Gifts

 
            I give people things so they will remember me, so when we haven’t talked in years and they don’t even know if I’m alive or have done something stupid, fallen in with the wrong mix and am currently half-breathing on some rotting, off-yellow couch in South Mexico with blood gliding down the syringe invading my arm, like a child on a slip-n-slide in slow motion, they will think of me and consider these things.

            There must be a list, somewhere in time, being scribbled by some angel on probation that is attempting to prove to god that I am a good person. This list’s contents: Heather O’Neill, Sharon Olds, Albert Camus, and Robert Pirsig books; Righteous Brothers, Bob Dylan and Neutral Milk Hotel LP’s; elephant and giraffe wood carvings (whittled by yours truly); various band t-shirts; fairly large sums of money; and gallons upon gallons of drinks filled up in bars and backyards. It is my hope that that angel, spoken of previously, can bathe in the purity of my heart, but in that hope, I assume I have drank it all up through one of the swirling and bending toy straws my mother, to this day, keeps around.

            Still, I imagine you, fingers twirling the carpet while you sink in with each turn of that vinyl I scoured record stores for and (upon discovering in the one dollar bin hiding towards the back corner) bought for you, playing back me, however you remember me. I see you, as well, a whiskey cooling on your nightstand, scanning the letters of each page, though not actually reading, because you are thinking of the time we were drugged, lying down in a garage, explaining our views of existence to one another. And I invent you, lonely after a fight with your girlfriend, smiling before you sleep because of when I pissed in your neighbor’s yard after a number of beers and shots of vodka I will never remember the count of.

Perhaps existing in others’ minds at times is all I need. Perhaps it is what causes me to exist. Perhaps that is what makes me a narcissist, but perhaps I’m just like everyone else, because we are all narcissists, no matter who gets the blame.