Chapter 48: In Which I Let You Go at an Abandoned Security Gatehouse
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It wasn’t my intention to come here without you. We just didn’t have enough time.
Fate’s bitchy like that. It’s certainly not the most grandiose abandoned space, but we talked about it enough during our to-and-fros to the Borscht Belt, to see The Pines, which burned down and vanished; to wander the Homowack, which also burned down and vanished; to try and sneak into the Nevele one last time because most of it has burned down and will eventually vanish.
And then there’s you in my hand, standing outside this decrepit and desolate security gatehouse, fully operational at one point, in the shadow of the now demolished Schrade Knife Factory.
You and a vintage glass medicine vial that came from one of our many expeditions together in the seven years we had each other, small receptacles like this one becoming a particular obsession you developed far before our urban exploration jaunts.
It’s impressive, the number of these antique bottles you snagged, vintage containers like this one, maybe an old witch hazel brew that you found outside the abandoned house right down the road from mine, an aging, glass vial that now holds a small part of your body, which is also burned down and vanished, except for your ghost, of course, which now haunts the abandoned places we used to explore together.
The way the phantoms of the former people who used to occupy these forgotten buildings (before they became empty and unused) often do, before their inevitable demise which typically happens in one of three ways:
A. get torched by idiotic teenage arsonists —
B. get demolished by aspiring property tycoons —
C. get reclaimed by nature, poisoned earth and all, the way everything will eventually go back into the soil where it came from.
Before the planet is swallowed by the sun, a star that will also die, after which who knows what will happen to it? Is its next, mythical destination a black hole, perhaps? A wormhole into a different time-space continuum? Does it simply explode, the next Big Bang? Billions and trillions of years from now, the dusty matter that sits in this small glass vial — a gift from your widowed wife, my friend, who offered me this small token to memorialize your existence — will be burning deep within the dead star we call the sun, having become a part of its complex chemical composition, filled with the souls of creatures and plants and millennia, and even a fraction of time itself.
I’ll be in there with you, my homo sapien ashes all scrunched tightly together, in and around the rest of the people and places and things and ideas of God that ultimately went back into the earth because, as our dear Isabel says, “Nobody gets out of this video game alive.” Who knows how much time I’ve got left anyway, before I too am sprinkled into a tiny bottle, held onto, maybe, by someone else who loved me the way I loved you, until they possibly decide to let me go?
Which leaves me with the question today: should I let you go?
The vines cradling this American ruin that stands before me, no larger than the hospital room where you took your last earthly breath, have framed one of the many broken windows leading into this cinder block tomb, and its sharp edges have become a smudged and sooted mirror that I stare into as I hold you so gently against the golden hour of this Ellenville August.
In the akimbo of my jagged reflection, I see you standing behind me, the way we both used to see the ghosts of people standing all around us, the spectres of strangers or friends, on those long summer days when we’d try and make sense of the open road, simply by finding the structures hiding along it, like this abandoned security gatehouse, because nothing should be forgotten, if we can help it.
At the very least, seeing your shadow standing next to me reminds me to make a promise to you: that I’ll always welcome visits from you. It’s what Eva said to me when she handed this small part of you off to me:
Here Blake, I want — I want you to have this. Julie just loved adventuring with you. It was one of her absolute favorite things to do in those last few years. She loved it so much. And so I thought that maybe the two of you would like to just keep adventuring together.
She’s not wrong, not in the slightest. Because — yeah. I wasn’t actually done hanging with you yet. We had so many spaces to get to. Like the abandoned Disney-esque mini-castle retirement community Burj Al Babas, a boneyard that reflects the 2018 economic crisis in Turkey.
Or the abandoned Six Flags in New Orleans, the one that they never reopened because George Bush decided that Hurricane Sandy wasn’t really a big deal, an empty theme park which has since been torn down, a demolition that, coincidentally, started a mere couple of months after you died.
Or even this small abandoned security gatehouse, which we always talked about poking around in, but never did, which is why I’m here today, poking around in it, talking to your ghost and trying to decide whether or not today, the 1-year anniversary of your passing, is the day I let your ashy matter go.
I think, somehow, that keeping you in your last remaining physical form feels unkind, and selfish, and universally unjust. I mean, shit, your spirit screamed out to the Sagittarian sun, the way mine continues to ascend into the Sagittarian moon, and to keep you here with me in the pocket of my torn jeans, may simply just not sit right with me anymore. Anybody else who still has the other pieces and fragments of you that Eva distributed gets to decide how best to handle their own scruples around keeping that smattering of you around, locked inside your own glass prison.
I just feel this might be what’s best for me. And for you.
I take you gently out of my pocket and bring you close up to my face and imagine it’s 1975. The Schrade Knife Factory is still quite active, having been transformed from its original Channel Master Antenna Factory in 1967 into this larger facility, and you and I work here, together, in the now-abandoned security gatehouse, before all of it closed in 2004, leaving hundreds jobless.
Your ghost turns to me and says, “Hey, you know where I wanna be buried?”
“Uh, yeah, where?”
“Right here.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, ya dummy?” I laugh.
“No, I’m serious!” you retort. “Think about it. I mean, think of how totally gorgeous this place is gonna look after it’s inevitably abandoned, the way all buildings are vacated, in one way or another, eventually. Think about what it might be like to explore this place after it’s abandoned. No humans to crowd around. It’s just us. Nobody poking their heads in here, asking questions. This property is ours, including these four forgotten walls, cement ceiling, and torn up concrete floor. We’re playing pretend and laughing and getting through these confounding human hours, one day at a time, together. Maybe I’m dying in an obvious, cancer-kind-of-way, and maybe you’re dying because, well, we’re all, always kinda dying, bit by bit, with or without cancer, and then eventually, one day, we don’t need to carry each other around in our pockets anymore. And you know why?”
“Why?” I smile back.
“Because: you and I have carved out a landing in each other’s bleeding hearts, and we’ll be there forever, in some way or another, with or without a small glass vial that holds the final specks and flecks of each of us.”
As you breathe in to say something else, the parallel universe of our otherworldly fantasy disappears, and it’s stupid 2025 again, August 31st, and the sun is finally setting in the Catskills, and I’m trembling at the thought of leaving you behind, in here…
“And that’s okay too,” I hear you say. “It’s okay to hold onto me a little bit longer.”
I knew you would understand because you’d probably do the same. So maybe next year, or the year after that, but at the very latest, if and when this abandoned security gatehouse comes tumbling down, I would imagine that’ll be the wink from you that says, “Okay, now, for real, let me go, you little faggot because I know one thing’s for sure: nobody can prove whether or not we’ll see each other again.”
My best butch dyke friend and I.
And you know something? The feeling that daydream brings up is really nice, so I’ll hold onto it, I guess, for just a little bit longer. You don’t take up that much space anyway, and if you do, it’s far more in my heart than anywhere else.
It wasn’t my intention to come here without you. We just didn’t have enough time. Although, I guess, in a way, you’re here just the same.
***
