My Heart like a Voicemail
On My Chemical Romance, The Opposite of Loneliness, and Keith S. Wilson's poem "String Theory."
Content warning: This entry recalls a friend’s suicide attempt.
There is a poem in my chapbook that ends “everyone’s life is a thing they didn’t choose.” It’s one of those things you think in hindsight, like an afterthought. It comes to you over ice cream. Or in the gym. Or halfway through a crosswalk as a car barrels towards you and you’re trusting it stops.
I watched [ x ] try to kill herself. She did the same with me. We didn’t speak for two years. Dated two more. Left each other’s hearts in shambles. Once when drunk I sent an apology letter. The next morning I had no reply or regret.
It’s easy to dress the story up in syntax to avoid getting to the parts that hurt. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that and here I am, doing just that. I like to pretend the whole fucking world is poetry because then I can pretend to have an interpretation with some sort of intellectual weight behind it. Unsurprisingly, that turns out to be so stupidly uncathartic I’m trying to escape it.
I’ll tell you that what I remember as hurting the most was panic. Afterwards everything goes blank and I’m sitting on a hallway bed in the psych-ward pasting post-it notes to the wall. The only good line out of any poem I wrote about this night goes: “holding the leftover pieces of you between the person I used to be and the person I had become.”
Most parts of that night are a blur but I remember the panic. Nothing comes close to describing it. I tried. I’ve lived a whole damn life—short-ish, but still—and nothing comes close to that panic in frequency or magnitude. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except maybe to say that in that moment I might have been most alive, rendered fully mortal by my fear. My mortality being the thing that recognized survival and pushed towards it. Shoving my fingers down her throat to loose the pills from her gullet or stomach or liver—wherever the poison was.
If, in hindsight, it is a probable thing to think “everyone’s life is a thing they didn’t choose” then it is equally probable to realize the difference between being willing to die for someone and being willing to live for someone. To curate a life in order to stay. It’s a terrible burden both ways.
Now, I hope you have more than one reason to stay, more than one person to stay for, I hope you have a life to wake to. The terrible burden is being the only one. I hope you never do that to anybody.
It takes more than one person to not be lonely. And often times it takes yourself too. The opposite of loneliness is something that takes many people all working together to make each other better. And doing it every day. It is care-taking as a way of life.
If you know me you know I’ve pointed all of my beloveds towards this passage. It’s saved my life multiple times. It’s by Marina Keegan, from her book The Opposite of Loneliness. I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard—there being an opposite of loneliness. It’s what I want my life to be.
The passage goes like this, it’s how she describes the opposite of loneliness:
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.
It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.
The pop-punk and emo kids will remember our appetite for My Chemical Romance. How easily they navigated the space of sadness, how certain they felt of its meaning—which at times was nothing. They felt genuine in ways other bands didn’t. At their most performative (The Black Parade) they were least performative. MCR was reachable.
The Black Parade is perhaps their most memorable album, if not their best. It traffics in the existential inevitability of death. I will spare you the narrative of the concept album because perhaps I want you to relive it for yourself, or perhaps encounter it for the first time.
Listen to Welcome to the Black Parade and rewind it. Catch the crescendo a second time. And then for its third rendition watch the music video. What do you think the video is saying beyond the inevitability to death? I think it speaks to what accompanies you into death. Though we may not know what lies beyond its pale, we are accompanied by a parade of people. Our lives are a celebration with many. The celebration has something to do with the opposite of loneliness.
That’s what the video is asking for. It asks what wakes you from sleeping into life? Who carries you forward? Who joins you in celebration?
I took a while to get here but I think I needed you to know the appendages of my thoughts, all the working arms that carry the building of my life. If we’re all looking for the opposite of loneliness then at the very least we share one thing that we can cling to. Our shared humanity is our need for community. Our need for care. To render care to each other. But I think the greatest thing that separates us from imagining and enacting this future is fear. Often fears that are projected onto us to keep the powerful powerful and rich.
I hope it is reasonable to think after all of this that to live well we would need to know the absence of fear. Not permanently, but enough to maintain healing and well-being.
I’ve been looking for the opposite of losing someone, which might not be possible. You cannot gain someone forever, and that panic I spoke of, that was the fear of losing someone forever. Someone I wasn’t yet ready to lose. It took me a while to come to peace with this trauma, but I think I’m getting there, if not getting very close. This week I read Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson. The penultimate poem is called “String Theory,” you can read it here.
I read it as depicting a partner’s suicide—the first poem I remember coming across that did so, and maybe I’m misremembering. I have read ones about friends and family though, but not about a partner. The last lines of the poem aren’t haymakers, they’re gentle but detonating:
we sat in hospitals for each other,
facing each of our fathers
trying not to leave: I am thinking of you tonightand how once you consider death, really consider it, you realize
here we are, and what you’ve been considering is love.
Sometimes what it takes to start healing is seeing scars scabbed over on someone else. I don’t know if that poem speaks to what the opposite of losing something is, but those last lines feel close. An almost. Reachable.