Meghan, or, Saint Matty

The first time that I saw her was in my eleventh grade poetry class. She came up to me afterward to tell me that she liked the poem I read aloud that day. I said thanks. This was how we met.

After that we would skip school sometimes, buying tons of food and not ever eating it. Actually, I ate sometimes, because I was so thin to begin with and didn’t like hunger, but I usually tried to starve, too, out of some kind of morose comradeship. Meghan wasn’t exactly fat. Not thin or small like me, but not really big or chubby, either; she was just kind of medium. Her hair was a pleasant light brown, like maple syrup or an autumn leaf, and her face was pale and soft.
I remember one particular afternoon we spent at her older brother’s house while he and his fiancé were at work. She played the grand piano, and I fed ground carrots to the small canary in the wire cage, both of us ignoring the picnic spread out on the carpet. After that I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I took my clothes off, right down to only my underpants, and stood in front of the full-length mirror, trying to hate myself. I just wanted to know what it was like.

I guess I could be more masculine, I thought, though this realization didn’t exactly start up any fires inside my head. It wasn’t that I was vain, or would have minded waking up one day with twenty more pounds or a few extra inches of height--it just didn’t matter to me much either way. In my mind, broad shoulders and big muscles were something I simply didn’t happen to have--like dark hair, or a vagina. Even the long, deep, oversized earthworm of a scar down the middle of my chest was, for the most part, just another feature passed over by the bar of soap when I showered or the cotton of undershirts when I dressed myself in the mornings. So I emerged from the master bath, clothed and defeated, alluded once again by a brand of suffering I chased but couldn’t seem to catch.

Though God knows why I’d have wanted to suffer even more after the previous school year. I liked Meghan because in the months since my brother died, she was the first person who spoke to me without fumbling and disguised condolences. Teachers, classmates, the guys I played music with and even my own family acted as if I were made of glass sometimes, and it bothered me. Somehow this resulted in me becoming a virtual junky of the stuff, watching movies just because I knew they’d make me sad. Once, when film My Girl failed to bring forth the desired sorrow, I got frustrated with myself and threw the DVD case hard against the screen door. I felt like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz.

By then I was having sex. It weighed on my mind, messed with my appetite for food, and made it hard to concentrate in class. I told my friend Noah about it, in between songs, in my bedroom on a day when school had been cancelled due to snow. We were sitting on my bed, Noah at the foot and me at the head, by the pillows, and he toyed with the knobs on the four track recorder and looked awkward. My parents eyed my C report cards but chalked it up to latent grief, and the refrigerator door grew increasingly bare. I still got teased occasionally by football-playing idiots who remained unaware of my new double-life.


The school year ended and summer came. I formed a band and played shows around town with Noah, his younger brother Elijah, and the McMenemin twins. And even though the empty space where my own brother had been filled neither physically nor emotionally, even though the horribleness of missing him was still acutely there, so much that I even still cried sometimes, a funny thing happened: I began to feel okay. Okay sometimes even gave way to good, bringing back moments of lightheartedness I had thought were gone forever. I embraced them, no longer a junky of sorrow. I began to watch movies that made me laugh.

There were long nights that summer, lasting long after the shows had ended and the parties dwindled down. They were the kind of nights that you’d hardly expect out of real life--the long, philosophical talks when we looked at the stars, the hilarious things that our drunken friends did. I was eating now, whole meals filling my stomach and feasts filling my dreams. I was sleeping with such dutiful satisfaction that it felt like a hard-earned reward. Even throwing up from too much alcohol now seemed like a reminder that I was a real, wonderful human body; fully functioning and very much alive.

But as I was growing happier, Meghan seemed to only become sadder still. Deep in the soil of creative souls, there tends to grow an unfortunate strain of selfishness, and I grew annoyed. I ate more and more and she ate less and less, though I grew no heavier and she got no thinner. I was sick of hearing her throw up her meals. I was sick of begging her to sit up in bed, and the concept of beautiful sorrow became a blatant myth right then and there. I realized I’d known early on that I could never really fall in love with her.

My parents thought I was a saint. Elliot, though kind at the core, had been prone to sarcasm and unafraid to cause a stir. Being younger, this left me with the Saint Matty niche, and a terrible feeling of fraudulence whenever I happened to do or think anything typical of a worldly-sinful seventeen-year-old. I cared deeply about Meghan and maybe even loved her, but I was young enough to still believe in the concept of being “in love” romantically, and old enough to know that this wasn’t it. I had three reasons for staying, two kind and one cruel.

The first, I guess, wasn’t really kind or cruel but somewhere gray in between the two, veering slightly more in the direction of kindness. Her weighty, enveloping sorrow (a sorrow I had originally thought we shared, but soon realized that I couldn’t even begin to compete with) worried me greatly. It annoyed me to no end, but it also made me sad, and I was terrified to leave her alone with it.

The second reason was that though I had never been fully infatuated with her, I was far from bored or repulsed. There was something quietly fascinating about her, vaguely beautiful, and we shared scattered moments of wonder that could have added up to an enamored state had they been more than just that--moments. She was a talented musician, classically trained, and watching her play violin made me sick with embarrassment of my own clumsy guitar picking, ill-timed drumming and meager attempts at keyboard.

The third reason was the one I was ashamed of, the one I didn’t dare speak of even in my own head. But the pressure was on, and the starved souls of the kids in town wanted songs, and lots of them. After a few glorious, mutually cathartic nights on stage, I realized in horror that I was running out of material. My childhood had been happy, my parents loving and still together, and I was from the same uninteresting place as my audience, and they knew it. Of course there was Elliot, but I couldn’t stand the thought of exploiting his memory as a means to stay popular. That was where Meghan came in. I knew that as long as I was with her--my mournful, violin-playing, eating-disorder stricken muse--I would never come up short on sorrow. It was the most selfish thing that I had ever done.

I know it sounds awful, or like it barely had to do with her, but it wasn’t always that way. I really did feel some of the things I said. There was one day in particular that summer, at the local park. Something about walking past plastic wading pools on front lawns and feeling blasts of air conditioner through the front doors of various houses made me feel as if goodness was all that existed, like everything around me but the sky could disappear and I would just wrap it around me like a favorite blanket and feel right at home.

The mourning sound of violins and a singer with a speech impediment swelled around us, where no one could see. Her hair in my face was so sleek and clean-smelling that it almost seemed wet, and I clenched her soft lower back in my hands. You are a saint, Matty Madison, she whispered.
Walking home we wove among the trees that I swore had hearts just like we did, so much that I almost feared their branches would swoop down and take us. She was simply happy for once, and I was content and free of the racing analysis that usually plagued my brain. It was as if the troubled parts of us had never existed at all. My God, I remember thinking, she could be so pretty if she always were like this. Alone, on the path back to my house, I found a marble statue of a lamb.


The winter of senior year fell, and Noah and Elijah’s parents were out of town for the weekend at a church retreat. Noah in particular didn’t have enough mischief in his soul to throw a party, but it was Midwinter Break, and both brothers possessed just the amount to invite the band over for drinks.

Elijah was just outside the sliding glass door, puffing on one of the cigarettes he didn’t usually smoke. Noah, wine cooler in hand, was laughing and light-headedly daring me to kiss Jaime McMenemin. Having had a few myself, I was obliging, as his brother Ted looked on in disgust from the hearth. My phone vibrated in the pocket of my jeans.

I put on my parka and went outside to answer it, taking Elijah’s place in the snow and leaning up against the side of the brick house. After several minutes, Noah came outside as well.

“Meghan,” I sighed, hating myself for not possessing so much as a wavering voice. “She’s in the hospital. Pills or something. They pumped her stomach.” It all seemed so matter of fact.

He hugged me. A good musician, Noah was an endearingly un-hip sort, sheltered, and often breaking social norms--not out of any kind of rebellion, but because he wasn’t aware of them.

“Is she going to be okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know. They don’t know.”

“You should be there.”

“I know.”

“Well come on.”

“You’re drunk, Noah.”

“I am not either. Get in the car.”


Selfishness runs rampant, like an ugly brook, not just in the souls of boys or poets but throughout the entire human condition. And so when night had given way to a white morning, and Meghan was okay, I was not a saint, but a very human, rather damaged teenage boy, and I knew I couldn’t love her anymore.

I walked out the hospital doors and didn’t stop until I got to my intended destination. Suddenly apprehensive to do what I’d planned, I strolled further back towards the bramble, dead and snow-covered in the January fog, where the older graves were. I watched the dates grow longer ago and less readable the further I went, some of them so washed away by rain and time that they were hardly more than blank stone. 1950, 1920, 1904. I crouched down and squinted to read 1890.

My hands and nose were numb by then, and everything was still. I realized that I had wandered not just to the snowy bramble, but straight through it, and I came across the little stone lamb who had greeted me so whimsically that day in the summer.

“Hey..” I whispered, smiling, kneeling down to brush the snow off of it. I was half crazy by then from cold and lack of sleep, talking to a statue. I examined the little hairline cracks in it’s face, wiped the frost from it’s blind-looking eyes and ran my numb hands over the bumpy, blue-green tinted white of its body. I noticed that the lower half of it was emerged in the earth, and I began to dig.

The ground was almost as hard as rock at the surface, so that I had to use a nearby stick and not my hands to break it, but it grew gradually softer the deeper I got; bitter cold throughout. The lower half of the statue unearthed, I realized that it was not a statue at all, but a headstone. “So that’s what you are after all…” I muttered, worrying for a second about how hard all that dirt would be to wash from under my fingernails. “What are you doing so far away from all the others…”

I wiped some of the dirt away with the sleeve of my coat to reveal the inscription of a name too weathered and faded to make out. Below that were two dates about seven years apart from one another, roughly two-hundred years old. And further down still, an epitaph:

Suffer, little children, to come unto me.

I pulled my hand away, my throat making a small, involuntary noise. I watched my breath clash with the chill and form tiny spirits, vaporizing and then fading. I had never felt so lied to in my life, and rarely had I been overtaken by such a dreadful, sinking feeling. I must have been the first person to touch it lovingly like that in years, decades, a century even.

I started walking back, hoping I could find my way still. I tried to imagine a tiny, home-sewn cotton dress or suit--just a fragment now, a fraying swatch of color or pattern--deep beneath the ground where I had just been kneeling. All that I could come up with in my mind was the image of a fall-apart antique patchwork tablecloth my mom kept in the kitchen at home. It had been around for as long as I could remember, but I’d never really given any thought to it before. Once, I realized in a state of elementary wonder, it had been new.

Unafraid now, I tromped back through the dates, the stones increasingly shiny and recent as I went. I began to recognize a few as belonging to older members of our church who had passed away over the years. I came to a large tree near the front of the cemetery. It resembled a snow-covered version of the one illustrated in that kids book, The Giving Tree. I sat down under it, the cold and wet seeping through my pants. Awkwardly, I wrapped my arms around the headstone sharing it’s soil in a trite and ironically earnest attempt at tenderness. I felt sick as the name in the stone met my eyes, slick and legible, not quite one year old.

One of the worst things to come to terms with is the fact that things end. Its not a sadness or a fear so much as a nauseating tenderness, the nauseating tenderness of things and people leaving. The four-track tapes are recorded over, and the plastic marine mammals all dry up in the garage. The worst part of all of this is that epitaphs never say a goddamn thing about any of it. My brother was not some stupid hallmark inscription he would have made fun of, or some biblical quote he didn’t even believe, or some song lyric that’s somehow supposed to make him being gone okay. I hated that someone two centuries from now would read his headstone and think that he’d been sweet, and never have a clue about his dirty mouth, or his ridiculous, unnecessary bravery, or how angry he could make people, or any of the real reasons I loved him. They wouldn’t ever know him at all, not even a little bit.

I tried to say something and failed. My self-expression had, by that point, boiled down to the unintelligible grief of a child, like a middle school support group or a very early Bright Eyes album. I held onto the trunk of the large tree to support myself. I felt a heartbeat, healthy and deep and very human, resound within it.

Some time after that I lay down on my back in the snow. All my life I had fought against the cold, huddling into myself, trying to keep it out, but now I opened my arms up and welcomed it in. Everything was still. The graves and the trees and the weather was quiet. At one point a pile of snow dropped gently from a branch of The Giving Tree to the ground a few feet from my boots. Now and then I sniffled. Time seemed to have become something else entirely. What am I doing? I thought. I am dying. I am lying down and waiting for the cold to kill me.

A few times I thought that I should get up and go home, but my limbs felt as heavy as my mind, and vice-versa. God, I had never been so cold. I remember thinking, now I know what a corpse must feel like. How a corpse waits until it’s parents drive by, bundled up and worried, to get out of the car and ask it, what in the world are you doing here, like this?

Why, they wanted to know.

I leaned my head against the iced-over glass of the car window. My forehead felt defiantly hot, suddenly. I imagined it melting the frost, forming spaces through which I could see. “Because I want to die!” I said. And then I shut my eyes and breathed in, deep and sudden.