I don’t know where to start with this. It’s hard to type when your eyes sting and are swollen. My friend isn’t dead yet, the key word being yet.
He’s decided that his life is worthless and nothing I can say or do will change that. I can’t undo years of pain and hardship. Nor can I combat a culture that does not believe in mental health.
I am relegated to the sidelines to watch someone I love very dearly suffer and decide that he no longer wishes to participate in life.
I knew this day would come, but I always hoped in my heart I was wrong.
It was always a sticking point between us, me being the optimist and feeling that we could overcome these deep issues, and him being the pessimist who reluctantly humored me for as long as he could. But even he said: “I can’t marry you, because I can’t promise you that you won’t come home someday to find me having blown my brains out. I don’t want you to see that.”
It was eight years we butted heads against optimism vs pessimism. Eight long years of fantastic highs and horrible lows, and none of it would I have changed for the world. We knew we would grow apart and life would take us on different paths, it was an inevitable thing.
But I never anticipated this. I always expected to keep this beautifully close friendship, something I cherish so deeply, even as our lives changed.
But this time things are different.
It’s no longer talk, it’s real. As real as it gets.
Perhaps if I was there I wouldn’t be writing this, but at the same time I can not prevent nor be the one responsible for his well being.
So here I write. Thinking how much it hurts to watch another soul, a good man, suffer. Feeling his life is worthless and serves no point.
It has always served a point to me. He was never worthless, even if all the other people around him made him feel that way.
I was the one who stood by him when he decided to quit law school I supported his decision to stop the madness of following someone else’s idea. I supported him finding his own path, becoming his own self.
I don’t want him to do this, I don’t want him to give up. I want him to fight. But that’s me, and this isn’t my fight.
I want him to run away, to escape the people who are making his life so difficult. I want him to find his path whatever it may be.
I believe there is a path for him, and that there is happiness if he chooses to look for it.
But again, that is me. My view of the world, my relentless soul, my searching for better….. He has never been able to see what I see, either by choice or by circumstance.
I expect that at some point soon, I will no longer hear from him. The line going proverbially dead. I wont know if he ran away, killed himself, or just stopped talking.
I think that is the cruelest fate of all, to be left with an unfinished story. One I can never close, one I can never revisit…. One that will hurt me deeply for the rest of my life.
He will choose his path, and leave me with the scars.
Yes, that is selfish of me, and I do not apologize. I do not want this story to end this way.
He is my best friend and someone I love very deeply, even if we were not destined to be together.
To him I say I am sorry, I am sorry I wasn’t enough to fix this, I am sorry I wasn’t enough in general, I am only what I am. No more no less.
Whatever you choose, be brave. You will always be in my heart.
You told me once, that as we light candles for the living or dead, it makes no difference, because in God’s eyes we are all alive.