Mark,
What can I say? It's not that I haven't thought of you, and often. But I didn't have the tools or the time to track you down. Funny, since all it took was google. From what I've read of your projects on the internet, you've completely redefined yourself....or maybe I never knew the real you, if there is such a thing for anyone. With your good looks and your athlete's confident charm, you must present quite a paradox to the activist community. Did you know I became fairly immersed in campus activism after I got back from Ireland?
You'll forgive me for making assumptions, but college seems to have been an especially tumultuous time for both of us, each trying to make all the bits and pieces of our fractured lives make sense, trying to integrate them into a single, coherant narrative, engaged in our own way in that fabled search for the "integrated self." Though Tim's impact on our lives ultimately had different results, I think you'll agree his magic was that he showed us, perhaps unknowingly, that there is another possibility for the self, what might be called the “inconsistent self.”
Before your eyes start to glaze over and I lose you, just try to understand that this is simply my agonized attempt to understand what happened to us, to me, to Tim. Beginning in Ireland, I think we three underwent a paradigm shift, a shift that would eventually be called, at least in Tim's case, “sick,” delusional, and even dangerous. What made this shift possible? It was the validation we offered each other, helping each other see that we shouldn't be anxious, depressed, or disgusted when we found a multitude of interests and potential selves.
If Tim had lived, I think he would have been a broad thinker and doer, but would his ideas and his life have impacted us with the same magnitude? If he had lived, there would be somebody who had witnessed a beginning, who implicitly understood me at a time I didn't understand anything, let alone myself. So what’s tragic is that Tim knew what I believe now to be my idealized, albeit germinal self, and that self is lost forever. What's even more tragic, I'm realizing now, is that I've never been able to wrap my head around your struggle, and we've lost the time together that might have produced some powerful moments. Why didn't we combine our strengths then, or even go to each other for comfort, to grieve? But that's water under the bridge, impossible to recapture now... and here you are, under your own power, you've done it. You've cast aside fear and taken a bold step into nothingness, with only an ideal, and hope, and maybe a little faith in the goodness of man. What surprises me is that I'm not skeptical at all.
It doesn't matter to me how much money you raise for your charities, or how many people you draw to a screening of your DVD (which I just ordered), it doesn't even matter to me why you're doing what you're doing. What I'm saying is I'm proud of you...not just for what you're doing, but HOW you're doing it, with such clarity and vision and purposeful drive. Of course, given what I know of you now, it almost pains me to have to tell you that I'm in the military, but if you've been in contact with anyone from the group you already know what I've been doing. Why the miltary, which is so fundamentally wrong for me? Again, I suppose it doesn't really matter why. I've now become jaded and I have to give it one more year...what really matter's is what I do after.
So please don't disappear again. Don't get shot again. And for god sake don't go to Baghdad. Or is that me succumbing to fear? As you must surely know by now, there's fear, and then there's healthy awareness of our own fragility....basically, I hope you'll be wise enough to watch your ass. If you're wondering, I'm stationed in England now, an easy hop over to Ireland. I was just there in Dublin for the new year, looked for Tim's tree at Glencree one afternoon, but couldn't find it....Aeveen was also out of town. If you're on this side of the Atlantic again, let me know and I'll do what I can to meet up with you. And you know you have a place to stay, whether I'm home or not. Be well, be strong.
-Kris
Kris,
In some place, I’ve been waiting for your words for a long time. I well know the need to make sense of what happened to us in Ireland. Tim’s death, and the time I spent with his family in Woodstock, accelerated me. I never felt anger about his suicide, though I grieved for so long. In many ways, I am still grieving. I wonder if he hadn’t killed himself, and brought me into his family, if I might have succumbed to a similar fate.
Tim, uncontainable and dangerous, flooded my senses, an opiate quickening, blinding me with rage I’d never known. We prowled Dublin, drunk with possibility and risk, searching for someone to fight. We found only ourselves. We exchanged fists and bruises for hours, dancing in the cold rain, slamming our knuckles into each other, laughing out as we shattered.
When I returned home, I fell forward into myself. I am lucky to have survived those next few years. I battled anyone who would oblidge me. I never won, I never wanted to. I wanted the fury of strangers to knock through my walls, crack my grinning mouth, crush me, burn me to ashes and leave behind only the essence. I sobbed heavy, private tears as I waded into the icy waters of the surging creek, searching for Tim amidst a current that should surely have swept me away. I destroyed what was around me, reflections of a self I wanted to transcend. There was no peace in it.
I nearly dropped out of school. I forced myself through an innocuous and false world I no longer believed in. I lived for Tim with the solitary hope of making him proud. I carried his great weight upon me. When I finally collapsed in exhaustion and loneliness, it was his quiet chuckle and calm reassurance I heard through the dull and enduring clamour of our memories.
I had sought alchemy but found a cell of madness and self-doubt. The fear I believed abandoned in Derry was in fact now bearing sharply through the raw, vulnerable skin of a trembling body. It was this fear alone, when everything else had crumbled and fallen, which remained to embrace. It was this that brought me to Palestine.
For three hours in the West Bank I was invincible. I stood beneath a 30-caliber machine gun, firing over my head with ferocious and gross neglect. I walked shoulder to shoulder with the strongest people I have ever known, a mere child in their presence, cast not into the shadows of their unfaltering steps, but bolstered as a pillar amongst them.
In this place, fear rips through from the center, flies outward and away without pausing to reconcile, leaves you breathless and faint. It pits the greatest of self against the least, and in the end, reveals itself an illusion. I watched a soldier take aim, and I watched as he pulled his trigger. I watched as bullets seared through a two-year-old child and his three-year-old sister. I watched as the blood poured from their eyes, their ears and their noses. I watched as my invincible self walked briskly away from me, turned back for a final, yawning look into my wide eyes, wink and fade to the other side, Tim’s side.
I rose from ashes at that moment, destroyed and renewed. Indeed, I have not arrived, merely ventured, and my steps are sure. With each moment, the world’s definitions of me slip from my heart and the possibilities of who I will be rise in their place. I am a better man than I was, but only a fragment of what I will become. What I have learned from Tim is that time is not short, the body not delicate. It is our sight that is short, our hearts that are delicate. The three of us will again meet on this path he gifted us, of that I am certain, and I will follow it with great appreciation, to Glencree.
Your friend,
Mark
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