Letter 23

April 30, 2017

Dear Jesse,

I walked four miles by myself yesterday.

Somewhere along mile two vivid images started flooding my mind of the moments just before, during and after when I found out you were dead.

I started seeing everything again.

The colors of the sunlight as it peered through the windows that morning. The subtle amount of dust that lined the window pain I banged with my hand over and over again fucking screaming. These moments started to become alive again in micro form as I relived my experiences walking on a sidewalk yesterday.

I didn't fight it.

I let my memory present everything again with each step I took. With every car that passed me I wondered if the experiences I was carrying were able to be seen by those driving by. Was it visible through the way my shoulders hung or by the way my head looked down instead of ahead? I felt extremely vulnerable navigating this internally while passing people.

You had two tattoos in your life.

The last one you had done just two years before you would die. It was a drawing you had created which signified the feelings inside yourself regarding events in our childhood which you never could quite articulate. But it was the first one you got at 18,  a black panther cat on your right shoulder cap, that was the one people who knew you remembered the most.

Something was happening inside of me as I walked those miles alone yesterday. Not only was my inner world replaying the moment I lost you but I was also remembering your black panther cat tattoo. I saw visual symbols of my pain, my terror, my incredible loss.

I saw your suicide, your drug addiction, your choice to die.  

I saw your tattoo.

I saw the black panther.

It pounced out of the shadows and into my life the morning of February 9, 2014. It gripped me by my throat with its mouth almost suffocating out every scream of mine. It tackled me to the floor as I lay holding my stomach screaming for you and it drug me away deep into a jungle.  Deep into a place I never had known before.

Your death had cracked open a part of myself I never touched.

The experience of losing you was more powerful then the ability one has to remain in control of themselves. I looked directly into the eyes of my terror and it enveloped me. I looked deep into the eyes of my worst fear and collapsed into it.

Every part of me.

In time, my lifeless body slowly started to move. Some days the rain in the jungle was so heavy that I couldn't move at all, while other days I would move an inch more then the day before. During all of this there was one constant in the jungle with me; the panther.

It watched me from the branches above.

It studied me, my movements and in return I studied the way it looked at me. The way it elongated it's body on the tree limb while unflinchingly gazing at my every movement. The way I could get lost with fear in the darkness of its' coat while yellow eyes pierced my heart with reality.

 There were moments in the jungle I felt as though I was bobbing around the vast and dark ocean while waves knocked me around. I was panicking, losing the strength to stay afloat and breath. I didn't want to die like this. I didn't want this to be the end.

Then something happened .

The panther slowly came down off the tree limb. No longer watching from above it now watched me from the ground. In time I sat up and started to exist closer to where it layed.  Something different was happening between us, the panther and I. Its' presence no longer was evoking intense terror but rather a state of coexistence with one another. I started looking at it from different angles as I became stronger and climbed the trees it once layed on. I started seeing the things it taught me about itself and the jungle it existed in. A place very few humans spend their time awake.

While the panthers' yellow eyes watched me, I leaned into its' gaze and heard wisdom from the thing that once filled me with terror.

"You will not stay here in the jungle forever unless you choose. It is up to you to accept the lessons you have learned here with me because if not, you won't find your way out. You must see the gift that has been given to you."