Ian music is song of drug addiction ascribed to crazy haired Cure fan who raved about Mood Swings near Autumn, in the magic of her midnight gallery opening I would never witness in the light of 90’s Ann Arbor Michigan day.
I met him 3 times before Pizza House friend cursed his life and sent him to his smack filled heroin infused ever after…
But I never knew “the asshole”; I only remember his kiss… Paul’s longing description… Carrie’s guiltless confession… and Dorian’s unexpected words which brought all these memorial ingredients into focus and allowed me finally to mourn – listening to Numbness on NYC downtown train to The Prom – no tears – but a sad smile and a kiss goodbye in the same deep water as you.
He whimpers and I wonder if I ever dreaded such desire so much or so unconvincingly, but then as waves of shimmering memory crash down upon us I know that I was once as fearful and thirsty as this unsteady stripling cursed by his impetuous prick.
The tremble in his voice tells me everything.
How many times have I heard that quivering?
Enough to know what will happen next.
Enough to know that he’ll kiss me for the first time before we leave this place and that his world will never be the same, although others may never know.
I wonder if he’ll be clumsy, fearfully failing and requiring my lessons?
I’ve never been a very good teacher.
But I needn’t have worried. His inaugural kiss is all skillful struggle & instinct; like he’s remembering a previously forgotten lyric which he sings into me, the movement resonating with my own dimly recalled early fumblings – old ghosts coming to light and making experienced virgins of us both.
Part II:
Years unfurl before us and we continue to cross paths, if not swords… never quite friends, but never enemies either.
We are could-have-been-lovers who never really liked one another… or maybe I want him desperately but have never admitted it to him, never admitted it to myself, and I protect this secret with a feigned indifference.
Perhaps he wanted me too once, but the injurious nature of his initiation was too overwhelming; too persistently all knowing, causing him to deny any self identified failing as commonplace as an honest, inexhaustible, uncontrollable lust.
The night I find him in the cemetery with a new student he actually drags the boy over to me to tell me that Ian is dead.
He kisses the boy goodbye, all casual and masterful now before he tags along with tears captured in his long black lashes.
When he reaches for my hand, I allow this silent sign language apology… as we stumble through a midnight city that once witnessed our virginal beginnings.
And as the sun threatens to wake us from our surreal remembering, he pulls me to him with eyes closed… desperate to feel the familiar, if shockingly innocent touch of my skin on his, rather than the aching emptiness our former brother once inhabited.
I don’t want this, I think, this isn’t how I’ve wanted him at all… yet I surrender to him like the tide pulled unfailingly by the moon and his sway.
A killing kindness that murders us both.
Part III:
16 years and he doesn’t recognize me on the underground.
I can’t blame him; I actually don’t recognize myself and I lack the reflection of his distant, unchanging gaze.
I watch him watching others but feel no need to illuminate him as I flow out and beyond him… Like I’m someone who never drowned in those icy depths.
I pretend and become a formerly drunken sailor, now sober, awake, and ignorant of all that took place that long night before, save a few vague images and the phantom bruising smudge of a lingering question, raised by the harshest of realities.
We once lost and found ourselves within each other… within the loss of innocence and the commingling of grief, but now, here in this place beneath a sea of inspiring destruction, what we discovered in that stilted, tilted, ordinary wonderland has been forgotten.
We drowned in the flood of all that came after, and though we may find ourselves again (and again) in the eyes of flaming strangers, the fire which burned within us has been lost forever, save in dreams which melt away every day as we wake.
Said that Ian had worked at Pizza House up until the end.
Didn’t know he was even back in Ann Arbor…
Briefly knew that Dear Friend.
And as it turns out, he didn’t survive me… though he once revived me; he is cold in the ground.
Only yesterday I thought I’d write… only not… & now to then learn he’s not even around.
Autumn once told me she’d written him off… not worth the cost… far beyond saving.
He couldn’t stop it… He couldn’t drop it… farewells & goodbyes; all he ever was saying.
Can’t stand the silence. Can’t stand the staring. Cure sang he’s NUMB – No cure for his fun – Did not really know him though I never stopped caring.
Written By Jason Wright December 31, 2001
For Ian
Explained:
Ian was a friend of friends. He was goth, and he had wild black hair that reminded me of Robert Smith of The Cure. He and Autumn visited me at Meijer when I worked there (between 1996 & 1999) and they picked me up to take me to a gallery where Autumn was having an exhibit while the museum was closed. He spoke with me about The Cure’s then new album, “Wild Mood Swings” (released: May 7, 1996) and later, after chilling at the Fleetwood he gave me a kiss goodnight at my car, despite me having a boyfriend in Florida. It was invigorating. My friend Paul had told me all about a guy he was hung up on named Ian but I didn’t make the connection. When I realized our Ians were one and the same, well, I stayed away. But I always liked him.
Ian was an addict. Heroin. Or so I was told. I’m sure it was true as all his old friends seemed to hate him based on his addiction and whatever shit he spewed on them as a result. He moved away. When I wrote my first poem about him I meant to send it to him but the people I asked had all come to despise him and weren’t interested in helping me find him. Later he returned to Michigan, and was actually working in a restaurant that I frequented (which itself was rare), but I never saw him there. He worked with people I knew, but they didn’t know that I knew him. And one night, my friend Carrie got in a fight with him and he left early, and he overdosed. And he died. And he was buried. And I found out maybe a week after all that from Dorian, who was a guy that I made out with once, who was a drug dealer, I think, and he and I would randomly cross paths now and again around Ypsi / Ann Arbor. When I asked my friend Carrie about it and explained that I had cared about him, she didn’t apologize or show any remorse or even the slightest bit of sympathy for me, and this hurt our friendship.
But to have written about him originally as someone who reminded me of people that I’d met in a hospital that I mostly outlived and that I found it comforting that he would survive, and then have him die, was very jarring. And it’s even more so now looking back at all this in 2026, over 25 years later.
And it is impossible for me to think of Ian and not think of “Numb” by The Cure from “Wild Mood Swings” – or hear the song and not remember Ian.
