I posted this letter to Layne on my site last night... 1 am is not the time to properly use spell check or really express yourself. Below is the updated letter, you can read it on my site too. Thanks to everyone who sent in their memories for our grunge issue.
Tanya
http://thehorsechronicles.tripod.com
The elements outside are beyond your control.... Layne said this to me once. As I sit here alone I wonder why any of this has happened. Any of this being a mouthful. I look back at my life and I don't understand a lick of it. I have never felt so alone or so lost and it is like no one else can see just how upset I am at the way things have turned out, the way I have turned out. Disappointment is hardly the word.
There are some days I wake up and I can't breath. I have this terrible urge to just keep myself distracted, fighting any opportunity to be alone because I know I would have to face myself. I know longer know if I am alive, and if I am alive if it is even worth the journey. Lately I have been trying to pass time while my heart is breaking, and each moment it breaks just more of my soul slips away. I have been working on my book about Layne, and found myself dealing with a lot of things I thought would never surface. Each page leaves me gasping for air, and I now know what Layne meant when he told me "the elements outside are beyond your control".
There were moments when he tried to teach me, and show me, what it was that so heavily weighed on his heart. It wasn't until the last couple of chapters that I realized just how grief stricken he must have been over Demri. In the book I wrote down what I knew, but then he introduced me to my past. I think it is said best that we truly have spent out lifetimes in search of what would never be, and feeling like we are unfortunate or unentitled to what others have in the comfort of another's arms is a soft suicide that aches like the slow burn of a cigarette.
What I would give to feel normal for just one day. I believe Layne silently felt this way, both of us just on this unstoppable road to capture what couldn't ever be captured. Both of us blinded by the headlights of deceit, blinded by having all the faith we could in people while knowing in the back of our minds that they would eventually let us down. Layne and I have been let down so many times that when we feel / felt good , it is such a foreign concept we end up withdrawing.
The grunge issue is never an issue I like putting out. It is never good enough, never captures just what I want to say. People send in stories, memories, photos and such - it all feels so surreal and I end up not publishing the best stories because they seem so personal. There could never be enough words to translate just how much people meant to Layne, even in his darkest most withdrawn hour. There is no justice in anything I write, you write, or the media writes. His legacy is what it is and yet remains so far from the truth. These double lifes we led seem to be a fading memory in my rotting mind. I just wish with all the will I possess that I still have a chance to feel like I can trust, rely on and have someone to share my life with. Again, the doubt is creeping up my spine because no one seems to stay, and I am completely aware of the nature of my eccentricity. Layne was too.
I guess the hardest part of this journey is the heavy depression that rains over my head. Days go by and I often see Layne, he is there out of the corner of my eye- watching me, haunting me, making me feel as if there is something I am suppose to be doing but am ignoring. I know my mind is bending like a psychic spoon during quite minutes throughout the day. It is an unfair fight that no one could ever understand. When I look at at moments I have spent with Layne, I fully understand the reasoning behind his brilliant madness. Both of us just struggling to pass the time without thinking about the trillion little hairs standing on the edge of our arms, erect and on guard just waiting to kill the pain of yesterday and tomorrow.
I have become utterly lost. My life has been a series of strange events, all of which I have been able to cope with up until now. As things seem to be going well - it is ironic that I have never felt further from finding myself or knowing just who I am. This had to be a bitch for Layne as fame itself could be such a high and yet contains so much isolation that you truly have to feel like Alice in Wonderland.
It is like I have been unconsciously lying to myself for the last twenty-eight years about who I am and who I am suppose to be. The last couple of weeks, I tried to ignore the memory of Layne. The more I think about him , and the more I understand what our time together truly captured, the more confused I get about what I am doing here. It all seems a bit unfair.
Needless to say, I have every reason to stay away from everyone. I have been fighting to be normal and live like nothing is wrong. I have tried to accept what it is that I have been left here to deal with, and yet ignore the truth about the series of events that have led up to each pulsating moment of this place called now. Often there is nothing but myself sitting alone in a room filled with people. My raw and unequivocally heartbroken emotions left sitting still on the edge of a world that won't stop moving. It is like I am just trying to prevent myself from falling off the side of this planet which no longer makes sense, or seems to hold a place for me. I try to reason with why is it possible for people like me, and people like Layne, to just sit here dead before the body dies, holding onto nothing but hope that tomorrow may be slightly less intense. Sunshine would feel good for once, or so I think.
These emotions that I write are in memory of my beautiful Layne. An extraordinary person who never held back in his writings, and to this day inspires me to share the pain and emotions I feel , as well as why. Layne, you fucking left us too soon and with few people knowing who you really were because of your own tempature for wild oddity - a trait we both shared(share). Layne you always understood my overwhelming and suffocating sense of being alone in a crowded place, and your spirit is truly missed with each line I write about you. With each deep breath I take to calm my shaking nerves, you are always in a shadow and lurking out of the corner of my eye. Even though I know you are really not there, just the flirtation that your presence may be watching out for me, watching over me, and still here with me- is enough reason for me to hope that I too won't succumb to my disease (whatever you want to call it).
I think Layne and I shared hope that a chance existed we would be able to wake up one day and just feel some sense of normalcy and assurance that despite our faults, we are people capable of love and so much more. There are sun spots on some of my days, but sunshine still fails to exhist. Without him, I am not sure if it ever could.
To living life in the moment- and trying to feeling all of the good emotions that can come through an organic high of a simple human connection- I dedicate this letter to you Layne. Each day that I get up, and blind myself from the impending tragedy of my brain's enveloping disease, I dedicate to you. All of this sad series of what has become our legacy has not been in vein. At one point both of us lived life in bold, bitchen, vivid fucking color. We had our moments where we just shined, we were above it all and we owned the night. Popular kids in a radical punk rock, kick ass, world! Regrettably it was/is our inability to deal with the feeling of being alone (or so we suscpiciously often feel / felt) the morning after that made for some great writing, some heavy tears, and left us with a gut wrenching feeling of loneliness and unbridled enthusiasm for just what we both could have really been.
In memory of Layne - As I continue to suffer from the dreamer's disease, I know you are still by my side as I sleep walk through this lifetime. A simple tear is shed for you today, a simple tear in honor of someone who, like me, was beyond reach - lost to time, sliently battling their disease.
Tanya