u/HosewaterJunkie

College life had largely unraveled by this point.

I had pretty much left college and moved home to work with my dad, but I still would go visit my roommates and had most of my stuff at our apartment.

Academic probation was a thing. The honors English Lit program was no longer a thing.

Alcoholism was a thing. The idea of playing music for living was no longer a thing.

I was up there on a random night, and, as usual, we had gone hard for a few hours and went out to see some live music.

Dan, our neighbor, was debuting his new band after playing bass for two years with some guys we knew and loved.

The guitar player, Russell, was previously playing in my recently-imploded band. Imploded because I couldn’t get my shit together and left college. All on me.

We stood in the small crowd and watched them on the stage. My mood was already off, because I hate change. And this was just one of about ten changes that were coming all at once.

But I loved those guys, so I drank my Killian’s, shut my mouth, and enjoyed their set.

Toward the end of the set, Russell switched to a clean channel, and I heard the beginning of “Enter Sandman”. I immediately lost my shit.

I was, after all, the first one within our friend group to figure that song out. Totally by ear, which I was proud of.

I had shown it to Russell. Now he was onstage playing it. Without me. I wasn’t mad at him. I was just made painfully aware of my shitty choices and the consequences to come. And it was too much.

I started to storm out. But Lisa, one of our other neighbors, grabbed me. She put her hands on either side of my face and calmly said, “R, stop. It’s over. And that’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

I can’t remember what happened the rest of that night. I mostly likely drank more, felt sorry for myself, and passed out.

Only to get up the next day and do it again.
Because past behavior predicts and all that.

What is a historical fact is that, a few months later, I was sweating my balls off in the June San Antonio heat. Shaved head. Calling cadence. Chasing a rebirth. Running from myself.

34 years later and I have yet to learn that I cannot run from myself.

I have so many memories of my old friend.

Sitting on that dock late at night, the Georgia heat still thick and oppressive. Roasting oysters we had just pulled out of the marsh. Drinking cheap beer. Watching the lights of the cars and trucks heading to and from Savannah. Talking about everything and nothing. Man, I miss that place at the coast.

The carpet in my S-10 pulled up, his giant frame crammed into the cab, running wires from the Pioneer we had just installed to the Vega boxes sitting behind the seats. Me, a metal kid, cracking up when he told me that the Vegas were a good idea because “chicks dig bass”. But, in his defense, they were good speakers.

That night outside of Hardee’s, him laughing and yelling, “R** GOT THE HAND ON THE LEG!!!” after Alis was flirting with me and did indeed put her hand on my thigh. Dude was like 6’5” and close to 300 pounds, OL on our high school football team. But his voice, especially when he got excited like that, could have been a 12 year old girl’s.

I could go on and on. From 1989 until around 1992, he was one of my best friends. Time and distance and life changed what that looked like, but that friendship never changed.

He’s been gone about two years now. I remember the day I heard that he ran into the back of a semi on I-20. I felt the blood leave my face. Every one of those memories, and a dozen others, came rushing back into my head.

When you get to a certain age, it becomes more and more common to lose your people. That’s life, and it’s something that we accept. But that doesn’t make the moment less shocking or difficult.

Just thinking about my friend tonight…

The urge to blow up my Reddit account again is so fucking strong today.

I really feel like I need to get my shit together. How am I still like this at this age? Still unsettled. Still searching. Still unfulfilled. Still…depressed?

Depression. That’s a word whose definition and application I’ve grappled with for a long time.

For years, I thought I was depressed. Basically my entire life. Then the pandemic hit, and I quickly learned what depression really felt like. It wasn’t the low-grade grey feeling I felt when listening to REM or someone like that.

It was hopelessness. It was day drinking. It was my head on my desk during Zoom calls, sobbing while on mute, “The Veil Of All My Fears” playing in the background. It was forgetting things. It was extreme anxiety. It was isolation.

It was standing at edge of a slab three stories up on the building I was building, looking out over Boston harbor, and debating taking two steps forward.

It was the first time in my life I had ever felt that way. Clearly I hadn’t been depressed prior.

Or had I been and it just wasn’t that severe? Because I’m feeling something now. Not at the level I felt during the pandemic, but something a little more than REM-grey.

All of this came before my cancer diagnosis.

Cancer changes you. It changes your entire perspective on shit. It makes you aware of the years in front of you, and, if you’ve survived/managed your cancer well enough to live a normal life, it makes you grateful.

And I am beyond grateful. Yet I still can’t shake this feeling. I can’t stop my mind from wandering to people and places that it shouldn’t. It makes me feel like a failure. It makes me feel undeserving of doing this well.

Or is this simply me assessing those years in front of me and wanting that picture to be painted differently?

Almost thirty years of living someone else’s life. In someone else’s world. Only recently have I started to claw back some of myself.

It fucks with you, that level of regret. And when you finally wake up and it dawns on you that time is indeed finite, you end up…well…here. Awesome.

”Stop and stare. You start to wonder why you’re here not there. And you’d give anything to get what’s fair. But fair ain’t what you really need.”