I\u2019ll never drink Bud Light Lime again. Just the smell of it brings me back, heaving and choking after getting the worst news of my life. I struggled to keep it down. Tasting it twice was the only thing that would have made that moment any more awful.<\/p>\n
I met him at my friend Brenna\u2019s Halloween party nearly 3 years before. She was moving out the next day so drunk, costumed young people and a dog dressed as the Yellow Submarine arrived to a nearly empty house. Not feeling much in a party mood, I knocked on the door dressed in a last minute Sexy Abraham Lincoln costume, clutching a paper bag full of records. I planned to play DJ, the stereo being one of the only things still in the house.<\/p>\n
At some point in the evening, a man in a yellow Star Trek Uniform swept behind me. \u201cWhat are you playing next, Abraham?\u201d he asked me very quietly. When I later looked through the kitchen doorway and saw him, head thrown back and singing along at the top of his lungs to \u201cWild Horses\u201d I knew I wanted to know him.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny, on Star Trek it\u2019s usually the ones in the red uniforms that die.<\/p>\n
Early in our relationship, he had told me that he also almost didn’t go to the Halloween party. Like me, his friends had pressured him until he gave in. Over the years, when our relationship hit rocky low points my best friend would say\u00a0\u201cI wonder how different your life would be if just one of you hadn’t shown up to that party?\u201d I’d often wondered that myself.<\/p>\n
He was a genius but he was troubled. He had struggled with depression since he was a small child. He was hilarious, so quick with the most ridiculous jokes. He quit drinking. He started taking antidepressants. He played in a band and when I watched him on stage a calm fell over his face that I never saw in him otherwise, as though playing guitar was the only way he could truly escape all that haunted him.<\/p>\n
We tried for nearly 3 years, but we couldn’t make it work. Not long after I gave up for good it was a hot summer evening and I was laying around, drinking Bud Light Lime and licking my wounds. I got a text from my best friend- \u201cWhere are you?\u201d and then she immediately called. She never calls.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s dead\u201d she said as soon as I picked up. She started crying, which was surprised me because they\u2019d never really liked each other that much. \u201cI couldn’t go on knowing, knowing while you didn’t\u201d. I sobbed and tried not to throw up and then I called my mom.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d hung himself in his closet, a closet that maybe because of the type of wood and the Super Hit incense, the leather and old books and something that was impossible to define made it smell like heaven to me. Divine and impossible to duplicate. Every time he opened the door I\u2019d remark on the smell to him, tell him about a perfumer I\u2019d read about in some magazine, a man who claimed to be able to synthesize any nostalgic scent. That if I was ever wealthy I\u2019d hire that guy to identify what it was that made that closet smell so intoxicating. I don\u2019t want that anymore.<\/p>\n
The strangest thing is that beyond that horrible moment, when my friend phoned and my life felt forever ruined, I felt like I’d died too. Months passed that I barely remember. I felt like a plastic bag, scraping along the road in the wind and being batted in the right direction by well meaning passersby. I wasn’t able to sleep or shower or eat like a normal human. I was only interested in poisoning myself with cheap champagne and trying to avoid being seen.<\/p>\n
The most vivid memory I have from that time is suddenly, one night, getting the idea that maybe he’d faked his death to get back at me. Maybe he was hiding somewhere with a new name and new life. I considered this delusion reasonable for several long moments before I remembered I had seen his body at a viewing.<\/p>\n
The rest of the summer and fall\u00a0went by\u00a0but I didn’t notice. Then one day, a day no different than any other, I felt I had suddenly awoken. I looked around at my new house; saw his cat that I had taken in staring at me from across the room with her big green eyes. I felt like a blinking amnesiac dropped into an entirely new world. Like someone that had just awoken from a long coma. Someone back from the dead. I felt empty and defined by this experience. I didn’t want that anymore, either.<\/p>\n
The cat jumped into my lap. I put on \u201cWild Horses\u201d and began my uncomfortable new journey: getting to know myself again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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