[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The beauty of magic + loss.
(AUDIO: The Rollercoaster Ride by Belle & Sebastian)
1. I ran away.
2. I hitchhiked around the world.
3. I lived on a farm in the desert and worked shirtless in the sun for ninety days.
4. I moved to Morocco and began a new life.
5. I had my dad drive nine hours north to rescue me.
6. I drank dark rum and stayed out all night by the Tiber.
7. I returned to Rome and found an apartment twenty meters from the fallout.
8. I sat on Jerusalem rooftops and wrote.
9. I listened to an album of songs she wrote about me.
10. I watched her disappear into the Gulf of Thailand on a canoe.
11. I listened to Marquee Moon and played with box-cutters.
12. I punched my best friend in the stomach and drank three bottles of wine.
13. I told a stranger in Union Square that she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
14. I flew to Paris and sat outside Shakespeare & Company.
15. I carved initials into my flesh.
16. I dreamt I was on a carousel that kept spinning and spinning and spinning.
17. I cried on the attic floor for hours.
18. I wrote provocative letters from West Africa.
19. I drank red wine and ate red meat exclusively for 21 days.
20. I watched the planets churn.
21. I drove in the rain for hours.
22. I lit an entire box of matches, one by one.
23. I purposely crashed a car.
24. I tried to jump out the window onto Central Park South.
25. I ate too many valium.
26. I took sad photographs in Amsterdam.
27. I stayed in bed for 14 days in a hotel in Tel Aviv.
28. I wrote a 300-page novel, dedicated it to her.
29. I lit the only copy on fire.
30. I lost all my money in Soho, London.
31. She said, “I don’t care if we both die tonight, but I couldn’t live if I woke up and you were gone.”
32. We both lived and watched The Graduate six times in a palazzo in Toscana.
33. I didn’t expect anything to happen, but it did, and then it was gone.
34. I’ve asked God for the exact same thing since I was twelve.
35. I collect lucky pennies.
36. My heart is still innocent.
37. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” destroys me every time.
38. Maggie Cassady is my favorite Kerouac.
39. I love Gustav Klimt because he still reminds me of someone I’m not supposed to think about anymore.
40. I loved Joni Mitchell first but I’ll never listen in the same way.
41. Love is the only drug.
42. I wrote her name in the temple.
43. I carved her name into a tree.
44. I painted her name under the floorboards in my old house.
45. I wrote thousands of poems.
46. She is the secret hero of these poems, whoever she is.
47. I listened to ‘Take Ecstasy With Me’ six-hundred times.
48. And ‘The Way I Feel Inside.’
49. And ‘Colours.’
50. I lived and suffered, and loved, and never regretted a single tear, or drop of blood or night spent dizzy and lonely and crazed. This is my kingdom, and I am little more than a wide-eyed King looking for his Queen.
