You're So Cool

Some things don’t go away.

I can remember what shirt I had on the day of that funeral. I can remember the color and the way it felt. Its cool blue fabric was stitched together in a way that allowed the breeze of late summer Michigan air through its pores, rustling the hair on the back of my neck behind the collar . I remember I wore that shirt helping somebody move earlier that summer. It was one of those shirts, kinda like a polo, that you could dress up or dress down. Made of an indestructible, snagless material that held its own against the corners of cardboard boxes, and ink pens alike, yet with sleeves soft enough to wipe my face that day. It was a button down. One of the last short sleeve ones I ever had - I never wear those anymore.

Now, I dress. I dress in the way that all nakedly ambitious and destructively power hungry young men dress; in ties, and blazers. In slacks and cardigan sweaters. Watches and hard-sole shoes. I should be embarrassed of how well I do it, but shame is something I have learned not to wear in public, like most of my true emotions. In the mornings while I'm holding my hands close to my chest, manipulating the buttons of my shirt I find it best to say a little prayer to myself in remembrance that this is all just a costume and not really who I am.

But I need to pretend.

I didn’t cry that night. I didn’t really even cry at the funeral. But a week later, randomly, when I returned back to school I found myself crying in the back corner of the library with a friend who offered me tissue as she watched from her identical plastic chair on the other side of our isolated little table, stunned, wondering where this had all come from. I don’t even talk to her anymore. That was ten years ago.

I used to be able to cry on command. I was sure my parents hated me for it. Their subtly confused facial expressions were enough evidence at the time. I was no tough guy. No football hero. Just a sullen kid that wasn’t weird enough for any single cruel label in particular, so instead subject to a hundred. Girls didn’t talk to me. I was not, “one of the guys.” I didn’t own a single football jersey or baseball cap and I spent my time after school playing the piano. Where I grew up, that didn’t make me any more marketable as “the sensitive type.”

Slowly throughout the ensuing decade I shopped for personality traits that would better suit my purpose; to be taken seriously. I always said I hated symbol worship until I realized it applied to clothing. My voice needed work too. It was painful for me to listen to; awkwardly high at times, squeaky even. I never landed the gig as a rock singer I always secretly hoped for, so I tried like hell to be one. I grew my hair and I took up guitar. I spent hours at the gym, where I would watch other guys interact with eachother like animals at the zoo. I was always trying to figure out what I was missing.

The attitude wasn’t enough. Around every corner was someone I had been to middle school with who knew another version of the truth. They could see through the veneer of thrift clothing and rockstar boots to my inner weirdo. I was never going to mature out of loserhood unless I escaped, and so, shortly after my 23^rd birthday, I left Michigan and moved to a place where I knew nobody, and more importantly, nobody knew me.

I packed that shirt along with a dozen others that I never wore again; some of which are still hanging in my closet. It seems like a single momentous day is attached to each one. There’s the black one with the plain white buttons that I got on clearance for six bucks. It had short sleeves too. I wore it one night when a friend and I were the party stars at a bar near Mack and Alter. Some of the homes that line the river channel there still have the boat docks in the back that were used to smuggle booze during prohibition. Then there’s the blue dragon tshirt with the high sleeves that I slipped on the first night I arrived in Savannah, Georgia and didn’t take off for the next two days. It still smelled like River Street as I was packing it to go home. The blue button down, however, had a particularly vivid memory attached to it. All these years, and all these miles, and all these ideas of an identity later and I still remember that.

I’ve since reached out for a new life. It was a long reach, fraught with bare, painful emotion that took time to grasp anything fruitful. I was desperate to connect with somebody – either a friend or a lover, but after many unstable trials it started to seem like I was doomed to disconnect from everybody. As I slowly met people I’d find myself out and about, in the middle of a crowd having a great time one moment, only to be sitting on the floor in my small apartment moments later with a silent phone that held only the phone numbers of friends in faraway places and my parents. To this day I’m not sure which was worse; being alone or pretending I wasn’t.

This was before I had a managerial level job. My clothes were a few years out of style since I never bought anything new. I didn’t find it necessary. I rarely went anywhere other than to work on the night shift at the hospital – which should have been almost entirely insignificant except that it was the bulk of my life. At that point I was still reaching and hadn’t yet managed to get ahold of anything solid enough to use to pull myself up. When I finally did, it happened all of a sudden, and I tricked myself even better this time that I had forgotten about everything that had happened before.

It seemed like that was eons ago, until yesterday at work when a coworker and I were talking about suicide. She said she had known somebody whose daughter had hung herself quite a few years back – a tragedy all but forgotten. The funeral was an open-casket, and on the daughter’s neck there was a very visible mark. That was the last time my coworker ever went up to the casket at a funeral. I didn’t have any Kleenex this time. It didn’t take a week for me to react either. Suddenly I found myself in tears; my coworker sitting across the desk from me, wondering where all of this had come from.

Necktie or not, I could have sworn I felt the hair on the back of my neck rustle behind the collar of that blue shirt as I myself gazed down into an open casket for the last time, looking at a very similar mark.