See You in Hell Chicago: Midway Airport- August 9, 2008
Copyright © 2008 By Curtis Meyer
The windy city and I have a troubled relationship. I’ve been here four times now, three of which have been in airports as stops between destinations. The one time I wasn’t, I spent two hours on foot with an ex-girlfriend searching for the Shea Aquarium in the middle of The Taste of Chicago Food Festival before driving back to her dad and step-mom’s place in Gary, Indiana. We never found the aquarium, and after dealing with five cops whose directions contradicted each other, she and I left the city frustrated and at each others’ throats. Even though it’s the home of hot dogs, deep dish pizza, Jazz, Blues, some of my favorite rappers and poets, and the birthplace of poetry slam, I can adamantly say, “Fuck Chicago.”
It’s been five days since we received the call announcing that he decided to relieve himself of his burden by becoming everyone else’s. Here I am again: Alone, in Chicago-in an airport- seven hours until my flight, on my way back to Florida from the National Poetry Slam, trying hard to immerse myself in poetry chapbooks as a means to distract myself from my best friend’s suicide and the fact that I have to iron my clothes for his memorial service as soon as I get up tomorrow.
I don’t even remember the two bus rides from Madison to Janesville, Wisconsin and from Janesville to Chicago; Four hours on the road and both ways I awoke at my stops as if mere seconds had passed. It was the best sleep I’ve had in ages.
I keep thinking it should’ve been you: The prestige, the compliments from big name writers, smoking joints in broad daylight, fucking other poets on the lawn of the capitol-it should’ve been you.
In the 24 hours before your passing, Kim asked how you were doing. That same day I had a conversation with Brendan and Rebecca about how I don’t believe in coincidence. Last night Laura helped me pick a daisy -yellow for friendship- that I’ve since placed in the hole of the zipper of my windbreaker and carried with me all to this point.
It is said the dead communicate with the living three times after their passing. In the past five days I’ve seen someone in a t-shirt with an insignia identical to your tattoo and laughed at a package of trail mix. Now, I’m in the stall of a restroom in a Chicago airport trying hard to shit to keeping myself from crying as the graffiti on the wall says written in black ink, “So what?” It is here in the mirror that I notice the flower in the middle of my chest: Drooping like some sort of perverse question mark or obscene emblem. It is then as I observe the green fishhook, that I know not only the “what” but the “how” of your death-the “why” still anyone’s guess. It is then I catch glimpse of the flower and its stem: How it resembles a hanged man, bent like an upside-down J through the hole of my zipper, petals facing the ground, brown starting to form around the lantern of its gold skull, neck broken, a bruise around its collar, four leaves collapsing limp and lifeless at its side like two pairs of limbs.
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