With or Without You (#2)

 

1987

I emerged from the pool, chilled to the bone, energized. Picked up my towel lying on a bench.

Guitar notes, looping, cutting, from the overheard speakers in the natatorium.

It was an Olympic sized pool, making it impossible to do more than 30 or so lengths each time I came. I came twice a day. It was my therapy and my bane.

Weighing 120 pounds, the water was freezing to me. I would get in that water and sprint my laps, trying to swim faster than my thoughts. It was the only way I could outrun the depression.

Swimming kept me super-charged for up to 2 hours. I was relatively clear-minded in that time, my depression incredibly lifted. But this was my bane, too, because it was so damn psychologically taxing, like swimming along that yogi’s razor edge.

Between the time we had driven to the concert in Detroit until now, I had fallen ill. A grave, clinical depression, anorexia, anxiety.

Sometime in that space of two years, I had gotten religion, Eastern religion. I meditated at first with enthusiasm and blind ambition. I was going to take enlightenment by sheer force of will.

But the mystical path kicked me on my ass. I could recognize my own attachments and aversions, take steps to eject desire and anger from my mind. But hubris and lack of self-compassion were in my blind spot.

I stood toweling myself off, my ears demanding that swooning guitar to reveal more. Bono’s voice kicked in, “And you give yourself away…give yourself away…” My buddies had said they’d played some songs from their upcoming album at that concert. This was it, The Joshua Tree. It was first exposure to it.

Oh my, what a lovely song. It made me ache for the old days – when I was a civilian, uninitiated into yoga meditation, a carefree college kid.

But there was something else here, a gift from the band whom I had passed on two years prior. “I can’t live…with or without you…”

Yes, this was my story, more than anything on Unforgettable Fire had been. What I was doing couldn’t be called living, neither could I live bereft of God, my divine Shiva.