Still Yet Drifting

I wish it had been different type of drifting. I wish I had drifted off to a light sleep before heading over to 1755 Sepulveda to pick him up for dinner, for another night out on the town, or just to hang out over sushi and sake and over tears of laughter and heartbreak. I wish it had been a nightly drifting instead of a morning wake; this way he would have had another night to drift through. His mother didn’t say much as I entered aside from her usual and passive “hello.” She had been passive throughout her entire motherhood. She was dressed in black which matched Edwin’s mental obscurity that early a.m. that led him to end his day prematurely and every following day permanently. His dad was also in black, greeting me with the same smile he hid behind regardless of the occasion.

I walked upstairs, I knew my way. I walked right, right past all the childhood portraits of my dear friend and his older sisters. None of which were there to be seen. I walked into his room and looked at every still. It was still like Edwin had been as he laid in his bed, watching his life flash away before his eyes with a smile. Unlike his father, he smiled through both life’s beauty and ugliness. As I walked up to his bed, his imagined final moments replayed themselves in my head. I touched the mattress, dressed with a blue comforter imprinted with plant images; he had taken up a passion for growing plants during his last days, his final passion. The imprint was likely coincidental. I felt it, silky yet cold, comfortable to the touch of my skin yet piercing my soul, sending shivers from my fingers through my entire arm and lastly to my memories, memories of the times we laid there covered with a different comforter and comforted through the lyrics of Selena Quintanilla and Lana Del Rey. Now only memories were there to comfort me.

I saw it tucked away in a corner, the box prepared for me by his dad; there was no way his mother had the mental fortitude to package the inheritance Edwin left behind for me. I walked up to it and kneeled, because carrying this inheritance in my arms all the way back home would have made reality feel uglier. I opened it, and it was exactly what I expected; a vinyl of Selena Quintanilla that I had gifted him on his twenty-first birthday; a DVD set of Alfred Hitchcock, his gift the following year, and sage. Sage had been his recommendation to drive away ill-meaning romantic prospects looking to use my body and not once consider my soul; we were both victims of this ugliness. I looked at my inheritance, looking at the cardboard case containing Hitchcock’s best works, tattered from having been held in his hands through each passing birthday after his twenty-second. I looked at the Selena Quintanilla vinyl and remembered how I always questioned his unbreakable devotion for the tragic artist, a bond I wished our friendship had remembered during his final months.

I kneeled back up and looked down at the box; it had to come with me but I didn’t know the strength to carry it out, much less carry myself out of his room, that space where we had giggled, cried, and lastly yelled at each other. So I stood still and looked at the space in its entirety, something I never did much of when he was its occupant. I looked at the walls, the Selena Quintanilla and Lana Del Rey and Madonna posters covering their otherwise pale surface, pale like his skin. I looked and stood still, wondering how I’d conjure the strength to find my way out of there, the same conjuring my dear friend used to open the pill case that facilitated his permanent exit. I looked some more, from the bed down to the cardboard box back up to those walls, then I looked at something new. New life to that room. The new and only life occupying it. It was a portrait, small, almost undetectable like his fleeting life in the eyes of his family and friends. It had a wooden frame, unremarkable unlike the image it contained: a ship on a horizon. A small ship with a blue sail matching the ocean it sat on. The image was hand-painted, almost as if my dear friend had done it himself during his final moments, envisioning himself floating away; floating away from that room; floating away from ill-meaning lovers with his soul intact; floating away from blind family and friends; floating away from our friendship, a friendship ended by my blinding resentment. A blinding and trivial resentment. A resentment I wished that small ship with a blue sail would have drifted away with, and left my dear friend behind in its place.