Letters for Paul Owens-Troupe

A stalker is an admirer is a lover scorned. An equal is a learner is a teacher is a friend. A diamond is forever. This is the one. 

He grabbed a hold of me, the first moment we met. Right from behind and close enough for me to warn You'd better be gay or I'm going to get you fired. 

I was never his hag, though he had several very close ones who I imagine are hurting right now. We were fags together. Me in the closet of my own failed sapphism. He in the flames of his unabashed queerness.  

What I only ever wanted was a close friend, and for the past 2 decades he was often my best one. It's not lost on me that in that time only my surrogate dad shared that title. I don't play favorites, not with people and not with anything else. I surround myself with bisexual women, fruit flies and lesbians... I tend to keep gay men in the periphery ( we don't usually like women in the same way) and there's often the token straight femme (not fruit fly) and always the male partner... not out of preference. Out of habit, circumstance, maybe pathology. 

For those two though, the rules changed. When they were in my life, they were my orbit. Everything else was the landscape. 

After a a deep dive of astrological entanglement (we were born 24 hours apart) I pushed him away. But I never let him go. 

He stalked me for months after the first time. He knew were I was in the city at every hour and let me know it. I finally texted. Paul, I love you so. I can't be friends with you.After that I didn't hear from him for several years.

I wanted nothing to do with his meth use or addiction. I couldn't keep up with the person he became on it. He was, is, one of the only people in my life who I struggle to keep up with.

I had my own addiction to deal with, a rotating fixation on my lover relationships.

It was a tenuous friendship, full of ego and competitiveness. Full of misunderstanding and frustration. We didn't desire to be lovers, and our intimacy was not sexual. We were very different people. Different backgrounds and perceptions about life and the universe. But we both cared, more than most, about each other and the world around us. 

Years after the first chapter of our friendship, he emailed. Told me that after we'd broken up he'd gotten fat and sick and almost died in the hospital with meningitis. That he had AIDS, but now he could say it was only HIV. That he was graduating as a Valedictorian.

I accepted his invitation but didn't let on that I was there.

I sat in the auditorium alone in the back seat, holding fast my guilt and regret. His speech served up a humble pie. And for him this was the beginning of a marathon that he kept running until his accident.
 

Anyway we were back together until we weren't, until we were... 

We laughed, we loved, we fought. We made art happen. Rode bikes naked. Swam greenbelts naked. Got kicked off stages (not completely naked). Took copious amount of mushrooms and bickered while still 100% engaged. It was a strange coupling, but something drew us together.

He was the light and I was the shadow and I was, usually, happy with that arrangement. Unless I wasn't, and sometimes (often) it was like that too. 

I settled into family life and watched him take flight. My child was born on his birthday. He was his fairy godfather, until we fought for the last time. I couldn't get past his unexamined bigotry and misogyny. He couldn't get past the stories he'd written about me. I guess I must say the same. But fuck all the amount of photos between the two of us that we erased. 

Too high, too high but I ain't touched the sky... So sings Stevie Wonder and Paul too was so high I couldn't see him anymore. 

He wasn't my kite, there was no need to hold on. No strings attached, ever between us. Wings and a lifetime of ambition that sometimes crowded the room between us. His wings, his ambition. We were a million miles away, or at least several thousand. He could spread them now. I smiled when they blocked the sun from my eyes and otherwise kept him and his life tucked behind my thoughts.

I thought he'd never give up trying to touch the moon, and I wanted him to hurry up and do it so he could land. I wanted him close to me, but his brilliance always left me burnt. 

In my mind he was the perfect human, if only this and that and... 

My inner critic has always been loudest for the people closest to me. And in him, my lifelong commitment to healing my perfectionism flaw always came to a halt. His own dwarfed mine. Our dynamic found my absurd desire for flawlessness further perversed.  

When he got in a debilitating accident on his scooter, I blamed him for his miseries. I was angry at him for being reckless, as he often was. His fucking scooter caught fire and exploded while he was riding. This was random, wasn't it? A part of me (not) figuring out how his electric nature sparked this. Because there's a school marm in me that I haven't made peace with yet. Because when the wave ebbs, I reach for blame.

She's idiotic of course. This part of me... a nasty remnant of being spoon fed garbage about karma, and reaping what one sows. A stubborn grip from many years of contemplating cause and effect.

As if life has any inherent meaning besides that which we assign it. As if we aren't here to sense the world and find our way through. As if spacetime is as temporal and linear as we perceive it. Silly parts of me, quantum is the wizard behind this oz. 

Paul never did share my problem. He was a beam and a vibration. He knew it. 

Meanwhile, I struggle to embody the reality of how the universe mathematically self-operates.  The web has no weaver. But being a weaver myself, I sometimes mistake my own reflections for the world around me. It's not because I'm waxing elegant about a holographic universe, but because what I'm projecting is still, after so many decades of meditation, too self-centered.

When he first told me he wanted to die, I sent him a bang gun. I couldn't believe it. He shared a video of him shooting himself when he received it. He was laughing, he seemed a little down, out of shape OK fine that made two of us... but normal. I never doubted he'd bounce up again.

He relayed to me his living hell. Bed sores, constant dizziness, psych wards and further brain injuries from said psych wards. I fucking didn't believe him. As if I too wouldn't want to die. 

He wanted Fentanyl and twice suggested I send it. I lost my favorite niece from a Fentanyl overdose, I wasn't going to entertain his plea.

After he told me he stopped taking his HIV meds, I didn't believe him.

After 21 months of not taking his HIV meds, nope still doubted. 

I just could not believe that this person who'd surpassed so much was free falling, with the wax on his wings that once fastened them completely melted off and disabling his flight. 

The last text he sent me was last year. He told me the goings on of his every day life. That he still wanted to die, that he was confused now. After that all I got was hearts for every other text I sent. I didn't take his suicide attempt to heart.  Even if I had, what was I supposed to do?

I compartmentalized it. I went about my every day, always knowing that Paul was dying. That he was killing himself the long way. His existence was already so fucking miserable, what did it matter? I tucked this pain, this reality, this impossibility behind my mind's eye. Behind my perception, somewhere else where I needn't run into it. 

The birds are chirping. Paul is dying in the city. My autistic child is punching me in the arm for the 3rd time today. Paul is dying. I'm walking under porticoes older than the oldest city in the US by half a millennia. Paul. I wish you were stalking me now.

Sometimes I reminded myself of my biases against him so that I wouldn't feel bad about it. Paul love hates me. Paul only cares about himself in the end. Paul hates women. He hates brown people. He's a bigot. Paul is vain and fixated on his physical form. Paul is mean.

As if telling myself these stories about him made me care any less.

Death doesn't tuck neatly in drawers and corners and distraction. It has a way of peeking around the corner. Hi Boo, wash your pussy. Paul was an irresistible kind of gross. 

It has a way of knocking on your door at 3am to startle you. Drea, I'm dead and look I'm here it's time to go running BISH. And he managed to wake up my husband that night, but not me. He was already dead but I've been asleep to his dying until this week.

He was letting himself die on purpose while I was trying hard to kill him inside of me on purpose. 

How long do you think it takes to run from NYC to Bologna when you're dead? Do you think he knows he's dead yet? Has he entered the Bardo of Becoming yet? Is he in the Bardo of Dharmata? My husband is my husband because he never tells me I'm crazy, most especially when I sound my craziest. He meets my crazy where it's at with his own. Of course he knows he's dead, he knew right away. Don't you think so? 

But, me believing the Buddhists have this part figured out, I don't think so, no not one bit.  

Paul used to bang on my door like a cop when it was time to run in the morning. He at least once broke into my apartment through my bedroom window to get me going.

The last text I sent him was a magazine cover photo of Flea. I saw it the day we found out our friend's son had also committed suicide. When I first saw it, it was Paul's face I saw staring at me behind the display glass. I don't even know if he ever read it. There was no heart. He had been in the Bardo of Dying for too long to be close enough to me in that moment. 

The next day his body succumbed to his own suicide, begun 2 years before.

I'd only find out last week, three months later. I looked up at a satellite stalled in the night sky and then thought of him the whole half hour walk home. This time I stalked you Paul, online, and I found you dead on the internet. 

His death was a collective effort. The accident he had in 2022 killed him. Despair killed him. Isolation killed him. NYC killed him. Flying too close to the sun killed him. AIDS killed him. His hedonism killed him.

All these things gave him life too. He thrived on surpassing setbacks. His despair propelled his charisma. His solitude honed an ability to collect friends like Pokémon. NYC was a dream that kept him waking up early every day. Flying too close to the sun filled his spirit. All this burned inside and shined through him as a blinding light. A blinding light that culminated in an exploding scooter. But now I'm cycling back to some kind of meaning making again...

How can anybody be mad about this? Is there any blame to be had at all? I doubt it, though the armored and shadow parts of my perceived self is waving the ruler, ready to strike wrists. She's a lot of things but smart. And she's nothing if not grieving. 

Nothing will kill him now. He lives forever, in the hearts of all who loved him. He wanted Fame. That was too bad. He knew his destiny was greatness, not ever embodying the wisdom that he had already arrived there in the hearts of all who knew him. Nobody who met him can forget him, whether because they couldn't stand him, found him absurd, or magical. He was not the kind of person who elicited milquetoast reactions.

He is here with me, dancing in the hypertension of my cricopharyngeus muscle... the proof of my love is him clasping my throat, using my esophageal sphincter as a beam clamp for his ethereal silks. He is twirling, bouncing around the vortical expansion-contraction cycle of my thoracic cavity.

Where he ends pounds my heart. Where he begins is my next breath. He is everywhere now. Everyone who I've ever loved that died. Everyone who has ever lived and died. This is how we unfold, and now he is a part of that too. 

I've lost him, I've lost him, I've lost him. But despite how much I love that New Order song, it can't be true. My surrogate dad told me I know we never die. And I know that too, somehow. There he was, a satellite stalled in the night sky. Actually there were two. Paul and my surrogate dad passing into orbit and waving. 

We've lost him. We've gained him. He will never let life go. 

He is the kind of she that creates cavities, because he is the femme fatale with a cock. So he stays, rotting your roots out, always with the sweet memory of his glee.

A kind of freedom that captivates.

The ocean a fish never realizes it must swim in.

A tattoo you didn't realize you had. 

An eternal boo in the dark.  

We both smoked plenty of cannabis, together and alone. And I wasn't the only one, and pot wasn't the only one either. But that's a past-time I'm glad about, drugs and all. 

He was the only POT, as he called himself, anybody ever needed. Or so my endocannabinoid system remembers him. 

Bye, Pauly. But, as you'd have it because you know as well as I do that there's nothing dead about you, Hieee.