Somewhere in the between…

We live a life in which we all dream… Streetlight Manifesto.

A band I was surprised you knew well enough to be surprised I liked them.

Prior to this? Your knowledge of good food, interest in cooking good food.

Before that? Your offer to lend me your car to drive down the street. I can’t quite put my finger on why I thought you were going to be an asshole (and had trouble shaking it.) But I was wrong.

Not chronologically listed but I will put them down; Your desire to talk on an emotional level about things in your life. Which I was and still am pretty sure was misconstrued as an attempt to get laid by any onlooker. You really did want to talk, I do believe, when I passed out due to my Seroquel and I heard drunken drama ensue as I fell asleep. I am sorry I didn’t suck it up and talk with you; because I understand the need to have someone listen who doesn’t have a hand in what I’m feeling.

Your keen interest in mental illness. You being the only one to notice me saying “Hi Poe Thee sis” because I was looking at hypothesis, but somehow not reading the whole word and asking “Uh, hypothesis?”

Putting on TED talks and Taboo? Thank you hallelujah.

A keen interest in things which I would have put past you in my initial evaluation, in which I had decided you were probably a jock type beach boys lookin’ ass.

I didn’t know you that long. I did feel sick to my stomach, I felt horrified and thought it was a joke when I got word. We had a business arrangement involving a marriage license. I was telling you in length all the aspects of the prenup and getting ready to ask you to tell me what you wanted to change or ad

The news was in a message that interrupted that.

And after I realized it wasn’t a prank, I thought back. I thought of how I said fuck no to staying in Tacoma with you and Paddy at the apartment because I assumed you’d be working the whole time. I realized all of the implications you gambling with your life the first time that went unnoticed or unaddressed. Drunken brazen ranger platoon behavior! Dumbass is the describing word. The reality of playing a casino game with your life is something even I didn’t really ponder.

I thought you seemed angry all the time, but I thought it was half hearted. I guessed you must be frustrated because you were intelligent enough to realize you weren’t getting much for everything you gave. We discussed the wage of a soldier, broken down hourly. I’d probably be pissed if I were being paid 2.25 an hour. I’d be mad if the event in which I’m being thanked for my service was actually 12 hours of working my ass off for people when it was my day off.

Today, and right the second I left you a voicemail asking you if this was a fucking sick joke, I wondered why I came back to Montana instead of just staying in Tacoma with you. I did need to pick up a few things. Nothing of huge importance. I was afraid I Wouldn’t know what to do If I did have that “Heading here next!” thing going on. If I didn’t have a mission to be on to my next destination, I might just have to examine what exactly the fuck I was doing with my life. Once I sat and thought about it in Helena, once again, I was a little excited to get married. No, we weren’t having a romantic thing going (Well, possibly, had you been less afraid to slap me.)
but it made me think that I could just relax and go to school and not be so crazy.

I liked you enough to stand the thought of people being able to see we had been married. I attempted to convince you to give me a wedding since marriage ain’t my cup of tea but a classy wedding would be amazing.

So as I wrote you a message explaining the only part being important on my end was my debt not being considered community property for your sake, I was informed you were no longer with us. I was remembering saying “Telll that asshole he better not die before I get dental.”

I made myself think I was being pranked.

Because I had and still do have the most sickening image of a handsome kid sitting alone in his sort of yellow-lit apartment all alone, drinking and thinking about shit no one realized he was always thinking about, being in a place I’m familiar with, a place that seems inescapable. This kid, who’s survived tours over seas in our generation’s never ending war but didn’t look at it as anything that great an accomplishment and didn’t say much about it, is afraid to die. He, when he’s drunk and alone, doesn’t want to live anymore either. And there is no truth in any idea which says this action means he wants to die. This is all because there is no other way to go, and when you’re there it truly does feel like it’s the only escape from a life you don’t want to live.

Bravest of people are afraid to be certain they will feel the horrible pain leading into a dead silence. So he only puts one in and spins the barrel. He sends a snapchat playfully. He’s alive when he responds later. But it might seem he did that same motion twice.

I imagined at first, that the handsome young man is not in fact alone in this story. I imagine someone, someone is there and they are horrified and so is he for a split second before the outcome is the same.

I’m not sure which disturbs me more, the thought of him in drunken foolery accidentally snuffing out what was undoubtedly going to be a brilliant life, one led by an accomplished man who wasn’t what he appeared to be at all.

The other being an image of an all American kid, some kind of movie-quarterback guy with a big smile feeling a loneliness many have too felt. A bleak outlook thinly veiled by anger in public, now boiling over. He does the same thing as last time, there is a bit of horror in the story my mind makes in the split second before impact. Horror because I was a sick girl who attempted in the most honest ways to kill herself regularly without success, often with no one realizing anything. When they had, I was simply angry to be alive. It’s not wanting to die. It’s not wanting to live. It’s a desire to stop feeling, by any means. So he’s scared, and he doesn’t want to die, he just doesn’t want to live anymore. He’s a proud kid. He doesn’t know how to say he doesn’t feel anything good, that he thinks about these kinds of things. That’s not cool, it’s pussy shit, it’s embarrassing.

Everyday being a day to pray for someone to end it for you, something. He ends up succeeding in the worst way.

At first my initial accidental assumption made me feel so sick I thought I might puke. I imagined the logistics of it all, the gore of this horrible situation, the way that his huge perfect smile must have twisted, how he fell into the furniture and was alone for hours.

Now I realize, the outcome was the same, and the feeling in the split second the same in both stories because of our human instinct to survive. The second scenario of a suffering person trying to gain the courage to do what he was rightly afraid to. So engulfed in the oain of their own mind betraying them, telling them that this is the best it’s gonna be.

After finding it’s not a joke, I imagine him there with his blonde hair a rusty red color. I remember hugging him and walking off and not thinking of how pointless leaving was.

I think of a life that even when shit faced showed potential most people could wish for. A kid with a fucking brain in his head and a heart that meant well too.

I called my mom and my brother to say I loved them. I cried like a fucking baby and I almost puked every time I put myself in the living room with my idea of what happened. I thought I might be overreacting, I didn’t know him well enough to feel sick about this, I thought. I realize, obviously, this person was someone who had that kind of effect, a Josh, an Olivia. Someone people really remembered. The really shitty part of  that might be not having gotten to truly know him, only somewhat intimately through intermitted conversation had in private while smoking cigarettes, in the off moments where everyone else was doing something.

True again is a statement I carry in my mind always… “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these; What might have been.”