Of Jesters and Harlequins (for my friends)

We sit in the tavern drinking away our misery and allowing it to filter in ways unimaginable. We are the life and the death of the whole room. We are loud and obnoxious and say horrible things to each other and laugh at the pain.

We are all dressed in motley. Make up on our faces we look like clowns to the rest of you. In black and white and red with bells that chime and wicked laughter we look back and remember the past.

I remember.

I remember as I sip wine the time I was left vomiting and he was at the bar. I remember the time I was on the plane alone racing across the country away from the disappointment that was my childhood.

She remembers the drugs and the depression and the void she couldn’t fill.

He remembers the cigar mark his father gave him. Decades later it still hurts.

My brother heart and soul remembers the beating he took and received from a mother who knew he would never fight back. He still doesn’t fight back.

She is lost and wants attention and gets it where she can find it, but it will never ever be enough. She is amazing to us still.

He is addicted and has no way out, and disappears and doesn’t show but we love him because he is our friend.

I talk to life as if it was a person, and not an idea or state of mind.

I say to life and all the people in it.

“Fuck it if I’m week and if the scars on my wrists have not yet healed. Fuck you for thinking less of me and not loving me when I loved you more and more each time you fell. I picked you up and knocked you down and I will live with it forever.”

We live and die by the admission of our imperfection and we revel in it. We use it and support it and mold it to our wills. We look back at life and talk to it expecting it to talk back and give us answers.

These wounds heal, but not before being scraped and bruised a second and third time. Just when one thinks they are better and they’ve found something different, a smile and a nod shatter what little peace one thought one had.

Cologne, perfume, a new dress or a freshly pressed shirt makes you remember what you want and how badly you want it. Funny how that works best when you are dismissed like the trash you were always told you were.

The makeup on our faces has run from our tears but we are not giving up these friends of mine and me. We have all locked arms and shoulders at the table. We are stomping our feet and singing our songs in spite of what we all know and all feel. We are one entity of pain and damage in its rawest form.

Go find your friends. They are not there. Go grab the crowd to laugh at us; they are hardly worth the effort. They will take you away from your problems and show you what you missed.

We refuse to do that.

We are weak, and broken says you.

We are disappointing and fallible says you.

We are pathetic to you so you lost faith in us.

You are pathetic because you lost faith at all.

We raise our glasses to the sky and sing.