We met the summer before starting college. He was the most charismatic person you could ever meet, and it drew people in like a magnet, especially girls, and he knew it. He was also the absolute smartest person I have, and probably will ever, meet. He was obsessed with music, philosophy, political science, and so much more. and we had never ending conversation’s about the topics, things never felt boring. We were always exploring or trying something new, he kept me so entertained when I find 99.9999% of people so boring. But since the start of our relationship, there was always a battle within him. He was always so torn between being such a sweet and loving boyfriend, and wanting to go out and party, hookup with girls, and basically just go off the wall. It was like he was at war with himself. I will leave out the details, but basically for 3 years straight, he put my through hell, deciding every couple months that he loved me again and wanted to be with me, and then leaving me because he was “young” and wanted to party and be single to get with girls. I know it is crazy that I put up with it that long, but I was just a kid and I was so insanely in love with him, he could do no wrong. He was 2 completely different people to me and to the rest of the world, and would make the switch every so often. I was willing to put up with absolutely anything in order to be with him. He was the only person that I felt fully understood me, and he is probably the only person that ever will. We shared so many conversations about life that I have never had with another person, thoughts that other people would not have. He was my guide and the person I could go to talk about anything and everything.
During our relationship, he introduced me to a lot of substances, all of which I had never done before. This started off as just taking prescription adderall for fun to draw pictures and do homework once in a while, to doing acid and shrooms. Eventually, he asked me to try a Percocet just to see if I would like it, and I agreed because I saw no harm in it. Again we were kids in college and I figured taking a prescription drug once would be harmless, and luckily for me it was. But for the majority of our relationship, besides the recreational drugs we would do once in a while, we were not seriously using any drugs, or at least we to my knowledge he was not. There were times he would tell me he tried a certain drug, for example Sudafed, and I thought absolutely nothing of it. I was always under the impression that he was fully in control of his drug use, and that it was purely for fun, throughout the 3 years that we were really close. Maybe it was because of his charismatic personality, (he was also a narcissist) that I believed this, or maybe he was so smart that he was great at hiding things. I will never really know. But even though I thought it was for fun. I didn’t really understand addiction because I was not an addict.
I still worried about him so much though. Maybe I just wanted to believe it was fun but deep down knew it was darker than that. I had like a sixth sense that would tell me when he was in trouble. I remember vividly, one day I had a gut feeling that something was not right. We were in one of our “broken up” phases, and he had been texting me gibberish all night and then stopped responding. I was driving when I found him in his car stopped in the middle of a busy road, passed out. I woke him up and he immediately said he was fine and drove off, only to total his car later that night crashing into parked cars while driving home. I would constantly have dreams about something happening to him. And even though drugs and alcohol were “fun”, would constantly worry that he would make another mistake like this.
Flash forward 3 years into the relationship, and I finally decide to have a little respect for myself. I became absolutely disgusted with the insanely traumatic cycle he had put me through, so I began to push away from him and we eventually ended our “official” relationship for good. I was so burnt out emotionally at that point that I no longer cared to fight for this shitty “relationship” even though I still loved him more than anything. Moving forward, we would still see eachother very often, but I was kind of tapering off of him for the next 3 years. We would both see other people, whilst still talking to and seeing eachother as well. Nobody wanted us to be together, so we kind of kept it a bit of a secret. He graduated college and moved home, while I stayed in our college town, and that was where our contact really started to become minimal.
That is also the point when his “fun” drug use started to turn really dark (the extent of it I learned after his passing, recently). After he moved home, he had come to visit his friends a few times back in our college town, and every time would show up extremely messed up on pills. At the time, nobody helped him and instead everybody excommunicated him from their lives. He then started heavily abusing drugs while he was living in the hometown that he swore he would never move back to. This all was happening in a period where we had minimal contact. He would randomly reach out to me, asking me if he could “buy pictures from me” or talking to me about insane conspiracy theories. He would FaceTime me and look so horrible. My image of him really began to change at this point and I began to forget the charismatic and smart boy I once knew, now he was becoming a complete loser in my eyes, and someone I did not recognize.
Still in minimum contact, he told me he would be going to Mexico to get treatment for his addiction (using Ibogaine, DMT, ayahuasca ETC). Funny enough, even at this point he still had me convinced that he was fully in control of his drug use, and that it was still fun. He would call me raving about his experience at the clinic, and how he was so confident that he would never use opioids again, and that it was just a phase he could easily quit. And I do believe that from that point, he did get it under control for the most part. I can’t say for certain, but from people who were close with him at the time, it seemed like he was doing a lot better for the last year. He got a new girlfriend, I got a new boyfriend, and our communication really had been nonexistent the last year. I felt as though a weight was lifted with his new relationship, like someone else was finally stepping in to watch over him, and I did not hear much about him anymore.
Flash forward to now. I have recurring nightmares every few weeks about him getting me into a relationship/convincing me he’s ready to be with me, and then disappearing, sometimes dying, and the entire dream I am looking for him, and chasing him around. I am awoken at 7am from another one of these dreams by a call from my childhood best friend, and she sounds so distraught and can’t form a sentence. She eventually gets the words out, “____ is dead”. I just immediately drop the floor and start just fucking screaming. My worst nightmare had come true. He had accidentally overdosed on fentanyl, and his family found him. It was only his second night living on his own in his new apartment.
The last 2 months have been an absolute nightmare for me. I guess there was always a desire deep down in my soul, that one day we would grow up, he would snap out of his ways, and we would end up together. I didn’t realize this until he was gone, and I had lost the comfort of just knowing he exists. Everything is just flooding back into my head. The week of his funeral was an absolute nightmare. Everyone around me, everyone in my hometown knew how much he meant to me, and I was overwhelmed with hundreds of messages of people sharing their condolences. I was an absolute wreck at the funeral, and it was a bit difficult and felt wrong to be in such a destroyed state over a boy I dated years ago, even his current girlfriend held it together 10x better than me. The second I saw his face on the board in the entry to the funeral home, I dropped to the floor. It is burnt into my soul. But for some fucked up reason, I can’t stop thinking about it and actually think picturing the scene brings me some sort of comfort. Maybe crying about him makes me feel closer to him.
He was only 25 years old. He had been clean. I’m assuming he was celebrating his new found independence in his new apartment when he decided to take the last pill he took. After all of his hard work to get clean, one fun high ripped everything from him. He died alone in the bathroom, and was there alone for hours before he was found. The image of a scene I was not even at is burnt into my brain. The fact that he took a pill and was probably so fucked up and just fell asleep with no idea it would be his last day on earth haunts me to my core. The thought of him lying there cold and alone destroys me. His new life was just beginning. He was working on his first book, and has just started a new job. But addiction knows no bounds.
I wish someone had told me the extent to which he was struggling. I know it is nobodies fault, but I feel as though I was one of the only people in this world that ever got through to the sweet boy that he was capable of being. He would have these little moments of clarity, and I just continue to cling to those moments. But it is the loss of his perspective on the world that will haunt me the most, for the rest of my life. There are so many questions that will be left unanswered, and trapped up in my brain. The only positive thing this has brought me is that I am no longer afraid of death, because now I know I will no longer be alone in it. His presence in my life is so intense since he left. Someone I shared the end of my childhood and beginning of my adulthood with. Half of my personality was created with him. All the music I listen to was discovered with him. My favorite shows were the ones we watched together. My favorite hobbies are the ones we shared. My favorite philosophers are the ones he showed me. Shit, he even was the one who introduced me to the wonders of Reddit.
I am not really sure where I am going with this. I am just hurting so badly and the situation is so complicated. Nobody asks about him anymore, and nobody asks me if I’m okay. I think everyone assumes I am because we had not been together for so long. I love him so damn much and wish I could have done something to save him. He was such a beautiful boy. I don’t know if I will ever be able to stop imagining timelines/scenarios in which things worked out differently and he would still be here. Maybe I am just hoping someone can relate, at least in some way. I just needed to get this tragic story out there.
If you read all of this, thank you. If you have experienced something similar, I am so sorry. If you are currently struggling with addiction, I hope this can be a message to you that your presence on this earth may mean the absolute world to someone you barely know anymore. Please stay.
