44th Streett

I find myself walking closer to the edge tonight, more than before. Nights like these the walls are just not enough to keep what’s inside from mingling with the ruckus below me on 44^th Street. It reminds me of a place I visited in my youth. Tonight, it finds me being visited by a familiar sentiment, but in this metaphorical room the only audience to the conversation I’m having is the condensation of my breath making its way into the world.

I vaguely remember the same feeling in my twenties. Fallow by the crashing of my lungs against my chest when I got the news about Joseph. I kept hoping to find relief from a world that wouldn’t accept us, but the world had already taken it upon itself to decide.

Joseph was gone. With the sudden news came a shift in my life that I was not ready for. In many ways, he was the man that had always been there, the best man at both of my weddings went and left me behind. I couldn’t make sense of it at first, but I don’t think I wanted to either.

A part of me became entangled in a constant war between the present and the past. Some days I didn’t want to wake up. I wanted to live in a world where Joseph was still a part of. But the alarm clock and creeping light from my never drawn curtains would eventually find their way to wake me.

My life was never the same since that day. The rush of being out in the cold, hanging off the ledge, didn’t seem as dreadful anymore, but it wasn’t always like that. At first, I found something else in facing my mortality as Joseph had; it made me question my decisions, not his. Something about it used to make me feel alive again. Tonight, even the millions of shimmering tears falling from the sky can’t change the mood.

It was nights like this when my mother would remind me, “To measure a man by his courage.” I could never accept that now. Why else would I expose such weakness to the world, if not to find an escape from all the failures in my life? I don’t think even the angels dare come down from the heavens to interfere with my fate tonight. As far as I can tell, I have already been cast into the abyss.

Death is very final, just like what waited for me at the end of the ledge. But even if I could fall forever, that’s not a good enough reason to let go of the ledge. Still, a man has to have the courage to live, or a way to find it. I have neither, so day after day I choose to borrow it. I find it more adequate than drowning myself in a bottle of whiskey every night. I know that’s what Joseph would have wanted. Besides, how else can I continue to pay those pesky bills from my first failed marriage? Now in my late thirties, I find myself coming out of a second marriage. My son won’t return my calls. That’s what I call a real success story, if I may humor myself instead of drowning in self-pity.

Anyway, it beats being overtaken by the dark and cold place where I find myself tonight. But much like my work, it’s a dead end. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Most of my co-workers are fresh out of college, still caught up in the allure of chasing power and money while working on Wall Street. The truth is that most will never be seen as equals by the people calling the shots. It makes me question if I should have invested in other parts of my life, maybe enlisted right out of high school when Joseph did. I always admired the kind of life he lived, a soldier who earned a Purple Heart in Afghanistan at the age of twenty-three. He was the kind of soldier I wanted to be, in and out of his uniform. He never backed down from the ledge when faced with danger. I guess the wrong soldier died that night of December the twenty-fifth.

After that holiday season, life was never the same for me. I didn’t have that one person in my life to talk over my problems. He was that kind of person, the one to talk you off the ledge when life was becoming a little too much to handle. I remember our fishing trip at the lake after my first divorce. We promised each other that when the tide rolled in we would always find an escape in Lake Champlain. I haven’t been back since then. It was too painful to visit knowing Joseph’s memory would be the only one accompanying me on the trip. I recently tried to drag Junior up there to help relieve my mind of some of the old stories between me and Joseph, but as far as that goes, he sees me as the enemy. That leaves little hope of us ever taking a fishing trip together.

Maybe taking the last step off the ledge would offer a different certainty. I’m sure it couldn’t be any colder or harder than spending my nights alone in my apartment. Fill with empty things to take up the space around me.

I wonder what Joseph would say if he could see me right now. Having to live with the memory has become a curse and a blessing at the same time. After all these years, he’s the reason I have never taken the final step. I’m not sure if I believe in an afterlife, but there has to be something out there keeping me alive besides the mountain of responsibility that’s accumulated on my shoulders. 

Or maybe it’s that letter that I keep at the back of my desk drawer under lock and key. The one that retells Joseph's final words before his battalion went into battle one last time. The one next to the picture of us in front of Lake Chaplain, Joseph, who I can vividly still remember, and someone that’s become unrecognizable to me.