The God light is a window, in a tall building, one block away. I fell in love with it in the winter. While it was still dark out, maybe 5:30 a.m., it would fill with light; somebody else was up, too. I could never see more than a shadow in human form. I pretended it was my brother, up early to make a cup of coffee, and smoke some drugs. And then the baby downstairs would cry, and that helped, too. I had reverse insomnia; I could fall asleep very easily, but would wake up three or four hours later.
Five months later, I still love the God light. Although I don’t pretend it’s my brother anymore. I always knew that wasn’t true. I replay my last week with him in late October, 2014. The oncologists gave him 90 days, in late July, and they weren’t kidding. He’d moved back to our hometown on Lake Michigan ten years earlier. So I traveled back and forth, from his apartment on the lake, to mine in Brooklyn. In earlier visits, he liked to drive on county roads which could be terrifying. Once he had to pull into a gas station because he said, I’m hallucinating from the morphine. But this time, we knew it was the end. There wouldn’t be anymore 6:00 a.m. flights out of Kennedy airport. On my last night with him, I said, good night, and he said, see you in the morning, without really looking up from the joint he was rolling. I wouldn’t see him in the morning, because I was leaving at 4:00 a.m. for O’Hare. I closed the bedroom door so I wouldn’t hear the oxygen machine.
See you in the morning.
I was in bed, actually at 10:45 a.m. EST on a Wednesday night when he died, alone, four days later, in a shitty nursing home. I guess I’ve been in and out of my bed now for over five months. It takes every last ounce of courage to get up.
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A physicist might say you are like a collapsing star. Joseph Campbell might say you are about to cross the threshold, and enter the inmost cave. It is one of the last steps on the hero’s journey. But because you are terrified, you are lingering, hesitant, perhaps you are psyching yourself up. Perhaps you want a little bit more time with your brother – even though you are communing with his shadow self, and this is just so fucking sad.
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Out of all the possible explanations for my strange behavior, I will go with Joseph Campbell, and the collapsing star as metaphor. After all, once a star collapses, it doesn’t just disappear from the universe. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Everyone knows this. It lives on in another form, in the multi-verse.
I don’t need to be medicated. I am not sick. I am grieving. I might get out of bed today, but I still need the God light. It’s my north star. Of course there is something wrong with me. I would be sick if I didn’t know that. I’m not sleeping in that bed. I am surrounded by a very small and very manageable universe. It is a curated environment, believe me. On the window sill, a winter cactus, a candle and red glass bird. These are talismans.
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The other night, I met a man at a French bistro on Atlantic Avenue. Very tall, dark curly hair, parted in the middle. Black eyes. He sat next to me at the bar – how did that happen? He was so gorgeous. I was dumbfounded. I had Peach Bellini’s and thought, you should marry me tonight. We bonded because we realized our shared phone company had this algorithm — that whenever we walk in to lower the bill, we walk out paying more. He said he was going to see the Grateful Dead in Chicago, and I said be sure and pack some hallucinogens, mushrooms or ecstasy. At some point, a very drunk man fell backwards off his bar stool and crashed, headfirst, onto a marble table. We both said, dude, go to the hospital, but he wouldn’t. We speculated on whether he had a concussion or a cerebral hemorrhage. We tried not to laugh. I both wanted and didn’t want him to ask for my number. As it turned out, he didn’t. His ride showed up to take him to another bar. He zipped off into the night. A few doors down; I sat on a stoop outside a liquor store, smoking, and watched Atlantic Avenue go by.
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The morning doves are singing on top of my air conditioner again. The sun comes in at a much higher angle. I see more of my neighbors on the streets. I know it’s spring. When I was in Manhattan yesterday, I was walking south when I thought I was walking west, on 42nd and on 23rd. Twice I had to ask for directions, like a tourist. Where am I? But after that I was okay. I liked being on 10th Avenue, so close to the East River. Up on the Highline, it was rainy and cloudy, but I saw patches of purple flowers, and a large blue mural of a mermaid. It was a city on top of a city, in the rain.
Five nights ago, I walked down to Brooklyn Bridge Park, also on the East River, to the little man-made beach just north of the entrance. I remembered a morning in October, texting my brother. I said, live each day as if it was a work of art, and he said, don’t treat me like a Chia pet.
So I had to laugh.
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I don’t need a doctor. I need a shaman, or a physicist – somebody who can talk to me about zero gravity, the golden ratio, someone who will trace the Fibonacci curve along my spine and down the length of my limbs.
Lillian Ann Slugocki has been nominated for Best of the Web, a Pushcart Prize, winner of the Gigantic Sequins prize for fiction, and a finalist for the Glass Women Award. She’s been published by Seal Press, Cleis Press, Heinemann Press, Newtown Press, Spuyten Duyvil Press, as well as Bloom/The Millions, Salon, Beatrice, THE FEM Literary Magazine, HerKind/Vida, Deep Water Literary Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Non Binary Review, The Manifest-Station, and The Daily Beast. She has an MA from NYU in literary theory, and has produced and written for Off-Broadway and National Public Radio. How to Travel With Your Demons, a novella, Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2015, was selected for the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Book Club. Her other books are The Blue Hours, and The Erotica Project, co-author, Erin Cressida Wilson. Anthologies include Wreckage of Reason 2: Back to the Drawing Board and Dirty Girls.