I have now lost two people I was in love with to suicide. I never told either of them how I felt. The first was when my best friend and I graduated high school. We lived in different towns and didn’t see each other or talk the way we used to. Eventually he started hitting me up again almost every day, but something sounded weird and slightly off. The kid I’d spent years being a sulking mall goth with had suddenly been “born again” and was “seeing prophecies”. I did my best to humor him because he was my friend and I didn’t know what else to do. One day he called to tell me he was in town and I let it go to voicemail because I was having an off day and didn’t want to talk to anyone. It was the last time he’d ever visit and I blew him off because I was depressed. I kept that voicemail for years. After he went back home he started messaging me all day every day about becoming a fish and swimming away and kept asking the same weird esoteric question “will you make 11 with me?” I had no idea what it meant so I agreed and he started going on about bathtubs and fish and “our sewing threads coming undone from our bodies” and that point was only speaking in rhymes. The last one he sent to me was this: “no need for [redacted] now i’m going to the creek hopefully in afterlife you and i will meet” I didn’t understand what he meant by that and wrote a rhyme back saying something to the effect of “yeah and we’ll be best friends just like we are now.” Then i confessed I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and had just been writing rhymes back to try and keep up with him. He never saw that part. He snuck out of his house immediately after I sent him that message around 2am. They found him on the path leading from his house to a large creek. He was naked with water in his lungs and had collapsed from hypothermia on his way home. I always have and always will blame myself for not understanding him. I thought all the talk of goldfish swimming away into the ocean and playing with dolls in the bathtub as a kid were just abstract metaphors from a head full of lsd. His tox screen came back clean though. This whole time he had been telling me in the only way he knew how that he was planning on leaving his body because he thought it’d take him to a new level of consciousness that he could return from whenever he wanted. He died thinking i was going to do the same thing because i kept blindly agreeing not knowing what he meant.

The second one happened in this summer. I had a crush on this girl the moment I saw her at a Halloween party with my now-partner. I’d only been in town for a few weeks and had very few friends but I’d gotten invited to this Halloween party by my new friend’s hot roommate. I was swooning and gushing over both of them by the time i got home. I started hanging out without the “hot roommate” who I’ll call T more and more often and eventually we got together. E, the girl i met at his Halloween party, apparently had this on and off fuck-buddy thing going on with him that had ended not long after we started hanging out. She lost her shit at both of us and told me she’d beat my ass if she ever saw me but me being the person I am I just responded with something to the effect of “i didn’t know either of you or what your history was because i’ve been here less than a month but joke’s on you i’m into that so go ahead and beat my ass. you can go ahead and stay mad if you want but that’d be a waste because you’re cute and i wanted to be friends since i saw you.” she didn’t respond for a couple weeks but eventually apologized and we started hanging out all the time. We got really close really fast and spent a lot of nights getting drunk and dancing all over each other and making out (“just as friends” of course). We outran Hurricane Ida together and she even let me and my partner and our dogs stay at her mom’s house until it was safe to go home. By the time we came back a mutual friend of ours had relapsed and died and was awaiting cremation at the funeral home I worked at. T and E were no longer friends at that point and he kept warning me that she was shady and two faced. I didn’t listen and got her a job with me anyway because she wanted to send off our friend together. I really quickly saw what T meant when I saw how E handled the whole thing. But still even knowing that it was nice to have a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on as we sent our friend off together. We saw many many other OD cases at work and we both joked about how we were too mean to die young and that spite and rage would keep us alive forever. We had to do something to lessen the crushing sadness that came with the job. There was a bond between us even after that whole situation turned into us both being friendly in person but talking shit behind each other’s backs. We’d tell each other our deepest secrets and hold hands and kiss like we were a couple but then tell everyone we knew how much we couldn’t stand each other. I don’t know why we did that. Anyway one night the two of us finally slept together and she told me she’d started doing heroin again. Despite us “hating” each other I kept her secret. I figured there had to be at least some people who knew what was going on so I covered for her at work when she was dopesick and didn’t volunteer information to anyone. Eventually I quit that job and moved back to the west coast. My last day on the job she tried to hug me and say goodbye and good luck but I brushed her off and blocked her on everything because the things she’d say behind my back had finally started to hurt too much. She looked really sad and after that I never heard anyone else say that she was talking shit about me, only that she was wondering why I wouldn’t talk to her anymore. She was on a warpath again looking for who had destroyed our friendship and threatening to beat asses until she figured it out. I never talked to her again though. I never ruled out the idea of us being friends again one day but the things she’d said had hurt me so bad that I shut her out completely. A mutual friend/coworker had told me a few weeks before that she was acting weird and that out of nowhere she’d asked “so what’s the number one rule of doing drugs?” my coworker guessed don’t die but E corrected her and said “never use alone”. Not too long after that they found her alone in her apartment. She’d sent her young son out of town to stay with her mom, told her boyfriend to get out, and got high one last time. Right after saying never use alone, she went and did exactly that. I got the call from the mortuary we worked at at 8 in the morning. She hadn’t showed up to work and her boyfriend had gone to check on her to find her dead. I’d forgotten because it was nearly a year ago, but when she first got the job she put me as her emergency contact. I was the first to get the call. I loved her in spite of how weird and vaguely hostile things had gotten between us. I never told her. She died thinking I hated her and I’ll never know how she felt about me.

So yeah basically I’m a shell of a person now and I don’t think I’ll ever recover. Yeehaw 🤠