Bless This Mess

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I remember waking up one workday morning and just wishing somehow that the day could be over. And I thought how sad that was -- to just want your life to go away. I didn't wanna live like that. I wanted to wake up each day and feel glad I was alive. And for the first time that didn't seem like too much to ask for.

My old friend Donal had moved to Denver a few months earlier, and he entreated me with tales of blue skies and mind-blowingly cheap rent. I was ready to go. I made plans to leave for Denver in June.

Before I left, I threw a big party at my apartment -- for friends and near-friends, all the people I had grown to know and love. I threw a party for six years in DeKalb, that blank, lovely little Midwestern college town; for the bars and bands, the girlfriends, the train tracks, the old brick buildings, and the river. I threw a party for the town I entered as a confused and frightened, excited little kid, and from which I emerged, six years later, full of possibility and hope. I was not yet an adult, but I knew I wasn't a child anymore.

So everyone came to my party. We drank sickeningly sweet alcoholic concoctions I had invented myself. John R. showed movies on a sheet hung in the doorway. I filled one room with Mylar clouds suspended from the ceiling. I got very drunk.

At 3 a.m. only a few guests remained. I was standing in the doorway waving good-bye to people when I saw my estranged friend Fred. We hadn't really spoken in a couple of years and we didn't speak a word this time either, but just automatically fell into each other's arms and started sobbing.

We cried and shook, holding on for dear life, for love. I remember his leather jacket, heavy and wet with my tears running down. I was leaving DeKalb. I was leaving my home.

John Porcellino, a California-based cartoonist, began independently publishing King-Cat Comics and Stories in 1989. This story was reprinted from King-Cat #65 (Nov. 2005). Subscriptions: $12 (4 issues) from Box 170535, San Francisco, CA 94117; www.king-cat.net.

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