LIVING PROOF - ANDREA GIBSON LYRICS
I have a few happy friends.
I ask them about being happy
the same way my high school friends
ask me about being gay, So, what
do you people do exactly? How do you do IT?
Their answers are never as freaky
as I would hope. Almost always they answer god
or booze. One I don’t tolerate.
The other, I’m told,
doesn’t tolerate me.
I’m fascinated with this idea
of getting high on life. I imagine people
on their backs in lilac fields snorting the lines
the planes leave in the sky, waking
with honeymoons in their bloodstreams.
Me, I often feel like I’m the vaccine
for goosebumps. I can’t remember the last time
someone commented on my sunny disposition.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to juice
the sun for every holy drop.
No one stands by passively
while their joy gets lost in the dark.
I know it is its own injury,
spending too much of your life
just holding yourself together––
I’ve known that since the first time
I tried to die: I was too ashamed to go back
and get the stitches out on time so they scarred
as badly as the wound. It’s the one part of me
I never stop thinking ugly––twenty tiny holes
framing a would-be flatline I still can’t look at
without seeing the light going out
in the tunnels of my friend’s eyes while they watched
the doctor’s needle close the one letter
I swore to never send.
The last, and I mean the last time,
I tried to return myself to sender
was a year ago this June.
After five months so sick I was certain
my stomach would never know a butterfly again,
I got so low I had to look up
to see rock bottom, and, ghosted by hope,
I got in my car and started driving toward
a dead end, a cliff that had been my backup plan
if ever the pain got stronger than I am.
Now I gotta let you know - this is a true story.
On my way to the end that day, I was already mostly gone,
clumps of my own hair covering the dashboard
from me failing to weed the hell from my mind.
I was sobbing and snaking around my own neck,
when i looked up from the steering wheel
and saw a stranger above me on the overpass-
holding on to the wrong side of the rail with one hand,
his arm was taut as a kite string about to lift his body
into the air and fly
into four rows of traffic.
This stranger and I had the same idea,
but as soon as I saw him, my eyes locked on him
like two screeching red lights that couldn’t stop begging,
STOP STOP STOP STOP
I was the last car to pass before the fire trucks
and ambulances raced to clot the vein of traffic,
to tourniquet the road, so when the man jumped
his death, his body wouldn’t graveyard
the windshield of someone driving home
with their baby in the backseat. I watched
rescue workers run to try to talk him off the ledge
while I shot out of my car behind the overpass
and started circling in the madness of being a twister
praying for someone' else’s sun to not go down,
pacing in the mind mangle of being someone
on my way to die stopping to tell someone else not to.
I might never know if he saw me, but I was haunting
the ground, punching my hands into the tornado
of my grief to grab each piece of my own lost mind
so i could get my footing long enough
to clearly ask the air beneath this man
to catch him like a snowflake on the tongue.
A tongue that might also whisper, Sweet sweet soul,
heaven is in the other direction.
Please don’t make gravity play god.
I’ve heard there are fields - acres of lilacs like petalled purple hearts
blooming only to pull us through and all you have to do is holler
your name into a canyon and hear
someone else’s name echo back.
Never in my life did I want more
to keep my blood blue, did I want more to live
than when I looked up and saw myself in someone else
trying to become the sky. I didn’t even know him,
but I know it would have killed me to watch him die.
So at 12:31PM, when he decided not to -
when he came down, when the road opened -
I did, too, my whole world, my whole mind
went home with living proof
of what I’d only before known in theory:
that we are truly not alone in this,
that our veins are absolutely strings
tied to other people’s kites,
that our lives are that connected.
That my butterflies are never gone,
they’re just flying around
in someone else’s belly sometimes.
I pray right now they’re with that stranger,
I pray he’s goosebumped
with a mountain range of joy.
I pray he’s high on the long line rivered across the country
of his open palm held out the window
while driving and singing along
to a stranger’s favorite song he suddenly knows
all the words to but doesn’t know why.
- andrea gibson