Some nights I wake, and everything is just as it was the night before and I’m still okay. Some nights I wake and he’s here. It’s never stopped; not even after all of these years. Decades. I wonder how many people grow up to find that they’re still surrounded by every single one of their same high school friends over twenty years later? It’s probably not a lot.
People are meant to drift in and out of your life. They’re not meant to keep coming and coming and coming after you forever.
I read something once: ‘Friends are there for a reason, a season or a lifetime.’ The largest group are the friends who befriend you for a reason---for their own purposes---for what you can do for them. They want something. I'm not sure what. I just want to get away from them or for them to get away from me, but it seems impossible.
The friends that last a season are only meant to be a part of your life briefly---for a little while; then they’re gone. This group of friends you meet at your job, more often than not. You connect with them so fully, thinking they’ll always be a part of your life…and then one of you gets fired and neither of your ever speaks to the other again.
When I was young, these people that follow me now were supposed to be the “lifetime” friends. That’s what I thought. I thought they only wanted my companionship. We were a tribe. They were supposed to be my tribe. Forever. That all changed one day in the summer of 2001. They want something from me that they didn’t want back then. My so-called “friends.” They’ve gotten so many of the other friends I’ve described to join them. My ‘reason’ friends, my ‘season’ friends, they’re being sucked in with the ‘lifetimers.’ Each new addition is taught by the others to stalk me. It started with just the core group from high school, but after all of these years people I barely ever got a chance to really know are stalking me with them. Being picked up along the way until they’re all always here. Always lifetime.
It’s difficult to shut their voices out; a mesmerizing buzz that threatens to hypnotize you and pull you from your senses. The sound compels you to do things you don’t want to do, somehow morphing those things into ones you want to do---but you don’t. You stop yourself. They didn’t just stop with my friends or aquaintances I encountered as I ran from one side of the country to the other…
My parents are there. Kevin. Cassie. My fifth grade math tutor. I forget her name. That guy who always told me racist jokes at that gas station in Eaton Park, thinking I’d find them funny because he assumed that every white person he encountered secretly hated every other minority. There’s that metermaid who I managed to sweet talk my way out of writing a parking ticket in Springfield. The homeless man I bought groceries for in Raleigh. There’s Tank. Tank is always with them. The old friends and the new. Tank is always in the lead.
I just want them all to go away…
The worst part is for a long time I wasn’t really sure what they wanted from me. They never told me what they wanted. I figured it out over time: they want me to come with them---to be a part of them…
I just don’t know why.
I was 16. Incorrigible. Feral. And the space and time that allowed me to remain that way felt boundless. We were abrasive. Unbridled. Volatile. We never worried about the consequences we left in our wake. They simply didn't exist. Nobody could touch our intangible youth. These were the illusions we clung to.
We called ourselves “The Anarcrew.” It was dumb, but what do you really expect from teenagers in the early years of the new millennium? There was me, Kevin, Cassie and Tank, who was my best friend.
His name was actually Travis, but even his own parents called him Tank because at 17, he was a massive 6-foot-4 and built like a military grade machine. When I tell you he was huge, I mean he spent half his life working out. He was always like that as long as I rememberd. I think he probably started working out when he was 10 years old. If we had to name our leader, it was surely Tank. Also, he was a weird kid. We all were. We never bothered with trying to fit in at school, preferring instead to play to the beat of our own drums.
Almost everything was always Tank’s idea. He liked to make what he called “documentaries.” Skateboard videos punctuated by pulling pranks as we rode around town. Everything he did, he did with reckless confidence. Everything he did was evocative and shocking. If he got hurt in the process, he shrugged it off like it was nothing. I saw him break his arm once and he made jokes about stopping in at the 24-hour donut place to scare the lady behind the counter. He wanted to point at things in the glass case as she watched his arm bend in wrong directions and in too many places. He didn’t even scream when it happened. Just laughed the entire way to the hospital and begged the men in the ambulance to stop so he could show people. They didn’t stop and they couldn’t help but laugh. He bled charisma.
I remember once he got suspended from school for wearing a dress. His massive, slightly hairy pecs and wide shoulders were practically ripping the bodice in half. Everyone thought that was a real good one. Funny how dumb these things seem in retrospect.
Tank was wild and spontaneous. We all looked up to him like he was a god…remembering him as he was then makes me feel sad from the pit of my stomach. Everything about Tank was legendary. He was the closest thing to a god I ever knew and gods can never die…but Tank was the first of us to go…he was the one to lead them…
Do legends ever really die?
Our afternoons were spent sharing packs of clove cigarettes, listening to NOFX and Bad Religion with reverence and introspection. We did this as though the tracks were the sermons to our own personal religion. We weren’t the only kids putting on the airs of non-conformist-brooding-teenage-angst but we sure thought we were.
Summers back then meant freedom. We would get high and ride our bikes or our skateboards everywhere. Tank had a car but it hardly ever had gas in it because we were all perpetually broke. I stole weed from my brother’s sock drawer so we almost never paid for that either. He kept the little baggies in a small mason jar filled with Folger’s coffee grounds to mask the smell. The jar was hidden in a wool sock near the back. I don’t think he knew I knew about it. I’m sure he never knew how much of it he shared with us. As kids, we didn’t have jobs or much money to spare and every cent we did have was set aside and saved for shows. The Warped Tour came through all the major cities each year and Tank and I and the rest had tickets to buy.
“Who do you guys want to see the most?” Cassie said to nobody in particular.
I decided to answer first. “For me, it’s Pennywise, Gutroot, Rancid and…”
“…AFI!” Tank shouted, finishing for me. He reached one of his hands over the headrest and wiggled his fingers at me. A gesture I returned.
“Well, duh,” Kevin said. “Of course you want to see AFI. You like all the gay theatrics, because you're gay.”
“Am not! What’s that supposed to mean,” I said punching him in the arm.
“Hahaha. Might mean you’re a homo.” Kevin said.
“Shut up. At least I’m not obsessed with The Screechies.” I told him.
“The Screechies are awesome.” He replied. “And Brodie Ashcroft is hot. Any chick with a pink mohawk is hot.”
“Yea whatever.”
“Sorry to break it to you man, they’re not on the full tour,” Tank chimed in. “Their last set was in Texas last week.”
“Goddammit!” He said, punching the seat in front of him.
“Hey! Don’t hit my fuckin’ seat.” Cassie shouted. Then she mused to nobody in particular: “I wonder what it’s like to go on tour with your band and your man’s band? Brodie and Tom Ashcroft…I bet it’s totally awesome. Maybe even kind of glamorous. Big rockstars like that.”
“The Rolling Stones are big rockstars. I don’t really think The Screechies and Gutroot are not the same thing. Not even close.” I said. The sarcasm in my tone was heavy. “But something I do agree with you on: Tom and Brodie are probably super romantic. ‘Here honey, help me do these drugs, then I’ll do you.’ Bet they share a room in rehab. You know when they met, he was twice her age.”
“Allegedly!” Kevin added.
“No, he really was,” I said, “He was 30 and she was like 15 or 16. That’s kinda gross.”
“When I said ‘allegedly,’” Kevin replied, “I was talking about the drugs.”
“Ok yea allegedly. At least AFI is straight-edge. They’re clean. Davey doesn’t do any drugs. He doesn’t even smoke…And he’s vegan.”
Kevin rolled his eyes. “Whoop-dee-fuckin-do. He wears eyeshadow and lipstick. A real punk rock legend. Being vegan just makes him more of a joke.”
Tank started laughing. “We’ve literally been speeding down Highway 50 passing a joint around, Hammond.”
“Whatya mean, bro?” I asked.
“Kinda like, idolizing someone for clean living while you drink and smoke is kind of hypocritical is all.”
“You know what I think’s hypocritical?” I asked, “Kevin’s over here talking shit about Davey Havok and AFI and this poser literally cut and dyed his hair to match.”
“Did not!”
As the car began to rock and tumble down unpaved terrain before coming to a halt, Tank had just one more thing to say: “You know, sometimes a song is just a song and a singer is just a singer. You can like a song and not really like the personality of the person singing it. Sometimes, you gotta separate the music makers from the music sometimes and just enjoy stuff.”
“No. An artist cannot be separated from their art,” I argued. “It’s an extension of the person they are.”
“Shhhh---Lady and Gentlemen! Shut the fuck up and bask in another small victory of our youth, for we have arrived.” Tank said as he pumped the volume on the stereo…
“From what I’ve seen, I hate humanity! Rot with repulsion!” Davey’s gritty voice blared on Tank’s stereo and I smiled. I knew he was playing our favorite band like this to get under Kevin’s skin. He was smiling at me in the backseat through the mirror. That grin was genuine and disarming and I looked away when he winked at me. I took in a quiet breath hoping nobody else in the car noticed the way I looked back at him in that moment.
As we reached the gate, a security guard stopped Tank with a rough hand to his chest.
“That jacket’s got to go.” The beefhead told him pointing to his left.
“Really?” Tank looked shocked. The jacket was covered in razor blades but his face was a genuine blank, as if he’d never realized a jacket like that might be dangerous.
“Trash can’s over there.”
“No way man, I’ll just put it back in the car.”
Next to me another guard was pulling a handle of vodka out of someone’s pack and chucking it over a tall fenced area that was littered with similarly full bottles of booze. Idiots. Everyone who’d done this before knew to put it in water bottles and reseal the tops with super glue.
“You guys just go on ahead, I’ll find you.” Tank said with a wink before running off back through the cars.
When we got in, nhone of the bands we wanted to see were on stage yet, so the three of us spent some time wandering around looking at the merch tables. I bought a shirt at one of the tables from a girl with a dozen piercings in her face. At least two others pressing against the fabric of her tight shirt. I’ve never understood the allure of nipple piercings, but she was very nice and shared a killer smile of perfect white teeth with everyone who approached the table. Kevin was behind me in line and as I walked away I could hear him trying his best lines on her.
“Wow, you’re cute.” He muttered as she giggled. I’m pretty sure it was out of pity.
“I’ll take that one and your number.”
She snorted.
“Let’s go around the world, eat bananas and fudge swirl, just me and you, punk rock girl.” Kevin said casually, his lack of awareness only overshadowed by his totally oblivious confidence.
I was stifling laughter but Cassie fell into outright hysterics. “He just gave her that line from the ‘Dead Milkmen’ song.”
I began to laugh really hard then. “I know!” I said, I turned to her and stage whispered, “he didn’t even say it right!”
Before we knew it, we had tears in our eyes and Tank was jogging back to us.
He looked pale and his face was wide with shock.
“You’ll never believe this.” He panted. “I get back to the car right, and there’s three or four wasps crawling out of the air vents. Bet there’s a whole nest of them in there. I fuckin hate wasps”
It was a good thing the AC hadn’t worked in that car for almost a year.
“We gotta see if there’s a nest under the hood or something before we go.” I said.
“That chick totally digs me.” Kevin declared rejoining us. His misplaced pride only made us laugh harder. “She said if I come back later for another shirt, I could get her number.”
“You’re a fuckin idiot.” Tank said, forgetting about the car.
I looked back toward the parking lot and imagined I could see them there, hovering over the car like a raincloud following a man with bad luck in a comicstrip. When I turned back to ask Tank what stage he wanted to see first, being so much shorter, I found myself turning directly into his broad shirtless chest and the words fled from me.
“Man, it’s hot as balls out here,” he said. “I shouldn’t have worn these fuckin leather pants either. Don’t have any pockets.”
He tucked the shirt down the back of his waistband.
I liked those pants, so I was glad he had worn them, pockets or not. I caught myself looking from the light patch of hair on his chest and following the trail of it down to the bulge and blushed. I turned quickly back to the parking lot, hoping my glances had gone unnoticed by the others.
“Well? What do you guys wanna see first?” Cassie asked. She was making curious eye contact with me, and thankfully from where she stood nobody else but me could see the devilish curl of her smirk.
We spent the whole afternoon slam dancing and skanking our way through the mosh pit as our favorite bands played. At some point in the afternoon, I realized I needed water, so Cassie and I left the other boys and went out in search of it.
“Ham…” Cassie began and stopped abruptly. Her mohawk hung limply in places, but not entirely. It bobbed as she spoke.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” she said, “nevermind.”
“What is it, Cee?”
She stopped and stared down at her muddy Converse for a moment, then took in a big sigh. “You have to stop looking at him like that.”
“Huh?”
“I see it. They don’t,” she said, “but they will…they will eventually. I don’t know what happens to you when they do.”
I let out a slow breath, heavy with everything I didn’t want to say.
“Just be more aware of yourself. Be more careful.”
I held back the things I wanted to say to her. I felt vulnerable and sick. My stomach writhed like it was filled with worms, and I prayed for a sinkhole to open in the mud and swallow me.
Was I that transparent?
I thought my makeshift wall was solid, but it crushed me to realize it was glass.
We didn’t say another word as we purchased a few bottles of water and headed back to the North Stage.
AFI was beginning their set and I found all of my self-loathing drain. I chugged the bottle of water quickly and waded into the melee at the center of the crowd.
A hundred voices were chanting an introduction over and over.
“Through our bleeding,”
Tank was at the center. His massive form was easy to spot in a crowd.
“We are one!”
The band took the stage and everything else was too brief, too fleeting. At the end of their set, Davey climbed out into the crowd to sing their last song, God Called In Sick Today, and I felt like I was experiencing a moment that stretched and folded into forever until the song ended.
With a stupid grin on my face, I looked up at Tank, who stood next to me. I looked at him just in time to watch him topple to the ground.
Everything became a blur then. People were all around us, leaning down to lift him from the dirt. I felt as though I was watching everything happen to someone else’s best friend from the end of an underwater tunnel.
Every voice was reduced to a murmur---“sun poison,” “dehydration,” “heat stroke.”
I was swept up in a wave of people---concerned faces, frantic hands---carrying Tank to the emergency building, pulling the rest of us along in their wake.
Things began to come a bit clearer for me as the group that carried him threw open the door to the ward. I felt myself slowly following the crowd.
As massive as the thing was, nobody saw the nest that the door crushed completely as it swung into the wall, but I did. I saw it happen clearly and my mouth fell open, slack with horror.
I pointed and tried to shout; to warn them. By the time that those well-intentioned people helping him realized what was happening, it was too late. The swarm of wasps moved as one, a massive buzzing cloud like the one I’d imagined, filled the air and filed straight towards the door and after all of them.
Frozen in place, stopped dead in my tracks on the path, I began to back away from where they hovered. A thick curtain moved like a living thing. An angry line of scribbles blocking the doorway. The buzzing wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the frantic voices of the people inside shouting for someone to help with Tank. They hovered there for a moment as if waiting to be invited and when no invitation was forthcoming, they invited themselves. Quickly the shouts for help evolved into screams of agony as people ran back out the way they’d come covered in welts and slapping themselves all over.
One of the on-site paramedics was the last one out of the building. He slammed the door behind him, bracing it with his back and panting. His face was covered in bites. Tank was still inside and no matter how I protested that I had to get in there to help my friend, I was held back from the door.
“They won’t hurt him.” The man assured me. “They only go after people they perceive as a threat. He’s unconscious. Don’t worry, kid, they’ll clear out through one of the windows and we’ll go back in a minute.
When they finally were able to enter again, Tank was in the center of the floor, bloated with venom. He’d been stung over and over again at least 300 times. They pronounced him dead at the scene.
I watched his funeral through a blur of tears. The insects left him disfigured to the point that the mortician couldn’t even drain enough of the venom out of him and make him look presentable for an open casket. At least, that’s what I was told. I don’t know if that was entirely true or a rumor someone made up. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky as the preacher stood at the head of the grave. I watched his mother and father drop the first handfuls of soil down. They invited Cassie, Kyle and me to do the same.
“You were his family too,” his mother said. “Since you were kids, it’s always been the four of you.”
She began to cry then and though the sky was still bright, the ceremony ended in one of the sunny midday showers that Florida summers are famous for.
I dreamt of him every night for the week that followed. Every dream began as something bittersweet and ended with something horrible.
One night I dreamt that Tank and I had grown old together. We’d gotten married and adopted two children. I saw them growing older and older yet never shrugging off their fear of the dark. Of the monster. They called him the Buzzman and climbed into bed with us every night, until one night Devin pulled away the mask of his face to reveal that he was a giant wasp himself and his sister Donna was the Buzzman too. They stung us over and over again until our bodies liquefied and melted the mattress like acid. Then I woke up.
In a different dream we were raising several hundred wasps in hives, like they were bees. We tended to them in protective plastic suits to save us from their stings. They didn’t pollinate flowers, in the way bees do. They picked them and carried them in teams to vases around our home. They filled the flower vases with water by carrying it drop by sacred drop in lines of droning swarms from the kitchen sink. We believed they loved us; adored us like any other pets. Our little tiny flying dogs that fetched us daffodils instead of slippers. We lived in our beekeeping suits just to be safe.
We ate our meals in the suits. We were drinking steaks and salads through long, thick straws that passed through the netting that protectively covered our faces. We slept in them. Even showered in them…but near the end I came to realize that the suits were not protective or vinyl. They weren’t solid at all. Instead, they were a swarm of albino wasps that moved so quickly they appeared that way. They were just biding their time, waiting for their direction to come. To reach them from the hivemind. When the order came from their queen, they stung us over and over again until each of us died in the other’s arms.
Another night, I woke to the sound of tapping and somehow knew that this was not another dream.
I turned groggily to face the glass and felt the haste of waking as the disorientation and warmth of fading sleep drained away.
Tank was outside my window, tapping on the glass and hovering there. My bedroom was two stories up. He was smiling in that disarming, boyish way but it didn’t make me feel the same as it did before. He was shirtless, just as he had been the last time I’d seen him alive, but now he was flecked with hundreds of bloodless hexagons, clustered in patches. Holes that bored deep beneath his skin like honeycomb clusters. Something was moving beneath his flesh.
Wasps were weaving in and out of him like he was an animated hornet’s nest. In and out of the wounds the creatures buzzed, crawling through the dusting of hair on his chest. Thousands of others clung to him by their tiny legs, unmoving, save for their wings beating frantically. They held him midair, their fragile, thin pinions of flight moving so quickly they could barely be seen; rendered nearly imperceptible by the dim moonlight. More of them swarmed around him, held on their orbiting paths as though by the same sort of gravity that spun rings of dust around Saturn.
He raised a swollen hand and waved sheepishly at me before cocking his finger towards the window, to beckon me to him.
“Hammonddddd”
He opened his mouth and spoke my last name. It sounded distant and full of static like he was speaking to me through the buzz of a radio signal as that signal fizzled out and died. A small trickle of dark, rancid honey dribbled down his chin and I found myself longing to open the window; to let him in and I didn’t know why. It felt dangerous and counterintuitive but I was desperate to do it anyway. I was used to furtive, secret glances---to looking away when all I wanted to do was stare. Something about denying myself the urge broke the spell and I found myself running before he could speak again.
I made it to the hallway and slammed the door behind me. I could still hear him there, as though he were hovering inside my room. Just on the other side of the thin wood of the door.
“Come back, Ham,” he buzzed. “Don’t you remember all those secret nights? Those times I climbed up here to you? No more climbing…I fly now.”
I began hyperventilating and choking on my quiet sobs.
“No more secrets, Hammond. I don’t have to hide. Neither do you. I’m a part of something bigger. You can be too. Fly with me, Hammy. Join us.”
I opened the door just a crack to look back. He was still there and he was smiling. He smiled the way he smiled at me in the mirror of his car on the day he died. That secret way he smiled. It was a smile saved and stashed away, a secret thing just for me. I found myself lost in his eyes and slowly opening the door further but something about those eyes that used to stare back at me so tenderly seemed so sad now. It wasn’t like him…because it wasn’t really him.
I closed the door again and slumped against it. I listened to him calling out to me in that strange voice that could have been his if it weren’t for the mindless buzzing and static that followed with it.
Eventually, I lay in the hallway crying until I fell asleep.
My parents didn’t know about Tank and me, but they knew he was my friend and they loved him too. Everyone loved him. That was part of who he was. He still bled charisma like he always had, only now he was full of holes and the poison honey was mixed in with his blood too. His voice was a hypnotic buzz.
I was devastated when my parents were outside with him the next night. I don’t know how he got to them, but somehow something in me knew he would and somehow I wasn’t surprised. The night after that he came with both of our parents---his and mine. Then Kevin and Cassie joined him later and he kept coming back to me at night, each time with more and more of the people he’d taken. They flew outside my window swirling around him like he was a god.
Sometimes, I found it hard to resist meeting him at the front door. We’d spend the night talking through it when he came to visit me. He would say all the soft, tender, loving things that made me feel vulnerable, and I’d feel myself swooning. I remembered how it felt to be in love. In those moments, my heart would soar---only to crash back to the ground, exploding into a thousand jagged shards, coming to life with wings and stingers.
Everything Tank said to me felt harmonious and after he would leave I would repeat those words to myself over and over until they sounded almost like a melody…until they tasted deceptively, endlessly sweet, but it wasn’t Tank saying those words to me but a buzzing made to sound like Tank’s voice---wasn't it? How couldn't it be? Tank was dead. Tank didn't say anything anymore. Travis was gone and this thing speaking, mimicking his voice with such near perfection was something else.
Some wasps do make honey---I looked it up---but there’s a reason we haven’t domesticated them for it. It’s not fit for consumption. Tank was no longer fit for consumption.
I learned so much about these insects but the hive puppeteering everyone I knew and loved didn’t follow any of the normal conventions or rules they were supposed to follow. These bugs---the common ones---they don’t form hives this size. They die off in the winter. They don’t come out at night. They don’t assimilate drones into their colonies. They don’t have motives. They don’t knock on your window every night asking why you don’t love them anymore. Why you don’t want to come outside in the dark and fly with them.
I never could get him to tell me what he---what the hive wanted. Was it me? Was it that simple? Did the love he had for me in life drive the hive of wasps that killed him to absorb those feelings from him? Was that why they were fixated on me now? It wasn’t a motive sinister enough and I couldn’t believe it could be that simple, but he just kept bringing more and more people I knew with him as the nights went on.
One night the pattern changed.
I changed it.
One night when he came to look for me, I was gone. Maybe he tried to come to our old house on Sable Palm Road again and again until he finally realized I wasn’t coming back to it. I never knew and I haven’t asked. I wouldn’t know who to ask. There’s no one left.
Since then I’ve been moving from place to place. I’ve lived this way for years now---over two decades. More than twenty years. Sometimes I can scratch out a little life on the way. Meet new people. Once I even got a job and rented an apartment, but they always seem to find me and he brings new people with them whenever he can find them---at first it started with every friend I met in my travels, so now I just don’t make friends. That doesn’t stop the hive from growing. They’ll take anyone even people I’ve met briefly in passing throughout the day.
Last night I recognized a gas station attendant I asked for change a week ago.
Every time they find me again, I have to go on running.
It’s like living in the wind.
I know it’s time to go again when dusk settles and I hear the droning buzzing sound somewhere in the dark. It sounds harsh. The discordance of a string section out of tune, making tension adjustments to the violins and cellos slowly until every note resonates with the same haunted chords.
It makes me shudder and sounds almost like a song at once.
Sometimes I drop my guard because I remember my parents. I remember Kevin and Cassie…
I remember Travis, as he was: My Tank.
I remember who they were and not what they’ve become and I wonder: would it be so bad to join them after all?
That question has been weighing on me for quite some time now and I feel in my gut that it’s time. It feels like giving up---only not---because giving up would make me feel guilty. There’s something inside of me---something that tells me that something about what I’m planning to do is what I should have done all along; that this will make me feel whole again.
Most people can’t say that their childhood friends have been a constant fixture throughout their lives. For me, that has come with a measure of torment---but also a measure of certainty. So much about moving around the way that I have since I was a teenager has been so uncertain.
Where would I go?
How would I eat?
What would I have to do to get by? Would it be awful?
I’ve done some immoral, illegal things along this unmarked, unplanned path I’ve taken. They were things done in the name of staying alive. I was young and alone moving through the world on foot or in stolen cars. Cars that I’d hotwired and driven to other towns, pulling off from main roads in search of the serenity of seclusion just so I could sleep, secure behind locked doors, curled up in the back seats. I’ve broken into vacation homes and places with “For Sale” signs in the yard---watching them for a night or two to be sure they were as empty as they seemed to be from their darkened windows at night. I’ve stolen food from grocers and convenience stores more times than it’s worth even recounting or keeping track of. I’ve done a lot of things in the name of survival, and I never regretted doing a lot of those things.
There were other things too…things I don’t do anymore, but did once upon a time for quick cash; offering parts of myself to strangers that I never wanted to offer up just so I could afford a room for the night. Those things I did regret. I regret them now. I had to survive, and sometimes the things it cost me left scars in places that nobody can see.
Living on the road, moving in the uncertainty of shadows every time they managed to find me once again, it’s strange to explain, but there was a part of their consistent reappearances that was a comfort. I hate it and I always have, but for my entire life, these people…people? Are they still people? They have been the only reliable constant.
For the past week, I’ve been staying in a house with exposed studs but solid exterior walls, a roof, and doors to hide behind. A half-finished construction. One of those developments put on pause mid-build at the behest of economic instability, or the construction company going bankrupt, or the rising cost of materials---who even knows? It doesn’t matter.
I’m standing at the threshold of the door, hand on the knob, feeling the weight of the night as it presses against the exterior of the house. It finds its way in through cracks that were never sealed and moves in the room around me, swirling, unhindered by the interior skeletons of walls yet to be insulated, plastered, and given skin.
I can hear it outside.
The droning hum is growing, seeping in through those same places that the heaviness of the night has managed to seep into, and now that sound is moving all around me too. The sound of it is different tonight. The buzzing no longer grates against my ears; it is a lullaby. The promise of an end to all of this running.
An end to loneliness.
What is love if not torment? If not also some sort of hurt?
The same force that stitches two people together also pulls them apart at the seams, strand by strand, until there’s nothing left of who they were but the tattered scraps of the person they’ve become. It’s not even recognizable then, because when you weave so much of yourself into someone else, you become a part of them---they a part of you---and when it’s all torn apart, what you’re left with is something fluttering in the breeze that’s indistinguishable. The ache of love can be so great that even after it’s gone, it remains, a ghost---the echo of longing for what once was.
Love is a wound that never fully heals. A fever that never breaks. An ache beneath the skin. Yet, we return to it again and again, begging to reignite cold kindling so we can burn again, and again, until we’re hollowed out. Consumed whole.
Tank was love. The only person I ever loved. I’ve never loved another because I’ve never been able to stop running for long enough to have time, but also because I don’t think I would have wanted to, because another constant I’ve learned in my life is this: love is torture. Love is unfulfilled longing. Love is pain.
The doorknob feels cold.
For so long, I have defined my existence by the distance I could keep between myself and the past. Every new town, every fresh start---it was just another delaying of the inevitable. A futile attempt to outrun a pain that has crawled into me, like a parasite, and now lives in my marrow.
I exhale. It is long and slow.
I wonder if maybe it's time to stop. No more running.
No more running.
I'm so tired of running.
I'm so tired.
I'm so...
Conflicted---still...
I’ve been dragging the weight of the past behind me for so long---decades of loneliness and fear. What if surrender isn’t defeat?
What if the freedom I've spent a lifetime tirelessly working to maintain has never been any type of freedom at all?
What if I just go outside?
What if that thought is crazy? Absolutely crazy…but what if it's not?
Is there any way to be sure?
The only thing I'm sure of is this has to stop. Somehow it has to stop.
I can make all of this stop.
I can open the door.
I do.
I open the door.
The streetlights flicker as the warm glow is obscured by the shifting black mass of wings and bodies, swarming in from all around. The night vibrates with their hunger. It vibrates with the voices they’ve been calling out to me with forever.
They don’t swarm me. They wait---hovering expectantly, patient.
In the dark, Travis hovers, too.
His face is clearer than it has been in years. The waxy sheen of his skin, the darkness of the hollow sockets where his bright eyes once were---none of it matters. I see him as he was. His cocky grin. The way he looked at me through the rearview mirror of his car that day. The curve of his mouth forming a smile. Mouthing three words silently. Words meant for me, and me alone.
“We can be together again,” he says, his voice laced with the static of wings. A thousand trembling bodies cling to his skin. Dozens of feet above me, they hold him aloft.
“I’ve been telling you for years.”
“I know,” I sigh, “I wasn’t ready. I still don't know if I'm ready…but I know I love you. I still love you. I’ve always loved you, Travis.
“I just can't---I can't keep running anymore. If I come with you everything---my whole life---everything changes,” I whisper.
“That scares me, Tank.”
“Change is change,” He replies and there's less buzzing in his voice---more clarity than it's had in ages, “it doesn't feel. It doesn't think. It can't be good or bad. Change has no intent. It's just---change. I'm still me. I'm still here. Don't be scared.”
His words sink in slowly, like honey permeating tea---thick, sweet, transmorphing its form entirely. I’ve been terrified of change for so long, always looking back, never allowing myself to move forward.
Maybe Tank is right…maybe change isn't the enemy…maybe it's just change. It doesn't have a motive. It just is.
I thought love was the past---something that died with him. But here he is, unwavering, waiting for me to accept what I’ve always known deep down: nothing stays the same. Maybe it’s time I stopped fighting it. Maybe it’s time I let myself change, too.
The first wasp lands on my cheek, its tiny feet tracing the ridge of my cheekbone like a whisper. Another brushes against my fingers, then my wrist. A tickling sensation spreads as more come, moving in tandem, an extension of a single will.
Their touch is gentle.
Reverent.
It's not the violence I imagined it would be.
It feels almost religious.
An awakening.
Like worship, even.
A sting.
It is tender, almost loving. Another follows. Then another. I feel my skin hum with their presence. I can feel them boring into me, beneath my skin...but it doesn't hurt. For some reason, none of this hurts at all. I can almost feel my blood begin to thicken---flowing through me like a soothing nectar---sweet, but not sickly so.
Nothing like I imagined.
I feel all of myself warming to the rhythm of their wings. My body is no longer mine. I feel myself grow lighter. The buzzing crescendos into a thunderous, electric hum that drowns everything out and it sounds almost like a song. Beautiful even. I hover toward him, meeting him in the air.
And then, at last, I understand.
Love is agony. Love is longing.
Love is suffering.
It always has been.
Things change.
It's inevitable.
They always do.
They always have.
And this change---adding my voice to this hive---maybe Tank is right.
Maybe love is a song?
Maybe love is just another sound to suffer?
Maybe no matter what sound it makes, it plays to a tune that all of us, deep down, can't help but sing.
