syzygy part vi

think about the person you love most in this world. think about your best friend, your brother, your sister, your significant other. think about how it might feel if after a long absence from your life you hear that the person you love most in this world, the person who knows you the most and the person you know the most, has become addicted to heroin, is getting in trouble with the law and before they've even cleared their teens, has suffered a heart attack. then think about them disappearing again. armed only with that knowledge, that they're on drugs and on the verge of certain death, imagine that person disappearing from your life without a trace, without a word. at your request, which, upon immediate reflection, you wish more than anything you could take back.

i was a wreck. i was falling apart. i didn't know how to deal with it and i was afraid to express anything to john, as the last time i ever expressed this much concern and caring and love for mike to my significant other, i ended up with a broken nose, a dented car, a divorce and a baby that would never be born. i made it seem as though i was disgusted with mike. i kept it to myself. i missed him so much. i longed for those never ending nights when we'd lie in bed on the phone and he'd sing silly songs to me like outkast's rosa parks and honky's ladder by the afghan whigs and crackity jones by the pixies. when he'd crack sarcastic jokes and we'd have laughing fits until our stomachs hurt. and we'd talk about spirituality and mysticism and scare ourselves half to death with talk of the supernatural. i missed the times we'd fall asleep and listen to one another's music playing in the background... blonde redhead, cat power, sonic youth or simply to the sound of each other's breathing. i missed being his best friend. i missed him being mine.

almost immediately after telling him to leave me alone i regretted it. i emailed him. i paged him. i called him. i never heard back. i kept trying anyway, until the emails bounced back and the phone number was out of service and the pager number was out of service. i started to die inside. i lost all my motivation. i dropped out of school and got endless dead end jobs. i started drinking a lot and then i started fucking around with the drugs again. i began to be irritated by john cause he wasn't mike and all i ever needed in my life was mike. i thought about him all the time. every night as my head hit my pillow, every morning when i woke up, when i ate when i watched movies when i fucked. mike mike mike. i was filled with a paralyzing, agonizing terror that he was dead. it's all that i could think about and i became an entirely different person with no energy, no will to do anything but watch tv. i tried and i tried and i tried to get him out of my head and i never could.

as the 3 years progressed i learned to live with my fear of him being dead and i managed to pull together my own business. i was still unhappy, i was still completely wrecked inside, but no one knew. no one understood. the simple fact that i had never met mike made people think my friendship with him meant nothing. i thought how odd that must be, to be someone so shallow and closed-minded that they think that a person who made me fix my life and made me laugh so much and made me love myself and feel so many fucking wonderful things should mean nothing to me simply because i'd never met him. and add to that the fact that the guy was a junkie and you've got yourself a room full of friends who roll their eyes at one single mention of him. so i kept it to myself. i was so terrified every day. and i kept it to myself. every night as i fell asleep i'd silently spell out "m-i-k-e" with my finger on the sheet below my pillow and it would send me into dreams that made me feel better than anything in real life had. i would have this recurring dream, and still do actually, of him simply hugging me. and nothing had ever felt so good.

as my business grew, i needed to learn new things and became quite familiar with the different features of google. i started to google people i knew just for fun and signed up for google alerts. i googled mike about a million times and put his name as one of the keywords for google alerts. nothing came up for so long. i figured that was a good sign because if he was dead there would have been an obituary somewhere. so i kept googling and googling... part of what drove it was guilt, too. he had stuck by me through so many hard times and so much stupid shit i did. he was always, always there when i needed him and then when he needed me i ditched him. so i googled and googled and googled and finally, FINALLY, one day i got a result. but it was far from good news.

to be continued...

Labels: mike

posted by Courtney at 12:13 a.m.

Sick of paying so much for calls from prison? Click here, DO Something