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when you think of heaven you think of Gatsby's house.
and you think of heaven too often nowadays, sitting in your flat with a bottle of wine, wondering how much you might have to drink in order to poison the too-red blood flowing through your veins, wondering if the angels would let you pass through those pearly gates if you do– not that you've ever really believed in heaven, but sometimes you have to hope. you would probably like very much to die, but you are too much a coward to set the knife to your skin, to pull the trigger. you've thought about it but every time, the image replays in your mind– circles of red in the pool water.
needless to say, you probably couldn't do it even if you tried.
but when you dream of heaven you dream in jazz. bright lights and magic in the air– laughter, light on the summer air. the partygoers like moths drawn to his undying light, their dreams humming in the air like fireflies. sparkle. glitter. and you would hide from all that– you would walk down to the docks and sit and watch the green light and wait for him to join you, listening for a casual, "Good evening, old sport" over the strains of the lively music from the house. you would look out at the green light and he would think of her and you would think of him.
and in your heaven you lean into his shoulder and he puts an arm around you and lets you stay there, presses his lips to the top of your head gently, but you cut off the vision there because some things hurt too much even to hope for in heaven.
you miss him so much you think your heart could burst.
and you wonder if you even really knew him at all and eventually you realize you don't care. you loved the man you knew; you knew somebody, whether it was really him or not. and you loved him, really loved him– not the one-night hushed heat of your usual liaisons, but a real love, the kind that made your heart beat faster just to think his name, the kind that leaves a scar. you do not have a lot of scars, but this one runs deep.
you dream in green now. bright, living green. when the nightmares come– and they do, more often than you want to say– they turn the green to dark, sticky blood-red laced with sinister gold. you thrash and call out without waking and after a while the man who lives next to you bangs on your door, shouting to keep it down, he is trying to sleep. you jolt out of your fever and you hate him a little bit but you hate yourself more.
you find it very easy to imagine heaven, because this must be hell.
you left the East to sew yourself back together, to patch up all your tearing seams and return your heart firmly to the cavity in your chest where you know it belongs, but when you arrived you found you couldn't find a needle and thread, and you realized too late that there was nothing to return to the gaping hole in your chest because you gave it away without so much as a second glance and now it's buried in the ground with the man you gave it to and you're damned if you have any chance of getting it back. you tell yourself it doesn't matter; you were tired of listening to it beating out a pattern in six-eight time on your ribcage anyway. you didn't need it in the first place.
you told Jordan you were too old for it, but you are very good at lying to yourself.
you never introduce yourself to your new neighbors because look how that turned out last time you tried. you keep to yourself; you take your meals at home and you don't socialize and you don't speak for days on end sometimes so when a sound finally emerges from your vocal cords to greet the shop clerk or thank a passerby for some kind gesture, it shocks you back into silence. your parents call and you never pick up the phone. you get letters and you do not open them. you do not speak to your colleagues at work, you communicate through nods and shrugs and not much else. the world is too loud for you now– a dissonant cacophony of lives intersecting with each other, clashing chords that you can't bear to hear.
you long for a harmony only imagined in the first place and you hate yourself for it.
there should have been a requiem. there should have been a crowd at his funeral– there should have been somber men in black suits and tearful women in dark silk dresses and elaborate veiled hats and some lone soprano should have quavered a Latin refrain and angels should have come down and lifted up his soul and carried it to paradise but instead you stood with his father and the owl-eyed man in the grey drizzle and you hated them all.
in paradisum, deducant te Angeli in tuo adventu–
you learned the chant once, in a choir at school, but you could not call it back to your mind now. you wonder if Gatsby is in heaven. you wonder if he deserves it. he wasn't any different, you never approved– you keep repeating these things to yourself and you do not believe them. you imagine Gatsby, winged, that smile amplified a hundred times, a thousand. you imagine Gatsby singing, calling you up to join him, but then red tinges the pure white and you blink the vision away because it makes you sick to think about it. you drink more wine to wash the nausea away. you drink more wine to wash the demons away. you drink a lot more wine nowadays.
you do not know who you should be forgiving, him or yourself.