remorse/for actually being happy/that you are still alive?
Because I think it’s called Survivor’s Guilt, and I hear it never goes away.
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