I led a fascinating life for the first eighteen years of my life. I grew up in a small rural town, miles from any major city, and helped out on my parents’ farm after school. Living so far out in the country, I was sent to private schools from kindergarten through high school, and was exposed to few other cultures. I tried to befriend the few students at my schools that would be considered ethnic minorities, but doing so led to disapproval from my peers. I sympathized for those students, but in the world of children and adolescents, fitting in is more important than living by principles. As a farm boy, I was subjected to a fair amount of teasing as well, but as people gradually came to see I had money, they backed off. I call those people Money, because it’s their defining feature. They like Money, Money makes them happy, and when they encounter things that are not, or defy, Money, they tend to either throw Money at it, or take their Money and run far away. In the fifth grade, I once declined an offer to go to recess with a girl because she looked unkempt and somewhat malsuited to her uniform. That was the closest I came to being Money, and when I saw a group of Money pull her hair at recess that day, I immediately apologized to the girl, and befriended her. We dated for a few years, but that wouldn’t come for a while longer in my education.
Unlike most of my peers, I did not feel burdened by having classes fill my day; rather, they were opportunities to interact with the world outside of my family. My parents actively encouraged me to participate in community organizations, but practical limitations like transportation and time management prevented me from developing any real thespian or athletic talents. I spent my afternoons with my parents’ animals, and tending to our small plots of crops. My father was a food scientist, and my mother came from a long lineage of dairy farmers, so I think the life they led was a direct compromise between the lives in which they grew up. I appreciate all the time I spent on that farm, and it led me to develop a taste for poetry. I never thought of any catchy tunes to accompany my strolls between rows of strawberry plants, and I couldn’t sketch well enough to differentiate a cow’s face from its ass, but my English teachers were consistently astounded by my ability to capture the emotion one felt while watching a cow chew on grass, or chasing a chicken out of the cornfield. I was praised for being a poet beyond my years. My parents were both academics, so they encouraged my talent, which is something I expect most other farm boys didn’t experience. So, I attended a university in the nearby city, and wrote as much as I could.
I spent the remainder of my twenties in the city, writing for newspapers and creative writing journals, but never made enough to go to bed full. I started substituting meals with drinks, and found my writing became increasingly profound, but at the same time more convoluted as I let alcohol guide my writing hand. I eventually began freelance work for greeting card companies and stationary designers, but I found the work wholly unfulfilling. I was writing what others wanted me to write; they had no interest in my stanzas about soil or my haikus about hunting groundhogs, so I quickly abandoned these lines of work as soon as I had saved a small bundle of money. I decided working for Money was not the way for me to get my work out, so I started establishing contacts in the publishing industry. As frustrating as it would be, I knew I would have to work with Money to make any money, and have others appreciate the pastoral side of life again. I didn’t care to preach to the populace, but I knew my story was worth sharing. By that time, the world was well past its point of no return, and the climate was being to change faster than most could accommodate. My father’s work in food science was to produce hardier crops that would withstand greater temperature fluctuations, while the past three generations of my mother’s farm dedicated themselves to finding proper fodder to feed cows during periods of climate change. So, my legacy was to write about it, and convince people that there is still beauty worth protecting as long as we can.
Publishing companies proved to be relatively closed systems of people promoting each other’s novels, and when I learned that a company I was hopeful would pick me up had chosen to print a series of romance novels instead, I became discouraged. I returned to live with my parents in an attempt to reclaim my passion while living in a familiar setting. I ended up suffering a series of manic-depressive episodes, and learned that my emotional expression had been partially fuelled by an emerging bipolar disorder. My parents were unfamiliar with mental health issues, and doctors were not readily at hand in the country, so I had to return to the city after only a few short months home for treatment. It was in this hospital that I encountered the love of my life: Luke was a graduate student at the university I attended, and was admitted to the hospital after his third suicide attempt. Unlike my parents, who I considered tolerant, relatively liberal people, Luke grew up in a Catholic, Italian family that was less ready to accept that their son wasn’t about to produce any grandchildren for them. He spent most of his childhood in a wealthy suburb of the city, but when he came out at seventeen, he was kindly asked to leave and never come back, lest the souls of his ancestors discover the disgrace that had fallen upon the Giacconi family name.
I’m impressed Luke made it through the rest of his high school career, let alone a graduate’s program, but Luke was a resilient young adult. His first suicide attempt was the day after he left his family home: he temporarily moved in with a close friend whose parents pitied the boy, and had never much cared for his parents. However, when they returned that evening with two suitcases of his possessions, the family found Luke in a bathtub of warm water, with slashes down his legs. Paramedics estimated that if the family had returned five minutes later than they had, Luke would have died that night. He quickly recovered, and attempted to make amends with his parents. When they pointed a gun to his forehead and politely asked him to remove his form from their premises, Luke complied, and began looking for work. Luke always hated to be a burden, so he began working before and after school to offer some sort of rent, and save for his future.
His second suicide attempt occurred three years later, during his third year of university. Luke’s savings had all but vanished, and he was forced to take out a second student loan. Luke knew the debt would stay in his name well into his forties, but without a bachelor’s degree, he had no job prospects. The sense of burden overwhelmed Luke, and the evening his boyfriend at the time offered to give him enough money to cover tuition and living expenses for a year, with no expectation of a payback, Luke drove to a nearby Walgreen’s, and purchased three bottles of extra strength ibuprofen. He wrote an eloquent note to all those he would leave behind, and downed the three bottles. Yet again, he was discovered before too much damage was done, though his heart weakened noticeably that night. Luke’s recovery was slow, but he was able to finish his degree easily. He took the financial aid from the boyfriend, who then dumped him on their graduation day. The two remained close friends, but the money was too much of a cavern of insecurities to be bridged by great sex and intimate conversations. Luke understood that he would not have Money like his ex, and so he stayed in the city, while the ex left to travel Asia.
I never read Luke’s suicide note – he considered it a piece of his past not worth sharing now that he had matured, which I found ironic considering the circumstances under which we met, but I respected his privacy. During my manic episode, I attempted to seduce any male visitors that dropped by my parents’ farm, and began construction on a new barn by demolishing the old one, but lost interest when I realized there was no need for a new barn when the animals could simply lie under a covered shelter. I cost my parents several thousand in construction supplies, as well as their barn and grain silo, which I stripped for its aluminum. When I came out of the mania, I fell into depression. Rather than killing myself, I began self-medicating with alcohol and sad poetry, a combination I found to be intensely gratifying in the short-term, but incredibly unhelpful and detrimental in the long run. I entered the hospital in a gurney, after my parents found me slumped over my desk, face down in a pool of whiskey, vomit, and torn up pieces of paper with various types of grain and cow anatomical parts scrawled illegibly on them.
Luke described his third suicide attempt as so similar to my alcoholic overindulgence that I knew he was worth considering. I’m a poet, so I tend to romanticize things I find good writing material. We left the hospital the next afternoon, and began what I consider the most tumultuous relationship of my life. We both refused any medication, and instead of attending cognitive therapy, we would dedicate an hour of our evenings talking to each other about mental illnesses. Luke’s research was in developmental psychology, and both of us had enough experience in the field to have a basic grasp of what therapy might look like. Most of our sessions overflowed into our everyday lives, and my material transformed into a much more chaotic, duplicitous style of poetry. I published my first book of poems three years after I met Luke, and consider it to be the worst work of my career. I realize now that readers may not understand the same cycle of emotional polarity I did, and probably don’t follow my theme of cyclical storylines. Still, it made me enough money to stay floating as Luke finished his second degree.
The war I was waging in my head showed up not only in my work, but in my relationship with Luke: when both of us were in depressive episodes, we said very little, and spent the majority of our efforts stealing each other’s liquor bottles to keep one another from self-medicating again. When I was manic, I found Luke too much of a drag to spend our savings, and didn’t find money as useful. I never felt less Money, and Luke seemed to perk up when I insisted on having sex three times a day. Our relationship flourished in spite of our personal issues, but we did have our arguments as well. And when we argued, we could be heard from blocks.
Our last argument ended with an unfortunate, unplanned double suicide. My manic episode got the past of me, and during a particularly raunchy episode of manic-depressive sex, I mentioned autoerotic asphyxiation. As soon as I brought up the topic, my mind would accept no refusal, and so I grabbed a length of rope we usually reserved for more vanilla play. I offered to go first, but thanks to the mania, I got overzealous, and insisted I could handle a few more seconds of no air supply. As soon as I passed out, Luke assumed I was dead – his appraisal of the situation was quite skewed because of the depression – and hung himself over my body after cutting me free from my restraints. I came to a few minutes later, and realized what had happened. My depression immediately set in, and before I took my own life next to him, I took a moment to appreciate that my death would be a near-perfect reenactment of Romeo and Juliet. Only Juliet was a boy, and we didn’t need a pharmacist to help us off ourselves.
Word count: 2,085
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