this is a funeral procession: chapter one

"i know my coat is ugly," he told me when we first met, "that's why i wear it."

bill and i were sitting next to each other, an awkward coffee shop arrangement where you are sitting too close to the stranger next to you. we sat in armchairs and shared a tall table, a boring lamp. "oh!" i stuttered, caught off guard at being spoken to. "no no, oh, no, it was just reminding me of something. another coat. my grandmother's coat."

bill looked at me, eyebrows raised, not angry or patronizing. just honest. "that's bullshit," he told me.

this is how bill and i met. we're not best friends but we might as well be, considering most days he's the only other human being i can handle. "that's really sad," he responded when i told him, "but i feel like that sometimes, too."

i knew bill for weeks - meeting once then soon twice then soon three or four times a week to drink coffee and talk shit - before we got drunk together. he called me one night to meet him in a park, greeting me with two fifths of whiskey cloaked in paper bags.

despite the fact that he wasn't wearing a ring and had never mentioned anyone, i wasn't surprised when bill told me he was married, because i had always known that he, like me, was the kind of person with things hidden. bill was sobbing when he told me. he and jackson wanted to love each other like everyone else could, he explained. they were married in the three month span where it was legal for them. but they were never really marriage people, and they were never really in love. they shared an apartment, a bed although it was awkward, cooked dinner sometimes like best friends would and sometimes fucked when they were especially bored or lonely. it was a union born from the passion anger brings, from knowing something is right and holding on to it in your heart so tight that your knuckles turn white and your body goes numb. it doesn't guarantee a happy life. jackson and bill learned the hard way.

two months into their "marriage" jackson fell in love with a co-worker, mis-read signals (perhaps out of desperation?), and confessed his devotion. the man sued for sexual harrassment; jackson was fired.

"he hates his life," bill sobbed. "i hate mine. whose fault is it? there are too many things wrong in such monstrous ways that you can't even find someone to blame. i wish we were in love, so maybe we could be happy. i wish marriage didn't exist, it turns us all into the living dead, consumed withh our failure in the one thing we are all supposed to know how to do right. and i am too bitter towards society to admit defeat."

i turned my body to embrace him, knocking my fifth off the bench, where it lay draining into the earth. and i imagine that that night the world got drunk with us, letting everything go for a split second. the worms went dancing, the grass passed out and stopped growing, the axis switched directions, slowed down or maybe sped up. i imagined the world drunk; gravity forgetting its name and all of us falling, falling. and maybe god would lose all her inhibitions and scream into our ears the secret of life.

and thinking of the earth spinning crazy and gravity failing, i vomited on bill's ugly coat. "it's ok, it's ok," he said, mopping it up with his hands. "now it's even uglier." he looked me in the eye, he said, "i wear this coat so i don't have to care so much about what other people think. so i don't feel like i have to be beautiful to feel alive."

"but that's not fair," i told him, "only beautiful people like you can make a decision like that."