Buffalo Bill

A narration

Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
               who used to
               ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                                  stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                                                     Jesus

he was a handsome man 
                                                  and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death

E.E. Cummings

A lot of my writing is related to a specific incident that sparked a series of events for my development even though it took a very long time to get to the other side of it. This story is for some context and though it’s not all of it, it provides a fair enough context of what I’m willing to share.

When I was a teenager, I struggled a lot with depression and drug use and dangerous boys and other unstable mechanisms. I had a few constants in my life - boy scouts (they’re co-ed in Greece) and my childhood friends on the island.

I’d known The Boy his whole life. Two years and two days apart, I spent family occasions and random holidays and birthdays with him and his family. Though age-wise I was closer to his older brother, The Boy and I had a weird connection. 

By the time I was 8 and he was 6, we started spending every summer together. I slept over a lot. They always had friends over for the summer. We used to play a game called “inside out” where we would split into two teams and the one team stayed in and fortified the house and the other team had to find a way to break in from the outside. Oh the days of no internet.

I was 11 and he was 9 and we used to dance together at his father’s parties. One of those times he kissed me and I was freaked out because we were children, no? WTF

I was a hormonal pre-teen and he drove me up the wall with his antics and his brother was always there to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess. One time I swam out beyond the gulf we were at because he pissed me off so much and his brother came to me with two sets of flippers to rescue me.

The Boy also saved me after we went exploring and I got stung by a weird sea plant and he swam as fast as his little 10 year old body could to get me to safety from the floatie to the beach. 

I was 18 and he was 16 the first time we had sex. It was awkward and weird and I got a yeast infection after. We were at a party with his friends. I was in a horrible relationship (the first of many) but there were no phones still and there was no way he could figure out where I was and I felt free for the first time in a long while. His bestie got so fucked up he was puking on a corner. We watched an elder teen ride his KTM up and down Anastaseos street, the Resurrection street, which is the name of the road that leads down from the cemetery. The road is named Anapafseos / Resting Road for the cemetery, but changes to Resurrection a little later. I had chills that night, foreseeing a horrible accident and death at that spot but I thought it was going to be the boy on the bike from that night, at a later date. 

Somewhere in there his brother crashed his father’s bike and almost lost a foot. But it was at the resurrection part of the road and it was only almost a foot so it worked out in the end. He got the best doctors and skin grafts and when I went to the hospital I found all their friends there and got in a fight with my boyfriend because he was jealous (eye roll). 

The Boy’s girlfriend hated me. I don’t know what she knew, there was nothing really happening at the time. She was maybe right to hate me later.

We used to say we will be together when he was 23 and I 25 or 24 and 26, we weren’t sure. I think we knew it was going to be the deal and we were biding our time doing other things. Both aquarians, equal to our sluttiness, we did not care about anyone the other was seeing. We also hooked up throughout multiple relationships we had because “it didn’t count” the way our connection counted. 

I was 21 and he was 19 when we spent two months living on the boat. It was one of the best summers of my life, not because I was the happiest but because now when I look back I can feel the sun in my bones in a way I haven’t since. He moved to Edinburgh and I stayed in Athens, I went with him to the airport, I used to drink and fall asleep on random benches, he would always find me and make sure I’m ok and had chicken nuggets to help with the drinking. We used to dance so much. And so well. We made plans to road trip across the US and to sail across the Atlantic. I told him he should be a boat designer and he hesitated, trying to appease his dad who wanted him to be an engineer. 

I was 22 and he was 20 when I last cut myself. He was away at school, I was depressed and numb, it was Friday the 13th in a cold January when I accidentally locked myself in the house and panicked because I cut too forcefully and the blood dripped on the floor and I had to use the nice white linen napkins to clean it. His friends came to get me and my friends too and I moved in with Penny for a spell. I spoke to him on MSN messenger constantly. They told him what happened. He was there for me too. I used to call him when I was PMSing and ask “Will you still love me when I’m fat and ugly?” and he would say “Yes babe and I’ll also fuck you”. 

I was certain we would dance at our wedding. 

There was maybe a time when the brother would have been the better person for me, but that possibility died the day The Boy did.

I was 22 and he was 20 when I spoke to him on the phone and the last thing he said to me was “I love you” before he hung up.

I never heard his voice again. 

He crashed the car I spent all my summers in with 3 of our friends on the end of Anapafseos / Resting Road, right before it turns into Anastaseos / Resurrection road. They all died on the spot. He lasted another week in the hospital in an induced coma, just to give us time to grieve the rest and attend the funerals and wrap our heads around this new reality, a world without them all. 

A world without him.

We made picture videos and I wished I had the camera with which I had taken all those pictures. Thank god for Facebook, there were some on there still. We sang songs and his friends carried his coffin and his dog was grieving - I have never seen that before and I will never forget it. 

By the time the funeral came around we were all used to it by now. It had been one week, three funerals, two cousins, one last freshly dug grave to lower someone into. None of us were crying as much. 

I stood over his casket at the church and sang the only song I could sing well enough, the one he used to ask me to sing to him that summer on the boat, when we had a future that included us both, no matter what the romantic setup would end up being.

And because I couldn’t find the words, but ever a poet, I used W.H. Auden’s:

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

When we got to the burial part, I stood at the edge of the grave and it was slightly damp and I almost fell in. I got hit with a bout of nervous laughter. His cousin grabbed me before I could make my accidentally dramatic gesture of following The Boy to the afterlife and we stood there snickering like idiots on the edge of the grave. 

I didn’t know where my place was. I wasn’t the girlfriend. I wasn’t family. I was nothing. I felt like nothing. I felt like I had no claim to my grief. I felt like my pain wasn’t as worth it as other people’s, who were more important, like his parents. 

So I disappeared. 

Into the toxic work life I had set up for myself, into a twin flame relationship that took almost every part of me leaving nothing else, burning it all to the ground until I was a shell of the person I used to be. 

But there was a faint gleam of the person I was to become. 

With zero tools, a whole lot of unprocessed grief, with very little money but with a family member in San Francisco and a series of synchronicities I ran away from the pain to find a life worth living.