Bernstein in Technicolor or A Fire, Escaped
August’s heavy air feels burdensome and though the storms usually clear the air, my head, make it easier to breathe, tonight the humidity is leaden and so is my heart. There are vestiges of lightning a few blocks over, dancing through the city park where kids ice skate in the winter and their parents buy local produce in the summer. I have a direct line of sight to this bohemian bourgeois dream of an urban green space from my apartment - the apartment that stands three stories above the worst neighborhood in the city. The neighborhood full of drugs, homelessness and now, me. The neighborhood where people are aghast to find out I live. The neighborhood that defines my own personal challenger brand, “I’m from Philly” I tell them “your trash is my Greenwich.” I don’t tell them that I grew up in a red brick home on a charming sidestreet in the best public school catchment in the city. It is unnecessary and wreaks havoc on my story whose chapters include “A needle exchange is a part of city life,” “Make friends with the neighborhood, but not too many,” and everyone’s favorite “I know what I’m doing.” And anyway, how about this incredible fire escape where I pretend to reflect every evening, but sit in silence with a cigarette instead?
The sky is ominous, but I am not afraid. The damp is pervasive, but I remain dry. I am gifted a lit cigarette by the man next to me, the man who would be or is or was my boss, my mentor, a father, the first person who believed in me so much he pushed me to do more than what I would settle for myself. He hands me a cigarette, we smoke together often while we both pretend we don’t. He is a man of privilege, and the hand offering me a cigarette says as much. A product of prep school and the Ivy League, if you didn’t know him, he’d always seemed a little too rough around the edges for his particular provenance.
The two of us sit on the fire escape, where like Stipe, I can’t shake Bernstein
“Now it begins, now we start. Even death won’t part us now.”
I’ve always been a sucker for destruction.
He shattered a lot of us when he killed himself last year. I had, have a deep, unending childlike, idollike love for him. He writes, he wrote me notes like my mother wrote me affirmations in a lunchbox - “I love you like one of my own,” “you are magic, a treasure to behold” He forces, forced, my hand at seeing past my own self loathing, something he can, could, never do for himself.
He looks at me and I can see how attractive he was as a young man. Age and depression and distilled spirits have ravaged him, leaving a wild mane of grey hair, a chipped front tooth and a set of piercing blue eyes. You can see youth in his freckles and he finally had his tooth fixed before he killed himself. When he looks at me, he says nothing and hums excerpts of songs he would have loved to have written himself. He was writing his great American novel, and then he killed himself.
He was kind to my former husband, but chronically, benevolently angry at me for settling and like some psychic paid by the hour he reminds, reminded me often that it would be hard to find someone who could keep up, so maybe I made the right decision. He tells, told me often that I would always have to do the work, to make the money, to show up. That I should always diversify and am I maxing out my 401k? He goes from Mummenschanz to financial planning in a single sentence. He has, had a weird way of pronouncing sandwich and asks, asked me often “why can’t you see the you in you” and was kind and terrifying and magical in every breath he took.
And again, I find myself unable to shake Bernstein. I’m finally seeing the me in me.
“Somehow, Someday, Somewhere.”
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If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or has had thoughts of harming themselves or taking their own life, get help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) provides 24/7, free, confidential support for people in distress, as well as best practices for professionals and resources to aid in prevention and crisis situations.
