save_me raze i think you're lucky if you meet someone who saves your life once. my dad has saved my life four times. the first time, he was driving me back to my mother's house after one of our tuesday visits. i would have been six or seven. i was eating count chocula from the box. i ate too fast. i started choking. i couldn't clear what was in my throat. i couldn't breathe. he pulled over to the side of the road. he grabbed me and gave me the heimlich maneuver. spit-soaked corn starch and marshmallows flew out of my mouth. when we got back in the car i could breathe again, but i didn't feel right. it was hard to talk. i puked all over myself. then i felt better. i went for a swim when i got home. my mother had one of her work friends over. i forget her name. i remember her curly hair. her tan skin. the soft diamond of her mouth. the second time my dad saved my life, i was thirteen. my mother and stepfather and his mother and sister and her husband spent every day i wasn't with my dad grinding me down into nothing. telling me i was stupid. worthless. ugly. unlovable. my dad wrote me a letter. he told me everything that was good about me. i used to read it before i fell asleep. i would cry and try to make myself believe i could rearrange the words on the page until they were him. until he was there with me. if i didn't have that letter on some of those nights, i think i would have killed myself. the third time he saved my life, he kidnapped me. he picked me up from school. i didn't take the bus. i didn't go home. he was my new home. he built me back up from cinders. the fourth time he saved my life, i smoked some weed out of a bong. the weed was cut with something. i smoked too much of it. i was dying. i could feel it. the first time it happened, i was alone. i felt the presence of a neutral higher power and an evil higher power. they took turns judging me without saying anything. i sang to them. i sang for my soul. i sang to the neutral higher power in a sweet voice, begging for salvation. i sang to the evil higher power in a gritty, demonic voice. i tried bartering. "let me spread your message," i sang. "i'll get your music out." i improvised an unrecorded concept album with nothing but my voice. then the light changed outside and i knew i was going to live. the second time it happened, there was no light. it was late at night. music wasn't going to save me. i could hear my heartbeat. it was too fast. too loud. there was no higher power judging me. i was going to die. that was it. that was all there was. my dad sat with me while i lost all the feeling in my body. i kept looking at my open bedroom door for whoever was going to come and take me away from him. dark, faceless figures, i thought. i don't think i've ever been more afraid in my life. he told me i was going to be okay. he stayed with me. the feeling came back to my body. i was able to move again. i didn't die. if he hadn't been there, i would have lost my mind. in my dreams he's almost always thirty years younger than he is in my waking_life. i know why. it's because if he stays young in my dreams maybe he'll never have to die. maybe he'll be here forever. and maybe one day i can be the one who saves him. 211002 ... kerry really feeling this. thank you for giving us so much. i don't know a better way to say it. 211002 ... raze reading that wrecked me a little. i think it's one of the most meaningful things anyone's ever said to me. all i can say is thank you, from my heart. (and you know, i could say the same thing to you. i hope i have, in my own way.) 211002 ... epitome of incomprehensibility This is why I'm wary of hallucinogens (for myself, I mean): my mind plays enough weird tricks on its own. What struck me the most here was the letter. The non-obvious sort of saving, the kind that might go ignored. I love how you put that in the list and give it good company. 211002 ... raze i still have that letter. i haven't seen it in front of me in twenty-six years, but i can see the font inside my head. i know cleaning_out_the_garage is bound to unearth it at the bottom of a water-damaged cardboard box. i do and i don't want to read it again, because i have no idea what kind of power it would be charged with now (some of the memories_embedded_in_objects can get pretty heavy). (and i think you're better off having stayed away from those drug-shaped things. i had some fun in my more reckless days, but there was a whole lot of not-fun in there too, and i realize i'm pretty lucky to have come through it all more or less intact. i can still appreciate the value of non-therapeutic drugs as tools, distractions, intensifiers, and self-directed weapons, but these days i think life is surreal enough all on its own. running it through a chemical filter would be a little too much for me.) 211003 ... raze (twenty-five years, even. sometimes i don't know my own age.) 211003 what's it to you? who go blather from