Dear Jesse Lacey, My Perennial Twin in Self Loathing

When you told me you were a bad person, I thought you meant it the way I was.

You were bitter and brash and emotional, but not in the way other boys were. You didn’t hate girls because they were sluts, you hated her. You hated her because she hurt you, and you hated your friend because he helped. You didn’t sing through your nose to make yourself sound tight and young. You screamed your throat raw and tuned your guitars to match, chunky and textured. I thought they were the reason my dollar store headphones kept breaking on the back of the bus on the way to school. I started amassing a stockpile of them, weapons to get through the day, the week, the month.

You’re the one who put words to the ache in my chest, the stinging on my wrists and thighs. I learned the depths of sadness that already existed inside of me. You didn’t make it worse like Mami said. You explained it patiently. You made me dream and draw and think I could create like you. If sadness made words like yours, maybe it wasn’t all bad.

When a hurricane forced too many people into my house and there was nowhere to hear myself think, you shuttered them out. You gave me a vast, open ocean of noise and sound to float on. You helped me grow into myself and put words to the mush in my brain. And if you made me a little too sad because the words were too right and too sharp and too much, you always apologized. After all, you told me you’ve got a positive message but sometimes you can’t get it out.

You.

You made me realize what happened. You told me about a girl that wanted too much too fast from you, who guided you to a room upstairs and made you feel sick to your stomach. She took and took and took until it was over and you were a man now and had never felt smaller.

And it reminded me of a hand on my back and on my chest and on my neck. Of the room upstairs far away from all of the other bedrooms that didn’t have anything in it. Of our parents downstairs while we played house. And how he told me there was something we had to do to play house the right way. He wasn’t that much older than me. I don’t know if someone else taught him. He didn’t know everything yet. I pray in thanks every day that he didn’t. I pray like you used to when you were young and still believed.

And then the women started telling me their stories. About you and them. The things you’d say to them. The things you’d ask from them. They weren’t women back then. They were barely girls.

They were fifteen.

They were fifteen.

They were little and starry-eyed and enamored like I was and you took and took and took until you were done and then. I guess that made you a man. A man on your own terms the way you wanted to be. Self-assured and big like your father. I thought you were terrified of becoming your father. I thought we had that in common. And I don’t know what to do now that the rest of you has been pulled out of the shadows. I don’t know what to think or feel.

How could I have found comfort in the voice of a man who would have hurt me just like everyone else if he had had the chance?

I want to say bile rises up in my throat at the thought of your voice. I want to say I screamed and ranted and raved and deleted every scrap of your work and burned your records and forgot your face and your name. But the thing is

I can’t.

I can’t sever myself from you. You’ve grown into me like ivy, like the fungi that sprout from decaying bodies and build themselves into the bases of new trees. You cling to my hair like the smell of smoke from the matches I lit to cauterize you out from my soul that the rainwater doused.

I hear your music in my dreams. That doesn’t happen for anyone else but you. The chords you used to strum have become indelible, stamped into the wrinkles of my brain. I hum them to myself when it rains and it’s dark. You’re still the only person who has perfectly explained what it’s like to be afraid of death despite wanting to die every waking moment. I hate you for how you’ve ruined me for other men.

I don’t know what to do besides pretend your greatest wish came true and you’ve died. You’ve died and finally discovered what awaits you now and you’ve left me behind to grapple with the mess you’ve made of me.

Above all else, I know it’s not about me. For as hurt as I am, for as much as there’s a spot on the left side of my ribcage that smarts at your voice, there are women who have to live with what you did. Live with the phantom of your hands and the ghoulish remnants of your words. But I can’t help asking myself, when things get bad, really bad, and you help me reach the full capacity of my lungs again:

If you’re so horrible and I love what comes out of you…does that make me like you? Have we become so alike?