What Is Broken Can't Be Fixed.

What Is Broken Can’t Be Fixed.


March 20th, was the anniversary of Paul’s death. I can’t fix that. I can’t glue pieces of memory together and bring him back. I have already tried and failed.

For months, I saw his body as he looked the day he died. He was three times his healthy size, patches of brown blood pooling on his yellow arms and legs. His skin now a clown’s fat suit puffed up and out with poisonous tumor cells and fluid released as all his organs shut down. I saw Paul suspended four feet above me no matter what time of day. There he was, above the bed or hovering over Bunny as she took a poop in the backyard.

Next to me, lying flat on the bed, a life-sized doll, a mannequin so to speak, took the general shape of Paul but with no facial features or hair. It took in and exhaled air much like the ventilator Paul was on the day he died. Paul’s lungs filled with artificial air, and then emptied, his chest keeping metronome perfect time, up and down, up and down, accompanied by the primitive clank of a machine. I thought that if I loved him enough, if I suffered more, if I was willing to sacrifice even my own life; the mannequin would melt into his facial features, limbs would animate with spreading veins and arteries, tendons, and growing skin. He returns to life.

I loved him as much as I could. I am still suffering. I would slice myself raw or swing from my second floor beams if it meant Paul could pick up where he left off.

The mannequin did not grow skin or push out ears. Instead, it faded and was absorbed by my green flannel sheets.

Love ripped away and body broken is an insane man’s recipe for nightmares.

I didn’t mean to fall in love with someone this past year but I did. He fell too or so he whispers and sometimes yells when I am inside him. We met while we were in a million jagged pieces. Alone, we escaped to a fantasy world made of porn, silicone lube, piss, disease-exchange, cock rings, hot breath and secrets shared. We created a world of understanding and free from loneliness. The painful realities of recent death and failed marriage are left behind by fused bodies, tears for despicable acts, and wet, all-consuming kisses. We imagined ourselves well during these six, eight, or ten hour marathons once or twice a week. An impenetrable fortress made of body grease, burning candles, cigarette smoke, alcohol and Red Bull. He has done the worst possible things you can do to someone you love, (not to me), and I still love him. I tortured him with manic episodes and he did not give up.

Hours when we were loved despite the fact, in his words, that we were, “hot messes”.

Unfortunately, what would have made for a passionate and romantic read in a grocery store romance novel is as they say, “not destined to be”. We are not going to sweep each other off the floor and onto our feet, hold hands while we watch the sun rise and heal our shattered lives, one loving piece at a time. It looks like there will be no happy ending in this trashy novel, just plain, old-fashioned and worn out drama. Sexual marathons of nearly obscene passion and breathy exclamations of love are not enough to put these two back together again.

There are fights that fuel passion. Then there is reality which bleeds it out. It has been a year and One selects and adds another player as back-up; he hopes this new man will pull him out of his misery by moving him into his life and apartment. A human life jacket, giving him the neat and steady life he craves as he hunts for chemically induced depravity. The other cannot rescue himself. He loves this One but wants no order or domesticity, no weight to keep him from drifting out of life. If this love fails, he cuts another notch into his lifeline.

When escape turns to love with no foreseeable future beyond one night, no permanent break from madness, damaged men respond with guilt, anger, violence and jealousy. Shattered pieces of complicated lives eventually repel one another like atoms of identical matter and equal charge. Love and sexual highs become a pipe bomb stuffed with explosives, nails and pieces of glass, shattering everything around it into sharper, smaller and more lethal pieces.

What is broken can’t be fixed. It is a shame because the opposite outcome was never more needed by any two people.