Before and After

When I was 19, I lost my best friend.

We had dated for a little under three years. We were dramatically and tragically in love. His sister was one of my best friends. We lost our virginity together. We wrote volumes of love letters while he was away at Army training for 9 months. During high school, our houses were very close together and we would sometimes send morse code messages by flipping our bedroom lights off and on (he was grounded from the phone a lot). I have never been loved so easily and without reservation by anyone (not counting Miss M, of course), or at least that is how I remember it.

My boyfriend’s name was Matt. He was lovely. Tall and thin. He had curly auburn hair, sometimes dyed black. He was tan in the summer. When we walked through the mall, he liked to put his hand in my back pocket. We went to different schools, but his sister went to my high school. Every morning when I would pick her up, he would run down the stairs so we could spend a few precious moments talking (or making out). He always had morning breath, but I didn’t mind. He had a mole on his lower left back. His hands were always cold and white. I can remember how it felt to lay my head against his chest. I can remember they slimness of his waist and the way I could feel each of his vertebrae and ribs because he was so skinny.

Matt went into the army the summer before my senior year of high school. He may have had some issues with depression before that time, but it seemed like his depression deepened in the army. I sometimes wonder if he may have been gay or bi and if that contributed to his pain. He parents would not have been cool with that and according to him, the army was a very homophobic atmosphere. Either way, he loved me and I loved him. And he was sad.

I chose my college partly because he would be nearby. After he returned from the army (he was in the reserves), he lived in my parents basement for a few months before moving to an apartment. He was lonely and depressed. He started seeing a shrink and got on some meds. Naively, I thought it would be better when I lived at college.

The night before I was supposed to move in to my dorm room, I got a phone call. Matt was acting strange. I managed to find out what medications he had taken to try to overdose. I called poison control, found out that it was a lethal dosage and called the  police. After driving like a bat out of hell tothe Hospital, I watched him get his stomach pumped and have charcoal administered via a tube in his nose. I moved into the dorm the next day, but I spent the next week drinking orange juice from little plastic cups and visiting him in the psyche ward.

Looking back, that was the day when my whole life changed course.

After that, sometimes Matt seemed better, sometimes worse. His meds were in a constant state of flux. Nothing ever seemed to work. I spent my first quarter afraid he was going to try to kill himself again. I didn’t meet a single person other than my dorm roommate that first quarter because I was on a death watch. When I couldn’t get a hold of him, I would walk the three miles to his apartment in the rain or snow (why didn’t anyone tell me how to take public transit or a cab? I was a small town girl and it never occurred to me.) to make sure he wasn’t lying unconscious somewhere. I was afraid he would step in front of a train on the tracks near his house. (I live near those same tracks now and whenever I hear the train, I think of him.) I would lay beside him at night and listen to his heart beating and feel relieved that for at least that night we were ok.

One day, I walked to his apartment and saw his car, but he wasn’t home. He had tried to OD again and had asked his roommate to take him to the hospital. After another week in the hospital, he was released. He and his parents decided he needed to move with them in Pennsylvania. I was terrified. I was convinced he was moving so he would be away from my watchful protection and then he could kill himself. He promised he wouldn’t.

Matt moved to Clarion, PA when I was in Colorado on spring break. He came back for reserve duty sometime around easter. He seemed happy, but he said he thought that this would be the last time we would have sex (we were broken up due to the move). I laughed and denied it, but somewhere in the back of my brain I heard a hint of desperation in his voice. When he went to take a shower, I searched his car. I can’t remember if I was looking for drugs or bullets or a gun, but I was relieved when I didn’t find anything. I thought we were safe for the time being. I was headed back to school and I was impatient for him to go that day. He insisted that we rock together in my grandma’s rocking chair. I think we sat there rocking and talking for about an hour. And then he got into his car and drove away.

It doesn’t matter how they told me that he died on April 23rd 1995. Or the car ride to see the place in the woods where he shot himself in the side of the head with a shotgun. It doesn’t matter that my best friend from high school flew home to make that ride with me. And that two other friends rode too (thanks, T. if you’re reading this.) It doesn’t matter that I crouched alone, screaming in the muddy woods where he died. It doesn’t matter that his last words in this world were in a letter addressed to me. It doesn’t matter that he was the only person in the world who really really knew me: My melodramatic teenage self. I doesn’t matter that I have never spoken to his sister, my good friend Deia, since that day. Or that his mother called me on the anniversary of Matt’s death to accuse us (me and matt) of being in a cult.

None of these things matter, because changing any of them would not have lessoned my pain one bit.

I am not the girl I was that day when I sat with Matt in that rocking chair. I will never be her again. After Matt died, I spent over a year in a kind of stupor. Even though I went through my day to day life, I felt like there was a constant screaming in my chest that I could not escape. I spent that summer having sleepovers and making out with another good friend from high school, which we have both tactfully never mentioned in the light of day (nor do I plan to now). That fall, I went back to school. I often went a week or more without talking to anyone outside of class besides my roommate. I got a job at a restaurant so I would have something to do on Friday and Saturday nights.

Unknowingly, it was that job that helped me find my way out of the darkness I was in. It was there that I met A. Oh sure, the plot thickened with the fact that I was sleeping with another “friend” (J) and later moved in with his girlfriend so he didn’t have to live with her. (What can I say? It was totally out of character and I was not in a good mental place at the time.) When we met, A had a girlfriend, B. I was sleeping with J and living with J’s girlfriend. I also spent a lot of late late nights dancing my pain away at raves* alone.

But over time, A and I became friends. It was a long hard process. I was wounded and raw. But eventually, he started to love me, even though I was so hurt couldn’t love him. I couldn’t give him even the tiniest piece of me, because I knew he was leaving for China in a few months. Despite all that, his friendship and love was like the tiny flicker of light I needed to start finding my way out of the darkness.

Obviously, with time, we worked it out, but falling in love will never be as easy for me as it was Before. Complicated or not, through A, I met his friend Animal who drove to my city from another city and then Chicago to hang out with me while A was in China. And through A I met our friend ST. who introduced me to SC, who became one of my best friends here and later San Francisco. I could go on and on, but basically every friend I have made since high school can be traced back to A (or to my decision to move to where A was living to be with him).

But all these people didn’t know me before, they only knew me after. When my claws of self-protection where sharpened and my shiny innocence gone. This person I am now is different and harder, and maybe stronger too.

So why am I thinking about this today, almost 10 years after Matt died? Because I went back today. I went back to the town where I spent my teenage years to have dinner with some people I knew in high school. (My parents moved away about 7 years ago, so except for my high school reunion last summer, I haven’t really been back.)

I got there early and drove around town. I drove by the places that were important to us. My house, his house, the places where we made out in the woods, the mall, the movies, the Army recruiting office where I dropped him of to leave for 9 months, the places you go when you are a teenager with too much time on your hands. Seeing all those places and driving around that town alone made it all come rushing back. And so did eating dinner with these people who knew me then.

I started thinking about who I used to be and who I am now. I don’t know who I would have been if I had never lost Matt. I don’t think I really want to know either, but I wish it could all have been different. I wish tonight I had been sitting and reminiscing with Matt, because that is where my memories of my teenage years really lie.

*All I can say is THANK GOD, I didn’t know about the hard rave drugs at that point in my life or there is no doubt this story could have a very different (bad) ending.