To contain it so gently

The first time I saw him he had barrettes in his hair, wore a huge hoodie and big pants and looked like a cross between a raver and a boy in a fairy tale. The last time I saw him he was hooked up to a ventilator—all tubes, neck brace, IV drip. The first time he may have been standing outside our dorm, smoking, trying to look fucked-up enough to make the right friends. It was about time for me. Neil was a year younger than me, a freshman who landed at Oberlin one year after I did. I wonder if I picked him because he kind of looked like a girl, except he wouldn’t have been a very pretty girl with his deep-set eyes and slightly big nose, which were exactly the best things about his face. And full lips. But he was small-framed, so maybe less threatening as a male specimen, and more familiar—the city boys I’d grown up with tended to be shorter, slighter than boys from outside the city (or maybe it was just that everyone swam in their baggy clothes). When he didn’t wear those barrettes, he would have to brush his hair out of his eyes.

The last time his eyes were sealed shut and blue, blood dripped down from the corner of one. The first afternoon in the hospital I thought he could hear us talking to him. It almost looked like he smiled or nodded but I can’t remember if his eyes were open that day or if the doctors opened them at the end or if they never did. I vaguely remember a blank stare, the big brown eyes. But mostly that blue, purple. All bruise. Life support. What is that?

I think of Neil sitting on the ground, feet tucked under him, knees pulled up to his chin. Ratty jeans bottoms that dragged on the ground when he walked. I think of us making eggs in my frying pan in the dorm kitchen on special occasions, pretending to be grownups or kids at home even though any food we bought had to be labeled (when someone ate my Phish Food I went ballistic). I think of when he first read me Rosy Ear by Zbigniew Herbert, a poem he wrote about Achilles, and the drawings he left in my Longman Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, large-eyed boys and girls with spiky, misshapen hair next to lines by C.D. Wright and Tom Lux.  When I went to his house while friends were collecting his things (when do they become “personal effects”?), I took his copies of Frank Lima and Zbigniew Herbert, whose work he’d introduced me to, hoping I’d find notes in the dog-eared pages, or more of his drawings.

The hospital said it was a broken leg. Then they called back and said come right away. They wouldn’t tell us much because we weren’t family. We sat and smoked in the “Sobriety Garden” overlooking the river and the FDR Drive. We got drinks and waited a few hours for his mom to arrive. I picked a piece of mint in the garden, or maybe that was one of the next days. It was unseasonably warm and nominally “better” to be outside than pacing the hall waiting for news, trading visitor’s passes as more friends arrived. There was also sitting in his room, listening to the machines’ accordion of air, heave and collapse, the occasional beep. Looking at his cheeks, his skull wrapped, his feet. Touching a hand I hadn’t in years.

At his funeral service I read from a postcard he wrote me about brushing his teeth with soap and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle while on a camping trip in Yosemite with one of his friends Gabe (there were two), but why was I one of the readers? I couldn’t have been to him what he was to me, a first in that way. He lost his virginity years before we even met, so I probably started out to him as just another person to sleep with. The card he made for my twentieth birthday, after we’d been together on and off for many months, had a drawing of a slim, long-haired girl. I wanted to believe it was a drawing of me, but I was also weirdly jealous of the drawing, figured it was of someone else or some dream-girl I could never be, like the girl in a screenplay he wrote—the perfect girl drawn on a sheet of acid. But the card said he loved me and “everyday it astounds me that you tolerate my nonsense.” Neil was my training for a lot of nonsense. Neil was the original nonsense.

It happened in a dorm, naturally, the shittiest dorm on campus, where we lived down the hall from one-another. (My roommate and I had gotten second to last draw in the housing lottery.) It was in his room—his roommate was probably out with his role-playing game crew. I think we first kissed the night of the annual “Red Party” (one of the school’s most frat-like events), after talking in the terribly-lit cinderblock hallway for a while post-party.

Around that time my friend Sarah threw a “tequila pajama party” in her room in the all-women’s dorm. We didn’t actually sleep over, and not all of us even wore our PJs, but I drank tequila for the first time and wound up puking all night thanks to a shots and beer one-two punch. Sarah is known for being blunt as hell and asking slightly inappropriate questions in front of large groups of people, which is perfect for slumber parties at any age. We played a variation of “Truth or Truth” or “Skeletons in the Closet” and Sarah asked everyone who was a virgin, or not a virgin, to raise their hands. It was a fairly even split, but I was still determined to get rid of it pronto. It was getting ridiculous, and there was a known shortage of straight (even straightish) men at our school.

We probably used a condom from the vending machine downstairs. I can’t remember much else other than feeling relieved, and I’m sure it was incredibly awkward except he knew what he was doing compared to me, and he was very sweet. I was glad to get it over with already. I probably did a little dance in my head like Tom Hanks in Big when he finally gets with his grown-up lady girlfriend and orders coffee, black, the next morning.

Right after the big event, or maybe it was a couple nights later, Neil and I took a walk over to Fairchild, the nicer dorm nearby with a semi-vegan food coop in the basement. Sarah was standing outside. Could she tell? Did I signal to her in girl-speak? I was relieved to be delivered into the safe company of a friend, or mixed company at least. I also felt some kind of small triumph. Check that off the growing-up list. That I soon fell in love with Neil was a benefit or inevitability (given how much of a romantic I am and how much of an under-the-radar charmer Neil was) that I hadn’t counted on but I’m sure I secretly wished for.

When you can’t see someone, can’t physically be near them again, it makes you want to speak to those you can, keep them in your life in some capacity no matter what. Writing to those who are gone magnifies the line between the possible and the impossible. To address them—does it soothe or just call up the ghosts to keep you from sleeping? It’s the kind of sentiment Neil might scoff at or at least express more eloquently. When I read the cards Neil wrote to me, he is still addressing me. We are not back in the time when we were in love, and I don’t wish to be, but he calls me “you,” he calls us “we.” He writes, “I’ve seen beautiful things. I’ll never be able to describe them, but I hope someday we can come here together.” He frames that time I learned how to share space, choose words carefully, nurture and be nurtured, hurt and be hurt. The main character in Cut Out Paper Heart, Neil’s screenplay, eats the entire sheet of acid, not tab by tab, but devouring the whole thing in ragged pieces, chews up the girl, not swallowing her whole but still consuming her entirely—by the same token she consumes him from the inside out. Neil was that kind of love, albeit in a less menacing or cannibalistic way.

I’ve seen Neil more in the past year in my sleep than in the past almost-decade since we finished school, even though we lived a five-minute walk from each other in Brooklyn for several years. In the dreams, mostly he is telling a story and making me and everyone laugh, maybe doing his impression of an old man, maybe talking about otters or llamas. I was always competitive with and inspired by Neil, but he could out-word me any day. He could call something “grand” and get away with it or say, “I can’t wait to see you. We’ll make chicken soup,” in a letter. The last time I saw him conscious was at a party the night he got hit by a car; I had also run into him the night before that after not seeing him in a while. He had just gotten back from a few months away, practicing Thai boxing, about which he was writing a beautiful blog. Even though he was drunk at the party, he still managed to say something sharp, observant, and sweet to me in our brief conversation about my band’s performance that night. I wish I remembered his exact words.

I don’t remember much about the first time we slept together, but I do remember one of the last times. Fall of my junior year. We rode our bikes out to the golf course at the edge of town. It was misty—very The End of the Affair (a movie we saw that year), but with bad late-nineties fashion and neither of us looking nearly as attractive as Ralph Fiennes or Julianne Moore. Most of our last sexual encounters involved long walks or bike rides, tossing stones into the reservoir, me giving him a flat-eyed look in conversation to avoid saying what I really wanted to. At the time I was newly enamored with Rilke’s poetry, especially the Duino Elegies. In his Fourth Elegy, Rilke writes, “Aren’t lovers always / coming to sheer drop-offs / inside each other / they who promised themselves / open spaces, good hunting / and a homeland?” Sure, some of it was late adolescent hormones coupled with a penchant for drama on both our parts, but it was Neil who began to show me how to navigate the cliffs of intimate relationships, to search for adventure and a home. His postcard from Yosemite said, “I want so badly to show them to you,” the new landscapes he had seen and started exploring. I have been looking ever since.

Note: The title of this piece comes from the Rainer Maria Rilke poem Fourth Elegy as translated by David Young in Duino Elegies

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Rebecca Keith’s poems and other writings have appeared in Best New Poets (2009), The Laurel Review, The Rumpus, The Awl, BOMBlog, Storyscape, The Millions, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review poetry contest and has received honors from the Atlantic Monthly and BOMB magazine. A native of downtown New York, Rebecca is a founder, curator, and host of Mixer Reading and Music series at Cakeshop. She also sings and plays guitar and keyboards in the Roulettes and Butchers & Bakers. To contain it so gently originally appeared in the seventh issue of Dossier.

Image: Adam Frelin, White Line, fluorescent fixtures and bulbs, steel cable, generator, 240′ long, 2005.