The updated version.

And whenever you tried to hurt me I just hurt you back it’s always so much deeper…

****

We were co-dependent on inflicting hurt. We stabbed each other in the back. What we didn’t realize…not really, anyway, was that we were in so deep we couldn’t breathe…it scared her more than it scared me. I always thought that we would have endless opportunities…I mean, I was a pessimistic when she ran off with Pacey… but then less than a year passed and we finally slept together. After that I was certain we’d get our chance. And I hoped that deep down she thought that too, that deep down she believed we weren’t over, dead, finished, that in fact we were just starting. But with death comes finality.

****

Joey slapped Pacey’s hands off her waist and jabbed a finger into his chest. “You go and get some more beer, okay? I’m not dancing. I’m too drunk.”

“You’re not drunk. If you were, you’d dance,” he retorted, twirling her around. “C’mon, you only turn 25 once honey...”

“Stop hassling the girl, Pace,” Audrey teased playfully, shoving a drunk in his hand. “She doesn’t want to dance with you, she wants to dance with me.”

“Yes, that’s it,’ Joey wrapped an arm around Audrey’s waist. “Pacey you’ve led me to lesbianism.”

“It’s because I’m so hot,’ Audrey added, nodding knowingly, waving Jack over. “Jack, Joey and I are all in a relationship…”

“Thrilling,” Jack looked at the three in amusement. Wow, they were all really drunk—if they could talk and be comfortable then it was a miracle. Wait…where’s party number four? He looked around the apartment—but no sign of him. “Where’s Dawson?” he asked Joey. “He came, didn’t he?”

Joey wiped her mouth after a swig of Vodka orange and rolled her eyes, “Contrary to belief I don’t have his tracking device.”

“Cool it, Jo.” Jack raised his palms in mock defense. “Since it’s your party I thought you might have known.”

“Joey doesn’t know if she’s straight or a lesbian…which is bad news for me coz I thought we were dating,’ Pacey informed Jack, “So she wouldn’t know where Dawson was.”

“Probably with some actress in a bathroom,” Joey quipped, and as the other three stared at her in surprise, realizing she and Dawson were obviously in argument mode. She grabbed a peanut and popped it into her mouth. “Excuse me, I have to mingle.”

“I’m going to follow her—make sure she doesn’t drink anything else,” Pacey sighed. “We wouldn’t want her table dancing anytime soon…”

“No, table dancing is fun…” Audrey followed him and Jack laughed, ordering another drink at the bar.

****

“Funny, how Audrey turns out to be the invalid,” Joey muttered to Pacey, as she opened the bedroom door open and helped him gently place Audrey onto the bed. Jack followed them, concerned. “Is she okay?”

“I’m fine…” Audrey argued tiredly. “Just really tired for some reason. Someone spiked my drink.”

Joey looked at her watch. “Well, it’s 2am. I’m officially twenty-five.”

“Yay!” Audrey sat up and hugged her. “My grown-up Joey.”

There was a knock at the front door, and Pacey clasped his hands together. “Here’s betting that’s Dawson, just in time for a little Birthday nookie, eh Jo?”

“I refuse to dignify that comment with a reply, Pacey…” she touched his hand and they exchanged knowing looks…it would be him who would spend the night.

Pacey walked out and into the hallway, and swung open the front door, ready with a quip, but he froze. “Oh—you’re not him.”

Two police officers stood outside, and the older fatter one took off his hat and looked at him sternly. “Is…Joey Potter here?”

“Yes, this is me. What’s the problem? Am I being arrested?” Joey walked to the door and put her hand against the doorframe.

“A, um Mrs. Leery told us to come here…” the policemen cleared his throat and swapped glances with the other one. They both looked nervous, and behind Joey, Pacey Jack and Audrey stood up, their faces serious.

“Why, what’s wrong?” Joey’s voice shook for a moment, with controlled hysteria or because her heart was pumping so fast she would never know.

The other cop stepped in for the fat guy, who couldn’t say anything else. “There’s been an accident with your friend Dawson, Miss Potter. I’m afraid it’s…fatal.”

Joey turned away from them, her face as white as a sheet. Pacey stepped forward just in time to catch Joey as her knees gave way and she fell.

****

I was a different man that year. I had lost Jen, and I had lost myself. I became a man I no longer could recognize in the bathroom mirror, and among the force of beauties I acquainted myself with one stands out, her image clear and sharp in the reflection of my bathroom mirror, her lazy smile, her clear sweet voice: “You’ve changed, Dawson, now let’s see if you’ll admit it…”

Had I changed?

I had my own TV show and I was only twenty-five for Christ’s sake. I was looking too hard for my vision, and I think I lost it somewhere along the line there, in the rush to make something of myself. I think I lost more than just my vision.

I was on a short fuse. I couldn’t concentrate at dinners or parties or nights at the movies with Joey. I can still see her looking at me curiously as my mind tumbled a thousand random thoughts. I smoked pot with my producer and actor friends.

At first it was to relax, then it was to forget, then it was to get high. I hated myself for it. I was always such a…good guy, as Joey called me. I mean, okay, taking pot doesn’t mean you’re evil or ‘bad,’ but it went against a lot of stuff I’d believed in as a kid. I even took ecstasy once and drank quite frequently because I partied often. I slept for short hours and drank lots of orange juice and boxed and jogged to keep me sustained. I can still remember Joey’s small hand wrapping around one of my arm muscles as we walked in Central Park, and her surprised and amused chuckle, “Dawson…working out much?”

I even offered some marijuana to Joey, who did it once, just once on a boring night in Capeside when we had all dutifully assembled for my mother’s new husband’s sixtieth bash. I had tried to get her to love me, I think, that night, on the grass near her house by the creek, when we were both so stoned we thought we were floating down it like swans. The wind ruffled the trees, the water rippled, I saw a faceless man walk by and the stars said hello.

I had kissed her, my tongue had tasted her tongue for a few delicious, sexy moments before her body weakened and she lay back and fought me off with one palmed hand. “Dawson…” she had whispered hurriedly, her eyes widening with her pupils. “I’m with Pacey.” Well, duh. It was all I could think about, Pacey…and my Joey. Her final decision.

It hadn’t hurt as much as it did in high school…instead it sort of just slowly burned…and it continued to slowly burn.

I went out partying with Jack and Audrey a lot. They didn’t have a clue if I was, as Joey stated, as a matter of fact ‘spiraling’. They loved my ‘friends,’ the guys who worked so hard with me in L.A, crewmembers, producers, actors. We were all close in a fake, strong sort of way. I was, after all, the same guy.

But Joey started to look at me differently. “You’re becoming one of them,’ she said to me one night at a party.

“Them?” I had looked at her incredulously, a little tipsy. “Who the hell are them?”

“Those snobby L.A director types.”

Oh, sure. “You need to loosen up,” I just told her, sticking a joint in her mouth. She kept it in out of shock, and let me light it, but after one puff she took it out and slid it into my mouth. I surprised myself when my penis stiffened.

“I’m going,” she said softly, dangerously.

“Don’t go.” I grabbed her arm. She turned and frowned at me. “You’re drunk.” She shook herself free and left. I realize now she was madder at me for not loving her like I used to than for being a ‘drunk.’ Because Joey Potter needed to be adored by me, needed to be comforted and supported, and when she fell for Pacey again I just let him do all of that, and in that I lost her even more.

Memories…they’re visions imprinted in the mind for as long as the colors stay fresh. It depends on how strongly the paint was thrown onto the canvas. Some things I’ll always remember: every word, every sound, and every look. Some things are a water color, just sliding and fading and untrue but an impression, there, in my mind.

I remembered so clearly everything…her hands on my back, my butt, urging me on and on and on, her surprisingly loud cries, and her soft breasts…this was back in college when we were still pure. Okay, not that pure, but pure…from each other. We slept together in her dorm room and I can still feel the way I felt when I slid into her for the first time and when she forced me to look into her eyes as I came, something I had never done before in my life…

This was on earth, of course, when I was alive.

I’m dead.

I died young. When I was twenty-five. Pretty harsh, I always thought, to die so young. I was hit by a car…a pretty lame death, but spectacular all the same...I was thrown into the air and landed so hard on my twisted body there was a loud, sickening crunch and, wouldn’t you know, I remember it! And so I started to lurk like the people in “Our Town” but I also had a home. If only I knew the truth about death…it would have made an excellent movie.

I wasn’t murdered or anything tragic like that, and it wasn’t a hit and run. In fact the driver was a twenty- year old college kid who unluckily had had a few beers and was on her way back to her home in New Jersey, and I had just ‘appeared out of nowhere,’ as she said in her statement. I died on 3rd Avenue.

I died the night of Joey’s twenty- fifth birthday. I guess I kind of blew the party. I was heading there, making furious plans to confront her again. “I’ll tell her…it’s time we stopped fooling around, time we sorted things out…” and then I saw the white light, it stung my eyes, and then I saw my dad and he was smiling at me, just before I heard more words from two men standing over this crumpled form on the pavement. Cars honked and honked and people yelled and everything was cloudy.

The girl who had hit me had fainted and was being carried into an ambulance. My stretcher was waiting as the officers tried to assess my death, and as the ambulance officers tried to figure out how to lift me without breaking anything else. I watched the entire thing, from the side, in my clothes, which, unlike my body, weren’t bloodied. My favorite suede jacket was bloodied and torn on my body and I hated that…I hated seeing it. But on me it was…perfect, and still smooth and warm. I was a physical form to myself but to everything on this earth I had hated and loved I was just the wind, the air, the cold breath someone took in the morning, or the chill someone felt in an empty house. And I just watched, curious, not surprised at all, like I had been dead all my life…because it seemed so…normal.

“On impact. His neck broke,” the doctor was telling the policeman, the guy who had to bar off the road which held my broken body.

The policeman then beckoned for his buddies to start checking for my identification—a wallet. They saw the address on my I.D card—which was my mother’s address—and took out the dreaded phone. They then had the nerve to go and tell my next of kin in New York City.

Joey screamed when she heard, when she came to after fainting. After a choke and a squeak, as if trying to catch some air. She screamed and screamed and became hysterical, falling to the floor in her pretty red birthday dress. I wasn’t there, but I saw it.

It is…quite a strange experience to watch your own death heard and spoke about by the ears and mouths of your closest friends, friends who had spoken your name a million times before, who had shared everything with you.

Audrey and Jack had to hold Joey to the bed, and had to call an ambulance to give her a shot so she wouldn’t scratch her own eyes out. One of the police had the nerve to say my neck was broken. That was when Joey started screaming again.

Pacey had swiped a table of glass onto the floor, cutting an artery in his arm. I wasn’t the only person bleeding that night.

And I saw everyone…

In Capeside my mother was sitting on the living room couch with Bessie and her husband. Bessie got up to go and check on Lily, her face streaked with tears for her sister’s kindred spirit, for the family he left behind. I saw my old teachers, my old school friends, all of them. I even saw Joey’s dad, on the end of a phone call from Bessie in his small apartment in New York, his eyes watering up, and I had felt oddly touched.

The night of my death…it was hot, ‘no winds, we’re in for a sticky one. Have a safe night and we’ll see you on Monday’ I had heard on the TV, as I had gotten dressed earlier on that evening.

Kevin Spacey once said… ”Every day is the beginning of the rest of your life except one…the day you die.”

Sam Ball, who wrote the script, was a genius. What would I have done if I’d known? I know the answer to that one…sort of, everything? Nothing?

I went out to dinner with some friends at a trendy café. I had Pizza, I struck a deal with a movie producer to direct the movie version of the book “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt—a story about bratty Greek students at a college who commit a murder or two. It was an incredibly hard feat but I was up to it. I was excited as I made my way to Joey’s around eleven. I then grew angry as I recalled our latest argument and if she’d even care about my news at all. We had been fighting more and more, ever since…that night, the night we forgot everything just for each other. Nothing had changed—except maybe since high school-- Joey wanted the dream, the illusion, and I wanted the realism, I wanted her to stick with me through the good and bad. We manipulated and hurt each other until there was nothing left, and in my death I won, in my death I hurt her to the very core.

Creator of the hit series “The Creek” Dawson Leery, just 25, was tragically killed when he was hit by a car on 3rd Avenue. Mr. Leery apparently didn’t see the 21- year- old female driver who hit him. Mr. Leery was an, ‘Energetic, passionate writer and director’ according to film director professional Steven Spielberg who was a friend of the young writer. “He will not only be missed by the world of television and movies, but by his family and friends who adored him. We have lost an artist tonight…we have lost a great talent.” All flower donations can be made to the number below.

My mother actually tacked this on the fridge, showing it proudly to people. “Steven Spielberg…Dawson loved him.” Well, duh. Sort of. She tacked up all my old posters, all of them until they covered all the walls. I was embarrassed when I walked in there after that. Fifteen year old Dawson…huh. Photo’s covered the board above my bed, and I studied them a lot. Lily and me, me as a baby, Joey and I as kids naked in a bathtub (We were always teased about that one) Joey and I at prom, Joey and I hugging, New Years, 2009, caught out having a private moment on the porch. It was a good snapshot. Joey had her head buried in my neck, and my arms were holding her tight. Every time I saw the photo’s the place where my heart used to be burned.

My dad was the first person I saw when I opened my eyes. He was smiling and crying at the same time, filled with grief for his wife and daughter and their loss, filled with happiness that he was seeing me again. Jen came to me later on, at her own pace. She was upset I was here too soon. She had wanted to watch me get married, and have children. I think Jen is an angel up here.

You won’t know what I saw, how helpless I felt, until you too die. As soon as I died I saw everything, I saw my friends, and I could do nothing. I watched as Audrey tried to take an overdose and watched with relief as Jack interrupted her. I saw when Pacey and Joey broke up on the docks near the yacht club, and saw them turn and leave without a glance back, and I saw them ten years later when they finally spoke again, and they cried in each other’s arms.

All their pain, all their suffering: it was my fault. Wasn’t it?

I would watch Joey sob in her bedroom for the weeks and months after my death, refusing to let anyone near her, not even Pacey. And she cried and cried until after a while she didn’t have any tears left in her. But she still stayed in her room. She lay on her bed and would just look at the ceiling. People would talk: Audrey told Pacey and Jack she thought she was depressed, that she had had so much loss in her life that this loss was just… the end. Her mother, her father, Jen, Mitch, Dawson…

She was right, to some extent. But I knew the real answer…only Joey and I knew that the last words she spoke to me where, ‘I don’t love you!’ after a heated argument about something I can’t even bear to remember now.

The moment Pacey had heard I was dead he had resigned himself from loving her. I knew this and I was angry when I realized it. Joey needed his love, his support. But Pacey had this idea that even in death, especially in death, he would have to compete with me. I loved him like a brother, but all our lives we subtly competed with each other. It wasn’t cutthroat, but it was there…it was healthy, really. But when I found out Pacey and Joey were dating again, I couldn’t deal with it. In my own pathetic way I closed off to them and opened up to my own world.

Whenever I saw them touching, I would clench up. Fuck the stupid relationships we had, because when I died, we were stuck back in the situation we were in high school and I was never able to say sorry. When Pacey retracted from her, when their relationship was shattered I too was shattered…because in death I wanted them to need each other.

Pacey cried by the creek near my house the night before my funeral. He cried and wept as quietly as he could, not having cried like this since he had admitted how bad his dad treated him to his father in tenth grade. He thought he was completely alone on the dock. But I sat next to him, watching him, wanting to hug him, or pat his shoulder or do something…anything. “Why both of them?” he asked the sky. “Why at all?”

I saw Pacey polishing his black shoes the morning of my funeral. His dad was old by then, but he came into Pacey’s old room and sat on his bed. They didn’t speak, but there was something there, and I smiled as I watched.

My funeral…I’ve only been to four. My grandpa’s, Mr. Brooks, my father’s and Jen’s. All people I loved, so I hated those funerals. But you never knew the meaning of hating funerals until you witness your own. I watched from the side, as was my usual position. I saw Joey walk in between Bessie and Alex, big even for fifteen (Well his father was African American and pretty tall himself) and helping his aunt sit down near the front near my mom and sister and other friends.

It wasn’t in a church, it was outside…with nature. The wind ruffled Joey’s hair as it began, and everyone watched the big brown coffin, which held me with trepidation, weariness or complete grief. What did I look like? What did my mom dress me in? I never knew. I sometimes missed my physical form, I missed the creaks and groans, the warmness, even the embarrassing erections. In heaven you can control stuff like that.

I watched as Audrey said my eulogy, in a steady, loud voice, smiling as she went, telling us to remember the good things, the ‘floppy-haired charm’ oh, thanks Audrey... and the ‘love which he equally shared around us girls,” (cue light laughter, even a quick smile from Joey.) She reassured everyone that Jen and Mitch would look after me, that we’d be together. Saying that made my mom feel better, I could tell by the hopefully brave expression on her ageing face.

Pacey was in the middle of his father and Gretchen…she was staring blankly up at the sky.

Joey was looking down at her lap. When I looked closer I could see her nails biting into the skin of her hand. In a move, which mirrored her movements ten years earlier, Alex took her hand into his. But unlike me, Joey kept her hand in his firm grip. Alex then looked exactly to where I stood, and I froze. Could he see me? His eyes were looking at me, not through me, and his brow was furrowed in confusion. I opened my mouth, but then Alex snapped his head back to Audrey.

I’m claustrophobic, so I simply walked away after the funeral. I didn’t want to see myself get buried. Either did Joey, it would seem. While everyone milled around the cemetery, she sneaked off to my house, wiping beads of mascara off her face as she went, and abandoning her heels on the lawn. She rummaged around in my dad’s old tin shed and I watched, amused, as she stuck the long rusty ladder against the roof.

“Be careful,” I warned her.

“Be careful,” she repeated seamlessly to herself after me, as if my words had floated into her throat.

I stood down the bottom and watched as she climbed the ladder. I followed, floating like in a dream.

It was a golden autumn afternoon and sunlight spilled into the room and she walked around in a daze, trailing her fingers over everything. She picked up a framed photo of the two of us sitting under a tree in tenth. She had a sarcastic expression on her face, but inside she loved it, she told me later. I looked into the same prom picture as she did, but only her reflection showed up in the plated glass, only her tears dropped onto the picture.

I tried to touch her fingertips then, but they went straight through hers and through the frame, making a whooshing sound. I stepped back when I felt Joey shudder. She shivered some more when I accidentally fell through her, and in a startling millisecond, I saw every image she had ever behold, from seeing her mother’s face when she was born to seeing the policemen when they had uttered the words, “It was fatal…” and it overwhelmed me until I was a tear, dripping down her cheek.

“Oh Dawson…I’m going to miss you so much…” she sighed to a room she thought was empty.

“I’m going to miss you too.” I answered softly. She lay on the bed and smelled the clean sheets, which may have smelt of me. She buried her head in her arms and I sat on the windowsill, watching her shoulders move up and down.

****

For me it seemed a day. Yet for years I saw my friends and family grow, love, hate, produce and die. I saw it as if it was a movie: but I knew all the details, I was there at everything, I saw Audrey give birth, I saw Joey make love to other men, I saw my own sister and my best friend fall in love and knew they were in love before they did. I saw my mother stop breathing after fighting breast cancer.

****

Heaven. Well, no one called it heaven up ‘here.’ We laughed at the people on earth who called it that. No, this was not all about fluffy clouds and angels and harps, no, this was your own private ‘Idaho’.

We were in heaven like we were when we were our happiest. We were nineteen again, and would be, forever into eternity. Our faces were unlined and smooth, our eyes bright, our hair luxurious. Her breasts were high and ripe, my body muscular and firm. You don’t see a lot of unpleasant looking people in heaven, not that we see many people at all. We’re just by ourselves a lot of the time, on our ocean, which is blue during the day, tinged pink in the afternoon and pitch black at night. We walk on it and sleep on it.

Heaven is…in one word, easygoing. Everything slows down in heaven, and it is what you truly want to see. There is sex in heaven, otherwise it wouldn’t be heaven.

Joey and I are together.

We lean off the rafters of our island and touch the water, and through the water we can see the world and our loved ones. We make love on the sand.

Life didn’t exactly work out for us, but while we had it, we yearned, we hated, we loved with fiery passion, and we lived like no tomorrow. We were too afraid to love each other completely but in a way we did. Up here, it’s forever. It’s true, and it’s love.

THE END