Divergence

Content warning—mental health, drug/alcohol abuse, suicide.

My life is perfect. 

My life is beautiful, and more than I could ever have known I wanted. My life is long enough to know what happiness means. 

My partner and I never marry—we are always better off as friends. We consider it, when we find out she is pregnant at nineteen just after I turn twenty, a product of the leftover teenage lust we never truly wasted from our systems during years of on-off foolish dating. 

We never decide if we make a mistake, or whether what we do is right. We leave it at deciding that what happens isn't wrong. I swear I'll live to see my child, to see his mother hold him. 

Our son is born to my assumed and unfortunate soulmate, a girl who deserves better. A girl who is: a highschool graduate, a good daughter gone rebel, an unlimited potential. A girl who swears she never settles, never will, and instead she settles down. 

Our son is born with me as his father: a drug user, a semi-alcoholic, an anorexic, an attempted suicide, a dropout, a burnout, a failure, a relapse, an escapist, every definition of a runaway. Wait, I mean, to a survivor with too many things to learn, just as many left to unlearn, because that's where I come from. To reach the beautiful parts, I have to survive. 

My son looks just like me. I hope I never see myself in him. 

We raise him in our one-room studio, converted from a warehouse long before we'd ever taken residence there. The far wall is still covered in Polaroids. The floors still smell like lacquer when it rains. The same couch has been in the center of the room since before even I moved in. I show my son the moon from the concrete steps, when I'm not just up to smoke in the middle of the night. I sing him to sleep. I make sure he eats. 

I play blues guitar in a shitty bar down the block for less-than-living wage. I headline Thursday nights. My partner waits tables and makes twice what I do. 

My tenacity is rewarded, and my friends join me on the unfinished wooden stage. We three—myself, the older who took me in at fourteen, and the younger who worships me to his own detriment—expand to a circuit of local bars, filling gigs far enough out of town to leave an impression, and a memory to reignite. We burn strong. 

My dreams of immaturity grow larger than life, larger than I ever expect my time to be. I map myself out of two hometowns, out of a cliche childhood in its negative definition and the place in which I'd been surviving. I become a photo finish of fame and popularity, my rock band aim of my only talent bounding out of a bayside city on the American west coast. 

Our daughter is born to me at my worst—the farthest I fall are the days I barely function enough to care for her. Rock bottom signs its name in blood and booze and blades on a bathroom tile floor. My son deserves two decent examples. My daughter deserves two living parents. My partner deserves reciprocation. With red on my hands I climb my way back. 

We raise our children via haphazard trial and error, driven always by love and the desire to be present above all else, and protection second from our—my—self-destructive habits, not quite yet extinguished by the flood of adulthood having soaked too early through our cigarettes-and-Converse souls. I tattoo their names on the scars on my wrist—reminders of the reason I'm alive. I keep surviving. 

Day by day the rough edges gloss over. Day by day the borders of consciousness begin to hurt a little less. A little more time waited out in the present, a little less weighing out each option as bad as the next. 

I wake up in mid-September as a twenty-five-year-old. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight. I watch sunsets. I put milk in my coffee. I hold my children. I let myself be needed. Wanted. Loved. The only club I join is those who can look back. 

I'm in my late 30s, living in New York, where my partner is from. Now our son is seventeen, an age whose behaviour of my own I remember and for which I resent myself in equal measure. His little sister begins highschool. 

They have good friends. They stay out late because we let them, and they come home to security and places they can speak. They come home to an apartment by the Park, one with their cats who run underfoot and a kitchen filled with cupcakes and family dinners where they make us laugh, and that same damn couch we won't replace, the one we've had since before they were born. 

I take them on tour every summer. We make it a road trip across the country, and my daughter's favourite memory remains the first time she was old enough to come. 

We all stay overnight in the same one-room where they were raised, on the days the band's played shows take us that far home. I eat breakfast at the table I once strewed with glass bottles and cigarette ash. I shower in the tub I once painted red, I steam the bathroom mirror I once watched erase my reflection. 

I'm more than content—I'm happy. I make it out alive. My life is beautiful. 

My life is perfect. 

But my life never happened. 

I died of an overdose, gunshot, cut too deep, bottle/body/eyes too empty, truth too late—who knows what they'll write in the obituary, or if I'll warrant one at all—in the dark under the bridge by the edge of the bay. I never went home, I never had the best-worst hate-love sex of my life with the girl who'd been my best friend since ninth grade. I sat alone, and she never found me, and I never found it in myself to get up one more time. I never found enough worth fighting for. 

That's what really happens. 

They say your life flashes before you're gone but it was my potential I watched spark out, a lighter flare of a last cigarette smoked to death and laid to rest on some late night in rain in October. I heard every word I should have said, every apology I could have brought back with me, souvenirs from the edge, instead of a nomadic drift closer and closer into nothingness. I was a failure. I was a relapse. I was a runaway. 

She should have run away. 

This, whatever's left of me, is all I ever was. 

I never made it out of here alive. The person I've been would never have survived. It would have taken too long to change. It would have taken more than I had left, to try once more. One more cough it up/put it down/sew it shut/break the glass/swallow it down/let it out for all to see/let her have more than a memory. 

There was nothing left. I could never have been happy. I was too late, that's what they'll say. That's what she'll see. 

My life never happened, because I died. 

Right?