Sane Love

"I can’t see the light! Oh no, I can’t see the light! Mamma, help me" cried my lover from his delusion.

What does one do when their lover starts to hallucinate, lose their mind and die right in their arms?

Crazy people carry a certain conviction in their delusions that seems to seep into the reality of the sane. I could do nothing but tell him to hold on and that I was going to help him.

"I have to get you to a hospital," I assured my fading friend while noticing he had pissed all lover the bed.

The urine was dark brown.

The angel of death was in the room, but she didn’t scare me.

He screamed and fought the paramedics and police, but I knew it was best for him, but the way they took him out of here was brutal.

We rode in an ambulance. He screamed louder than the ambulance.

How does one stop the screams when there is nothing to fight but the imagination of the dying?

Enter the delusion and face death too.

The medical technician looked at me and assured everything would be alright. I didn’t believe him for a moment as my lover fought off the hounds of hell.

In the emergency room he screamed again and again. His body was bleeding everywhere-- red rivers of life sustaining liquid, the color of love, flowed out of his mouth.

"He wasn’t bleeding at home. Where did all this blood come from? What are you doing to him?" I cried loudly like my insane lover.

He opened his eyes, blood dripped from the seam where bottom lip meet top, grabbed my hand for the first time since the onset of the coma and whispered, "Hold your head up."

A stranger in the emergency room turned to me and said, "Pray over him. He wants you to stop being sad for him and hold up your head. Now pray over him," the stranger ordered like a Rabbi.

Words flowed from my mouth like the blood from my lovers lips. The commotion of the emergency room subsided as his body started to tremble and the bed upon which he was strapped shook the curtains which offered us a little privacy.

My hands trembled as they remained glued to his body during the powerful prayer.

I couldn’t stop the flow of the words of the prayer. They continued to spew from my mouth, and for a moment, the prayer itself seemed to be the purpose of my entire life.

I spoke things that were not my words, but rather, an ancient language that I only knew, while in prayer, over the body of my lover.

An old, beautiful Black woman grabbed my arm and said, "I hope your friend makes it. I will pray for him too."

The pain and agony left his face. He seemed to be at peace and I let go.

During the last hours of his life, I massaged his feet while he was relaxing on morphine, I swear, I could see heaven through the eyes of my passing friend as I held my head up watching him receive his crown of glory.

I didn’t return to the hospital to help him die. I knew his soul was gone after I said my prayer and attending a wedding in heaven.

At the stroke of 3 a.m. while at home, absorbing the fact that my lover had not only AIDS, but hepatitis as well, I felt my psychosis begin.

Curtains flew from the walls of our apartment and the phone rang.

"He died," they said.

"Thank you," I said, and walked onto the streets of Brooklyn searching for his lost soul.

When I awoke in a psychiatric ward, a crazy guy walked up to me and said, "Hold your head up!Shawn said to tell you that it’s beautiful over here."

I told the shrinks to get me away from all the crazy people.

I then looked down to see Styrofoam slippers with smiley faces on the toes and realized I was crazy too as a crown of medicated thorns tore my soul apart.