Plush (15 page)

Hope is noose around my neck, my fucking neck.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t exist.

I’m forced to stay on this awful, fucking planet,

decaying

and alone.

Fuck it all.

Fuck it all.

I can’t sing.

I can’t write.

I can’t understand anything – any fucking reason they give me for the death of everything.

Falling, falling, falling through the ravines of the broken heart inside of me.

Falling, falling, falling through the ravines of the broken heart inside of me.

But what fucking heart?

It has rotted away as Jack rots in that fucking grave.

And I admit it:

I’m fucking crazy. I’ve lost the rope to tether me to this planet.

More Xanax, and more Xanax, and more Xanax please.

NOBODY FUCKING TOUCH ME.

Nobody can see me.

Nobody can hear me.

Fuck Carter. Fuck the kids. Jack would still be alive if they hadn’t robbed Jack of me.

I admit it:

I’m fucking crazy.

Five million cigarettes a day. More pills. More pills please.

I need anything to drown out whatever is left of me –

a life not my own.

Am I just a puppet, devoured by tragedy, thine madness,

and ripped apart by the gods?

Yeah, I bet you’re all fucking laughing.

Laugh it up while I fucking die on the cross.

FUCK you WORLD. FUCK YOU.

Pills, more pills.

I admit I’m crazy.

No one can speak to me.

No one can fix me.

No one can save me.

Everyday I’m add to the shrine of Jack that I’m building in my studio.

I never leave.

I never go out.

Another photograph. A guitar pick. Poem.

My shrine of Jack won’t bring him back, but I won’t forget

who made me who I am. Who is the only one who will ever understand.

Jack. Jack. Jack.

Crooked. I’m so crooked.

I’m crazy.

I’ll admit it.

I’m calling your phone five million times a day,

hoping that you’ll answer.

I pray so hard to answer the fucking phone.

But no one ever does.

Answer,

Jack. Jack, don’t leave me here.

These months have been worse than anything.

I’ll give you anything to come back.

Please come back to me.

I watched you dead in my arms

and with your death, half of me is gone.

A life not my own.

A life not my own.

Jack & Hayley 4ever

Jack & Hayley 4ever

JACK & HAYLEY. JACK & HAYLEY.

JACK & HAYLEY.

See,

we were meant to be.

Eternity.

Please, please come back to me.

Please.

36
    March 10, 2012

No one’s allowed in the studio. No one. They leave me things: offerings, fruit, books, pills, cigarettes’. But they never come in. No one can reach me in the wall of Jack’s love that I’ve built around myself. They leave offerings to their dying queen who has lost her throne – and her fucking mind. I can’t draw. I can’t write. I won’t talk to Carter or the kids. Fuck them all.

From my fetal position where I always lay, I see. Today, I see Annie. She’s trying hard to get me to open up for her. She comes everyday showing me her love through the glass door that I won’t unlatch. She delivers a box with
‘Jack’s stuff’
written on it. As soon as she’s gone, I run to the door.

The white box. I drag it inside, lock the door, and open it. It’s from his studio apartment in Hollywood where we used to live when we first moved here. He never left it. But the traitor bitch that I am, I left him.

Poems. Poems. Photos of us. It’s all of his journals. I am scratching myself. I am a skeleton of my former self,
searching for some sort of fucking answer in the chaos of self-destruction
. His fucking death was ruled accidental overdose. Fuck them.

The world killed him.

I killed him.

Carter killed him.

Benjy and Cody killed him.

The world killed him.

I’m killing myself, a slow disappearance.

I don’t eat anything but cigarettes and Xanax and cigarettes and champagne and fuck you all. I didn’t even allow a fucking funeral. I keep the ashes. Only I know Jack. Only I love Jack. The ashes are on a shrine. When I’m not sleeping and when I am, the porcelain blue vase is in my arms. Dust. Dust of my one true love.

My mom called me soon after she heard and said she was coming to help me. Then a few days later, she called and said she was at the airport with her bags but they wouldn’t let her on the plane. I could hear in the background the sound of slot machines, gambling to insanity. And Dad. Dad called for a couple hours to play judge and jury and condemn me for not taking care of Jack, for not saving him, for failing as a sister, and for failing as a friend – I get a big F on the paper reports of my life. But I took it, because he was drunk and crying, and I knew at that moment that I’d never ever, ever fucking talk to my parents again. The world may have thrown Jack and I out of their sperm and eggs and incubated us in her womb, but for only this do I have any gratitude.