Have you ever truly lived, my pock-marked asterisk of a friend? Have you ever walked into a room and made out with the leading lady of your dreams? Or dove into the darkness with the eagerness of an action hero? Or been there to save the most important person in your life from what would otherwise have been the worst mistake ever? Have you ever openly wept? Or looked out from your hopeless meandering moment to instead be filled with awe when facing the incomprehensible absolutes of your life? That all who you love will decay and die before you, and that you will be one of these people? Unless of course you feel nothing, and then it’ll all happen behind your back while you’re always rummaging in corners looking for shiny objects to distract you from this ever-expanding horror. So. I’ll ask you again.
What about, have you ever truly died? You over-sized prawn-powered muttering device. Have you ever slipped into unconsciousness convinced that you’re never ever going to ever wake up again ever?
I say this in all seriousness as I simultaneously split my tongue with a straight edge razor and eye the dribbling blood with an inconvenient hilarity. For I have tried to do both of these unfortunate things—this living thing and this dying thing I mean—at different times but always in the same backhanded passive aggressive fashion. And all because of you.
You who are uncertain in the face of wildlife. Whose fingering of the fleshier parts of the brain have left you jittery in the face. You who have no home. You with your on-going middle-aged acne. You who bald so effortlessly in the bar rooms of the world. Who are you now?
Are you the one who sits at your writing desk in Southern China mourning your departed ladyfriend in overt and easily untangled prose? Eating a donkey meat sandwich in Beijing complete with globules of mucus-y fat? Loitering in the Seoul airport? As giddy as a recent immigrant while pacing in San Francisco? At a butterfly farm in Belize? Or do you fall backward into the darkness at times like these? Are you always forever falling away from me? Can I touch you? Will you touch me back? At a butterfly farm in Belize? While I’m vomiting back up that donkey meat sandwich in Beijing? How about living in a basement in Chicago and not even a particularly nice basement? Sort of windowless uninsulated little hole you’d expect to find in a low-end Tibetan monastery.
We’re one and the same of course. I’ve said this so many times, but I can’t ever convince myself on account of it still seems so silly to suggest that we are indeed the same person, even when we so obviously are. You with your complete disregard for others and their many needs, who’s always talking about us and them, and even though you might be really impressed by him or so in love with her, you’re always this separate and very aloof eye always lurking in the back alleys in the back of my brain. But also my best friend ever. Then I returned to China to play moody free jazz and become full of snot.
And you weren’t there inside me anymore. You, my imagined audience, loitering in the corners of my dreams. When I returned to China, I left the audience portion of my mind back stateside. Like they’re all shouting encore while I slip out of the auditorium and onto the plane, leaving them to wilt, crammed and unwatered in a building of miniature proportions in Philadelphia or Detroit. And when I returned a year and a half later, you all eyed me strangely from your many perches. We’re in Chicago now, and now I use my cell phone to light the way while I stumble towards the door that leads from basement to back yard every morning and always stumbling through other people’s trash. Which. Do they do that in Tibet?
So. This is my story of living and dying in the many crevices of the world, of how a person who wanted nothing more than to be a great and respected writer found himself struggling to hold onto what little self-respect he had left while coughing up packets of yellow phlegm repeatedly throughout his day and sniffling in the industrial city of Zibo. Spending his one day off playing moody free jazz at an empty coffee bar, as I mentioned previous, but also spending his days coughing till he’d pulled a muscle. At that time it became like sickness was just a new way of thinking, and I was becoming a new man.
Every morning, it was off to the little clinic near the school where I taught and to my iv. Colorful glittering trash strewn around the lot round back, and jokes with the nurse, and a used bandaid stuck to my comforter, and long ropes of creamy yellow phlegm pouring out of the man in the bed next to me. Then a classroomful of children every afternoon, and adolescents in the evening. One had named herself X and another Meci. This is when I started thinking of love and death.
As will happen when you’re approaching middle age in the Far East and have a pneumonia that could be a life-threatening pneumonia or just an irritating several-month-long cough you will later turn into an amusing anecdote. Which I was even at that time turning into an amusing anecdote, whether it was life-threatening or not. All of which got me thinking in an embarrassing way—like your cousin the modern-day prophet/schizophrenic is embarrassing—or maybe it’s all just the profoundly foolish and naïve thoughts of the awkward optimist. Grinning stupidly as your favorite continent slips gently into the ocean, leaving you friendless, and godless, and cold.
And eventually I got better. And eventually I took a train to Hong Kong, gave my passport to an ancient Chinese man over the turnstyles in the Hong Kong subway, and went to the seventh floor of a nondescript building on Nathan Street the next day, where a cheerful woman gave me my passport back with a new visa attached. Then the night bus to Yangshuo and discussing David Foster Wallace with an Italian financier while occasionally glancing out the window at the weird shadows cast by the rows of miniature mountains that lined the road like we’re riding along the gumline of the giantest whale in the universe, a whale in serious need of some dental care. To Yangshuo, where I ended up working for a year. Met this girl I am now planning on marrying. Who moved to Beijing. Where I went to visit her. Before returning to America. And ultimately Chicago. Where I now live in a basement.
And am really just waiting to go back to China. Because I got this ridiculous problem with staying in one place maybe? Or maybe it’s just that I’m absolutely completely in love and didn’t realize how dependent I am on this person who I love till I was separated from her by an ocean and a good percentage of continent on either side? So that happened.
But it started with realizing that love really is the most important thing and not just the old-fashioned pornographic variety love we all enjoy hearing about so much. Or even the open-hearted swooning variety love. Or long-suffering parental love. But that widest variety of loves. That love that sticks out of every orifice and sprouts from every seed. Hard to grasp that one. Harder than finding a prospective mate, certainly. Like trying to make a pornography wherein the protagonists ate of the asshole of existence.
Something like how that would be hard, but honestly it really started with the fact that I’ve always had some serious problems from as far back as I can remember. These were garden-variety problems that seemed as wide as the sky. That’s to say, they seemed so large that I thought they were going to gobble me up. And then they did. But I was still there afterwards all the same. All of which started with girls.
Under the stairwells of the gymnasiums of the world and by the porches of the parents of the world, except for that after a few frenetic attempts to actually have fun, for the most part, and throughout my twenties, any and all manic bedtime with humans of the female persuasion became a frightening and actually crippling concept. I refused to believe that I was terrified, when I was very obviously I was a mess, but then again we’re all seriously screwed and half-scared and running on steam and running in general, to some glittery object or away from some dark event or both. Each of us jack-knifing our way into the earth and each with our own chorus of divers diving along with us. And some of these are honestly really very pretty people, like how moms can be pretty when they’re singing you to sleep at night.
But there are times when you let yourself flow so deep into the understories of your thoughts, you think you won’t ever be able to dig yourself out, which is exactly what happened to me. I drowned in the damp recesses of my brain and was spat out a very different and exotically broken being—naked-and-skittish-on-a-street-corner sort of exotic. And then there were the lost years. In condos in Boston, or looking out at the abandoned school grounds in Jiaxing back the first time I moved to China in 2005, and from there to the anarchist compound in Oregon, and from there to working eighteen hours throwing roe in the Bering Strait. These are stories I’ve told before. I am proud of them because I collect stories like other people collect porcelain dolls or the souls of their friends.
But then it’s several years later, and on one adventure in particular, while working six days a week and very ill in Zibo, I realized that just because I might not die tonight, doesn’t mean I’ll never die, and I saw with a clarity that it’s the people I care about are my reason to live. Simple straightforward no bullshit. Then I coughed until I vomited up a frothy yellow mouthful of fluid.
Then there was the moment when you had to step out from behind the piles of snot-riddled tissue, from your sparsely furnished apartment in this new and already crumbling apartment complex, and through this perpetually overcast sky and its accompanying unnatural fog, until you were on a train headed south with your money taped to your inner thigh. Where was I then? While sitting up in my bunk and looking out at the bright reds and greens of Guangdong while all around the soft patter of Mandarin is intermixed with the even softer patter of Cantonese. And inside is just the wonder of infants everywhere. I can see their faces even now. Because there may have been a time when your dreams were murky because your thinking was murky, but when they turn bright again, that’s when you’re seeing things with the clarity of someone who knows nothing.
And then I arrived in Yangshuo, and I spent every free moment trying to develop lesson plans. I started smoking again. I still looked very sick.
Because when your highest goal is to see the world always with the wonder of infants, how many cages can you willingly step into? How many dark caverns can you spend years lost in, bumping into yourself bumping into yourself bumping into yourself, because the cavern’s walls are also you, and you are lost in the darkness because you know nothing but still must live in a world defined by known quantities.
But then I started to really enjoy my job. It was really beautiful here. I learned to love coiled dragon eggplant and fish-flavored pork. I fell in love at Secret Beach on the Li River, and she was swimming back and forth practicing her breast stroke for five hours straight and just the most adorable neurotic I had ever met in my life. I told her a few days later, and a few weeks after that she interviewed me like you would for a job—she worked in HR for a multinational company in Shanghai—and then gave me a hug to let me know I had indeed gotten the job.
Is there a thread ties all this together, or that I’m the thing that threads together this pile of snot-riddled tissue and that chorus of familiar faces smiling down at me from out the rafters of my past? And when my thread’s cut, all those giant heads will float away and reorganize themselves into different patterns? What is that certain something hiding out in the larger picture of a lived life? Where are people in all of this?
You got to work to be human of course. But you also can’t help but be human. And those who have never made any effort to be adult human beings and also are always struggling to conceal their basic humanity. And maybe what it is is that there was a time I wanted to understand the inhuman within, of myself first and foremost. I wanted to stand in the understories of my thoughts and to dig even deeper, but I became so curious about this project that I forgot about people altogether, which is how I got so lost. Sort of like becoming so excited about math, you forget that it’s made up of numbers. Except what is a number?
Are you a bloody blob or a place marker between places, or halfway outside the outside while always too far in to see? For the thing of it is, I never really considered how very dependent I am on the kindness of my friends, and so I tried to escape from them. And a few times I actually did escape my wonderful horde of friends to go collapsing all over the place. And all because I wanted to get as far away from them as possible so I could fly higher untethered by their more real-bodied lives.
But now I see that what I see always turns back and looks me in the face. There are faces in everything. Sometimes they’re athletic American faces and sometimes these faces are hidden within their chitinous insect bodies, and sometimes they can sing the most beautiful notes. And I’ll look you in the face and you’ll tell me how ugly I am and I’ll smile stupidly back at you and the two of us will hold hands and stumble on our way to the doorway. Or it’s me stumbling from out my Chicago basement and through the air to the Sichuan mountains, to be married in the local tradition, and on to any number of miraculous-seeming lives that will each and every one all lead to the same death. Because now you are an actual person who I hope to make my wife shortly after my return to the Far East as opposed to the fantastical friend I have been bickering with all throughout these many obvious and uncertain paragraphs.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
