Published in Empyrean Literary Magazine, Issue 5, Spring 2023
Author Bio: She is a Leo sun with a Cancer rising. Her favorite movie is The Lion King. Her favorite book is Jane Eyre. Her favorite poet is Louise Gluck. Her favorite color is emerald green (or royal blue; it changes with the seasons). And she feels a lot and writes about it.
Content Warning: Addiction
Editing Playlist: Half Light by Banners, Berenstein by The Band Camino, William by Graveyard Club, Neptune by Sleeping At Last, Elise by The Greeting Committee, Happier Than Ever by Billie Eilish, When The Party’s Over by Billie Eilish, Sometimes (Backwood) by Gigi Perez
An Amethyst Face
Hey Danielle…uh..Danielle… *unable to transcribe* ..um…I just wanted to…uh uh… say thank you for everything… um…um…hopefully I don’t hurt myself tonight, I’m not telling you this so you call me…or…I don’t know, off myself tonight, I’m supposed to be going to rehab tomorrow, but uh… you know… times are hard, uh, I just feel a little lonely right now…if you wanna call me back by all means go ahead…I’m going to rehab tomorrow, I don’t really have anyone to tell or talk to so I just wanted to tell you… cause you know, I…um…I don’t know if it’s cause I’m a leo or just cause of who I am, but uh… you know I like to hear that uh… that um… uh… …*unable to transcribe*… not closure, what’s the word…um… how about uh… I like to hear that… uh… … that second opinion…uh… thanks for everything, um… I’m probably going to rehab tomorrow, or the… most likely the next day, most likely the next day so… if you want you can call me, if not then… I’ll be dead so… thank you for everything but… hopefully I, I don’t think I’ll be dead… because… I got a lot to live for… and… uhh…uhh… I’m… I’m very happy right now… so… thank you… goodbye Danielle… uhh… goodbye.
This came in as a voicemail through the voice of the boy – the man – I’d loved since I was 13. At 20, I was proud to have rejected the call. It was silly, really, how proud I was, as if I was imperturbable, as if at hearing his voice after clicking play – his voice, always a song – I wouldn’t be so completely compelled to call him right back.
Somewhere between 17 and 20 – the muddled years, the purgatory, or, well, the first few years after we broke up – he declared me his own personal angel voice. Our relationship had gradually become one based through phone calls, so it was easy for him to simplify me down to a sound, existing only for him to hear, like with the pauses between his phone calls were lapses in my life. He meant the comment sweetly, but it only brought attention to how powerlessly native my voice sounded to his ears at any hour of the night, like I was a spirit – his spirit, his guardian – instead of a person. I didn’t mind that; in fact, I thought it became me well, and I was waiting in that somber place a while, until I found I was merely waiting, and for a no-good end.
He left this voicemail after I’d gone a few days ignoring his calls with (for the first time) no reason other than that I simply didn’t want to hear him.
Two nights before, he demanded my response through text messages, angry, like I was doing a bad job at ‘angel voice,’ like I was pulling the sudden audacity of not fervently wanting him out of my ass, or like I was merely just the left side of his brain which he was aiming desperately to reach but couldn’t, for the life of him, understand; hey… pick up… why won’t you answer… facetime?… hey… pick up… and he kept on going. I sent back the relentless question that’d been bubbling in my mind like acid or poison all these years, which I’d been persistent in managing to stay refrained from speech, I asked him why?
He said, wym why?… Why what?… Because I want to talk to you… and I said I’m sick of just keeping in touch and he went off in a stream of consciousness, you’re the one making it a big deal… I just wanted to talk… I don’t need to talk to you… it doesn’t have to be a big deal… you’re the one making it deep. Then he sent a bunch of nonsense and jumbled letters like he’d been banging on his keyboard, which was something he and I both did if we fought when we were 15. This is 20.
At the angsty age of 15, our impenetrable infatuations for one another, founded on a distraction from the reality of our youthful ignorance, allowed us to mask how incompatible we would’ve been when removed from our high school friend groups, or during day to day activities that didn’t involve sleep or beds or staying up past the time our parents wanted us awake. At 12 and 13, my parents disconnected my phone often as punishment, for they’d hear me giggling in bed on school nights at 4am while on route to the restroom. In my no-service times, I used my house phone—he did too, when it was his turn, and he’d switch positions from bedroom to living room to basement when his phone service faltered. Boy, we were so young, but our friendship was years ahead in strength.
In our relationship, we liked each other best when waking up from an after dinner nap at his place, and, stationed on the bottom bunk of his bed, could lay quilted in each other’s chests until the night ended, my dad texting he was parked outside at 11. Despite the beauty in that, the first signs of disaster were already deriving their way into our so-innocent first love entanglement when we were 14 and he began wanting to smoke weed all the time, and I wouldn’t do it with him. I was never against his smoking weed, I just had an aversion to doing it with him since his first times doing it were behind my back.
We were in health class together at 11 and 12, learning about the dangers of marijuana and it’s bad rep as a “gateway drug,” and we sat together at middle school assemblies where the addicts spoke about their first experiences being high by pot, and how they wish they could take back that first, tragic hit of a blunt. We were 12 year olds vowing that drugs are not our vibe, that they wouldn’t ever be our thing, and then on the night of our eighth grade dance (and two month ‘anniversary’) our mutual friend told me she saw a text message to a pot dealer that said he was planning to pick up later that night.
See, we were only 13 and hadn’t even been in our first fight yet, so after a quick apology for keeping it from me (he said he thought I’d break up with him and he cried all night, ‘dust’ in his eyes, he joked), I gave him a diffident smile and told him it was okay, which was a forgiveness with repercussions, of course, since his ‘punishment,’then, became a silent vow that I’d never join him. A punishment to him but, unbeknownst, also to me, because each time he’d smoke, he’d accuse me of looking at him differently. I don’t believe I ever did, but he’d always been a perceptible genius, and I suppose he could’ve seen a wall emerging between the two of us long before I felt it there.
Early on, the first time after I’d accepted this was more than a thing he was only trying out, he tried to include me. We gathered his dime bag and grinder and told his parents we were taking a walk to McDonald’s. They hit us with questions like why, it’s pouring out and would you rather me drive you but he kept his lying cool and I made sure to nod and smile and we made a show of walking out his front door and, furtively, tip-toed right through his back gate. We got mud all over our shoes and sat in puddles under his backyard deck to light a bowl he bought from the stoner up the block. He passed me the bowl. He meant to share the experience with me. But the humidity and the rain and the mosquitos and the view of an inexperienced druggie taking his first few hits mixed with a girlfriend’s intuition—I, quite apprehensive, did not want to be part of his experience. I said maybe next time. I watched him get giddy and happy – a dangerous smirk on his lips – and I stopped looking him in the eye.
It wasn’t long before smoking became less a rarity; at 15 he was no longer hiding it from his parents. He typically went to the smoke chair in his backyard after dinner while I, scrolling through social media under his blankets, waited for him to come back inside and kiss me with marijuana breath during the talking scenes of a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Though we were already fated wrongly, up until this point we were perfect. We loved each other—we really did. Things started to go awry at 16. There was an instance when I noticed it; when I felt the powerful balance of mutual desire between two young lovers get shot into space in one arbitrary and meaningless night, and then right back into me. Only me.
It was Fourth of July, we were 16, and we were conscious of how much we loved each other for just a moment before the cataclysm, before I started carrying the weight of it for us both. After sunset we snuck into the field behind our old elementary school to watch the show our town was about to paint for us in the sky, and I caught myself feeling like “one of the boys” as he helped me hop the iron fence, like I, too, fit into the category of kids who’d hop it past dark to graffiti and to smoke. There was an awkwardness to that, to his holding me up, pushing me over the fence—to being reminded that to him fence-hopping and all the works were very familiar but to me they were not. He’d gotten himself into the habit of doing sketchy things like this but, whether on my demand or his I’m not sure, I was typically kept out of them.
On this night, I was right beside him, and when we hit the other side of the grass, I was really seeing him, finally being with him, the troubled parts and all. We sat at the top of the slide, on the playground in the center of a big field, just him and I, his weed, and fireworks popping the sky from all directions around us. It could have been a mere consequence of his sensitivity to the way I was looking at him and seeing him in some majestic way, but I swear on the top of that playground, he appeared to be transcending. It was enveloping us – love was, or something bigger than we were – etching our souls further into the others. We were breathing in the devout. I didn’t smoke with him, but I watched him, I really watched him—each pulsing breath, a heartbeat, a life.
Surrounding us we only heard the quiet of crickets – no conversation, we spoke with our eyes – but from the distance we listened to what freedom sounds like; us sixteen year olds, reigning at the top of the slide in a field that gave us resonance with being in the middle of the world. His skin in the firework light was colored by a purple shadow—I bet I looked of the same royalty, but I wouldn’t have cared to have noticed myself. He was magical, and I’m not sure if it was the backdrop of fireworks or the excitement of law-breaking or just the overwhelming gratitude I suddenly had for his face – his beautiful face – in a foreign illumination, but if I could have taken those few moments of recognition to replay in my dreams or even in my death, I would never let myself wake up. It was the kind of moment people start believing in god for, a real religious experience, a humbling epiphany—maybe for me it was the moment I truly fell in love.
He seemed so mindless to how conscious I was of his appearance yet he completely had me captured. He seemed so in control. He looked like that of an amethyst crystal—a work of art, a piece of nature, a phenomenon. I admired all his subtleties (the finger flicking tick, the way he looked out into the field like he was reading something in the grass) and I paid attention to his face but the worst of it was that his mind – the thing going, but not speaking, just being – was as beautiful as his silhouette; purple radiating off his skin, serenity off his core. His whole essence was that of perfection, of life, and man if I hadn’t already been absolutely screwed by how much I desired him, this was the moment that did it. This was my downfall.
With one glance too long, one reckoning where I overreached at omnipotence, I felt – like it was a part of the wooden playground we sat on – the bold peak that we loved each other in, the ecstasy, and then – as wood rots over the years – it diminishing, seeping from his heart to mine, all that raw, raw love, flowing right out of him and into me. His side of the seesaw rose up, and he kept getting higher and higher as mine fell down, until it was part of the turf, the concrete that we grew up on. I became stuck in a fixed position, sulking in our childhood playground for an adult sort of love, but it didn’t matter where I was—he didn’t notice me. He was soaring, he was soaring high without me.
It was at this moment that I asked too much of the universe. I manifested a love so deep it was bound to soil, a love that could have been spread over 80 years, I destined myself to feel in 4. I reached too hard for the romance I knew from fairy tales and romance films, and I fell victim to the cruelest part of young love—I made a promise in my core that despite the weathering years I would never let him go. How ignorant of me, to think that’s what it meant to love someone; to think love was a fight. I became attached to codependency, and he let me have it. The balance – the seesaw of mutual desire – was tampered with. I felt it too deeply, and now I’m left grappling with the disparity of how that ‘desire’ was solely given to me, of how it’s something that, by it’s very manifested nature, couldn’t have been split between the two of us.
That was our last moment, up on that playground, our very last moment, before I began bearing the love for the both of us, and I’ve been stuck with it since.
Not too long after, he was selling weed, and then xanax, and then he was taking xanax, too much xanax, and then he was taking too much xanax with a girl in the grade below us who also took xanax, and then I was alone. It was our senior year, and we didn’t know yet that I’d stopped being his favorite high, that I was really just his high school girlfriend, that love doesn’t run so deep. We learned that we didn’t know how to love each other past the small realities of our childhood home. I wish I’d known. I wish I’d known so maybe I could have closed my eyes, maybe kept the night meaningless, maybe stopped from angering the spirits who thought I delved too deep in managing our fates.
After high school – after the break up – I left town for college because I thought I’d forget about him there. The reality was it only helped him to forget about me. He was in a relationship with the girl in the grade below us (Belle, her name is Belle), though I took it she was as toxic for him as he was for me. This was bad news; this meant he loved her.
At college, I still picked up his phone calls except for a two week period after I found out he slept with my best friend. I found out the night before my first day of classes; I called him immediately, I said I know you slept with Lucy, and he said okay?, so I told him I just wanted to let you know I won’t forgive you this time and he said so you’re just calling to say fuck you and I said yea I’m calling to say you’re a fucking dick but he hung up before I got the last words out. A few nights later, he called at 2am and woke me out of my sleep. I answered but didn’t say a word. After a few seconds, he asked Hello? I hesitated—his voice, my weak spot. Drowsy, I said, Gabe I’m gonna go, and I hung up the phone. Five years, in a relationship and out of one, he’d been calling me, and it’d never been me to end a phone call; this was the first time, the first time in 5 years I put myself before him.
After receiving 18 missed calls one night at a party, I panicked when I woke and called him back in the morning; I thought he may have been dying. It was just that Belle cheated on him. Belle kept cheating on him and he’d call me and cry about how broken his heart was. Through his tears one night, he slipped out a “she makes me the happiest I’ve ever been,” and that’s when it occurred to me he’d been able to compartmentalize me as his friend from me as his ex; I muted my cell phone and cried, too, our tortured hearts in battle. He’d thank me each night, tell me I’m the only person who understands. There was irony there, since he and I both knew exactly why I understood so well, but neither of us mentioned it, so I’d just listen and cancel bar nights with friends and put off studying for philosophy quizzes to remind him that he deserves the entire world—a tacit understanding, I wanted him to enjoy the world with me. I realize now, implicitly, I was confirming for him that I was okay with settling as a small spawn in his, as long as he’d have me there.
I transferred to a school back home at the end of that first semester—it wasn’t like I’d made any new friendships while being away, I only watered the toxicity he and I had been planting in the space where, once, we loved. We put distance there; we established I would love him after I had gone. At home, we lived within 10 minutes of each other, but spent most nights on facetime, until he’d say he’s tired and I’d say I’ll go and he’d say please don’t and we’d fall asleep on speaker phone and I’d wake in the morning to the dial tone. This lasted two years or so – he was on and off with Belle, on and off with me – differently, of course, since we were only good friends or exes or whatever we told ourselves, and then she was out of the picture.
A few times I slept over. 18 years old, I walked down the street at 2am listening to Mayday Parade and he picked me up in his fathers minivan, snap-back hat still backwards, but his hair a lot longer and some stubble growing on his face, his red-shot eyes glued to me in his passenger seat instead of the road in front of him, he was swerving between the lanes. I said to him “Gabriel, slow down” and he turned his head to me, speedometer at 40, and said “but there’s something beautiful about if we were to leave here together.”
The image of his transcendent face on the top of the playground on that Fourth of July two years before slid into my view like a car slipping on ice, and it occurred to me that a spot for my soul next to his in the afterlife would feel a lot like home used to. I could surely be addicted to that. But I didn’t want him to look at me. I didn’t want him to look at me and it wasn’t that I was afraid he wasn’t seeing the road, but I was afraid he was seeing me and I was afraid I looked nothing like what he thought he’d been missing me for. I was afraid I was no longer beautiful.
We’d go to his place and kiss a bit on the bed we lost our virginities to, though the intimacy never felt as pure. I wasn’t the only object of desire like I had been back when we were younger; now I was just a girl, just a girl he was sleeping with. I could feel it, I could feel the detachment even as we were clashing hips, wondering, while in his grasp, if my skin felt more or less smooth than whoever was last in this hollow space of girl in his bed. I felt a shadow; I felt less than whole. This was vulgar.
The same tragic story for another year. One night he brought me to his backyard; he had a cup of sprite with some kind of medicine in it, topped off with a few bars of xanax and a blunt he shared with me. For the first time ever. I took a hit of his blunt and then a few more and he told me this has been his dream since he was a kid and he can’t believe this is happening. I was afraid this was the moment for him where I looked as magical as he did that one night for me – my eyes drooped and red, barely able to see him, my skin yellow in the dim of his sunroom after the sun was far down, my hair smelling of smoke and old PINK perfume meant to remind his olfactory nerves the bliss of being near me – I had faith, though, that he wouldn’t really remember.
He stood up to take me inside and had to sit back down before his legs gave out. We played a game of scrabble (which he won, that incredible mind of his), and then we went inside to have sex, both really high. He said how he’d fantasized about doing this back when we were dating, when we were fucking kids. I made a comment about how I didn’t know it was hard to kiss after smoking, cotton mouth or something, and he nodded, dismissing me and kissing me anyway, since he’d already mastered sex in this way when he was barely 15. The drugs probably weren’t truly an issue for me either. Really, it was the 3 years of perpetual waiting, post-breakup, for his calls, for his invites, for his love, alongside the tragic truth that he was forging me hollow—actively forgetting there was still a human behind the voice I spoke to him through at night. It was this which made it hard for me to fuck him.
Days later, one very early morning, his call came from his hospital room instead of his bedroom. He’d overdosed. He said he was with some girl and, together, they overdosed. He doesn’t know how he got to the hospital. He complained that the girl thinks they’re a thing now but he doesn’t feel that way for her. I didn’t mention that I was hurt—me and someone else in the same weekend, am I truly that little? He said he’d just woken out of his coma, he was going to rehab soon and they have him withdrawing from opioids and he’s confused and he’s cold. He told me not to talk because he didn’t know what was real and what was in his head, but to stay there, to just please stay on the phone. He told me he was afraid. I was helpless; I wanted to be there with him, oh more than anything I wanted to be there—for him, I swear, for him! I sat up in my bed, resenting the morning shine through my window, while staring, catatonic, at the burgeoning sun shadow on my wall. He broke the silence when he said I love you, but he said it so far away like he was speaking to the air. He wasn’t telling me; he wasn’t telling me. I didn’t know how to respond. It’d been three years since I’d heard that and he was half fucked on drugs and half fucked on sobriety so I asked him what color shirt I should wear to school that day and he said yellow and then he dozed off.
He called me a few times from the community phone at rehab, and he promised he’d see me when he got out. I don’t recollect the content, but there was a moment he laughed about something, and he sounded like himself, like his sweet and good self again. His lovely nature was there at the forefront, juxtaposing the sound of screaming I could hear from other patients behind him. When he came home, he was the same wonder he’d left in 2016. We were 20 and I slept over on Valentine’s Day, though neither one of us acknowledged that. We watched an Ari Aster horror movie (being typical for us) and at one point he rested his head on my shoulder. When it was over, his blankets and his chest had the comfort of back when we loved each other, and this time, it was just him and I again; it felt like the first time again.
The first time we were 14, and we were in his family room watching The Notebook. We didn’t have a condom, so he went up to the kitchen, his family around, and he came back down hiding saran wrap under his American Eagle sweatshirt. We tried with that, the sweet kids we were, but it hurt too much and it wasn’t working, he was so gentle. We decided, for take two, not to use anything. Skin to skin, just him and I. Two children, playing with the things that lovers do. No wonder we fooled ourselves into thinking we were mature enough to emulate being in love. Of course this was years before he became an addict; at this point he still made jokes about how he was only addicted to me. So on that Valentine’s Day when he was sober – when we had sex and he was sober – symbolism told me he was only taking my virginity again, same as all those years before, before this heartbreak. All the times between 17 and 20 didn’t matter, they weren’t him – I was sleeping with drugs and I shouldn’t have been – but this time, this was him again. To fresh starts, to new beginnings, to the two skins who were meeting for the first time in adulthood, I thought man, we’re in love again.
Then the phone calls stopped coming so much except for the sporadic 3ams, and he was suddenly always crying, and though our relationship only really ran so deep as phone calls, there was no thing I ever did better than make him feel loved. There was a night he told me he had something really important to ask me and I thought the moment was coming when he questioned if I’d ever take him back. The climax hit when he spit it out, finally, after my convincing him not to be afraid. He asked if he could borrow a cup of my urine. His drug test was the next morning and I asked if he’s not sober; he told me he is, he is but he smoked some weed last Thursday night. I told him I’m outside – I wanted to be there when I broke the ‘no’ in case he got mad and hurt himself – and he said he can’t come out to meet me, his father will think he’s buying drugs, so I told him he’s an idiot and he’s always been a liar and he sounds drunk and he sounds high and he is never this sad when he’s only smoking weed.
For about a month, I told myself this was it. I told myself I can’t be there for him forever, I told myself this is going nowhere, I told myself he doesn’t want help, I told myself I can love him from afar, I told myself it’s time to be selfish. I soul-searched a little bit, I convinced myself I could try dating again, and I missed him as I should. I just missed him; no tragic and artful poetry about how much I want him back, no self-pitying cry before bed, no angry letters starting Dear Gabe in my notebook.
And then came the zenith, the nights where I began ignoring his calls and texts. I didn’t even feel bad that night, the night with the stream-of-consciousness text messages, the night he said I was the one making a big deal out of just keeping in touch. I didn’t even feel bad. I didn’t answer those texts, I didn’t stay up all night listening to my sad playlist on spotify, I probably didn’t even dream about him. The next night came, and I’m sure he was only on my mind as my ex-boyfriend who I was going to have to let go of; I went to sleep and I woke up, headed to my 12-8 shift at Chick-Fil-A, and came home to eat my parents’ leftover spaghetti for dinner over an episode of The Vampire Diaries. It was a little past 11pm when he called me off his house line and left that rambling voicemail on my phone.
As it turns out, I am not imperturbable. The voicemail was a minute and 46 seconds, and I called him back in two. After all that letting go, after all that moving on, I called him back in two.
He answered, and I was jubilated at his voice – so awake, so alive – he sounded so happy, but the dangerous kind, so I said “let’s hangout” and he was ecstatic at that (I hadn’t been the one to initiate seeing him since we broke up 4 years before) but disclaimed it with a “don’t patronize me!” and I said I’m not, I just wanna pick you up and go for a drive.
I threw on my favorite pair of sweats, his voice coming through the speakerphone on my dresser, and he blurted out “I love you!” and then he took it back as quick as he said it, a simpered embarrassment, but I got the feeling he was only embarrassed for show. He was conscious, this time, when he said it, but it was more of instinct – maybe the familiarity of having his head to the phone when speaking to his mother – than of sense. I laughed it off, reassured him, I know you didn’t mean that, but I wondered if a bit he did.
I was at his house in 15 minutes. This was out of fear—I was afraid; that voicemail left me afraid.
I parked on the curb in our suburban neighborhood, and I texted him I’m outside. I called him and texted him and he didn’t answer. I waited in my car in front of his house for a full 45 minutes, banging my fists on my legs in anger, frustrated crying, staring at the back gate waiting for him to walk out of it. I told myself every 5 minutes, another 5 and I’m leaving, but it was 12:25 and then 12:30 and then 12:35 and I really didn’t want to leave him. It was close to 1am when I decided fuck you and I was done waiting and waiting and waiting for years and years and years, for him to want me like I wanted him. I began to drive home.
About halfway there, I turned around and headed back to his house. I was angry, but still, I was afraid.
Out of character for me, I texted his younger brother who I hadn’t spoken to since I was 17, and I told him I’m outside. I asked him if Gabriel’s awake. He said Gabriel was sleeping in the bathroom but he’d wake him. Five minutes later Gabriel called me and apologized, told me he didn’t mean to fall asleep but he’s coming out now. Another false promise, another 20 minutes I was still in my driver’s seat staring at the back gate and waiting. I texted Karl a second time, I said can you wake Gabe up and walk him outside to me? Soon enough the back gate opened, and there he was. Oh, how I loved him.
I got out of my car and I gave his brother a hug; the last time I saw him he was 13. I said “oh wow, you’re taller than me!” and he said I lost weight. As soon as I pulled away from Karl, Gabriel pulled me in, “hey, you’re not gonna hug me?” he said, and he held me tight, so tight like he was making it one to remember—I really do remember. I wondered if he was thinking back to when we were 13 and we hugged for the first time at a park near our school in winter; we were skating with sneakers on black iced concrete, laughing the lighthearted and free sounds of young kids feeling the early freedoms of adolescence. He asked me to hug him, since I never had, like it was a right of passage in friendship, and I did, and he said I’m a great hugger, like I’d passed a test, and I told him I liked tight hugs best.
Him in my passenger seat, I drove us to the 24/7 halal place up the block, and he kept looking at me and touching my stomach like I, maybe, was a saint manifested human, a treasure to his eyes, too.
Back at his house – which I landed inside, I’m not sure how – he sat at his computer desk making electronic beats, spitting silly freestyles over them – him in his natural element – while I sat on his bed, alongside his brother and his brother’s girlfriend. We held most of the conversation among ourselves– emo stages and animism – while Gabriel came in and out, dozing off and waking, sitting upright on his computer chair. His neck, I thought, I don’t want him to wake with a stiff neck, and I asked his brother to get him a neck pillow—anything to protect him from a little pain. When he did wake up, he told me he was going outside for a cigarette. He asked if I wanted to sit with him on his deck while he smoked. This would have felt familiar. I said yes, and he said he’d be right back; he just had to use the bathroom first.
While I waited in his room, his brother mentioned something about a weird smell that I passed off as just an average comment, and after 10 minutes I made an insensitive joke about what, did he go outside without me? Karl, seeming a little nervous, said to check if the bathroom light was on, so I did and it was. Then, he said something about I don’t like that noise. It was a croaking coming from the bathroom that I didn’t actually hear, but when Karl hurried down the hall to knock on the bathroom door, I did too.
“Gabe?” Karl knocked. Then I knocked. “Gabe? Gabe, you okay? Gabriel?” The knocking got louder, and then Karl and I were banging and I was begging Gabe’s name and he wasn’t responding.
“I think you should get your dad,” I told his brother, to which he said not yet and he pushed the family dog out of the way and from 5 feet back smashed the bathroom door open with his very own body, all his strength—his little brother being strong where he couldn’t be.
Next came the image – the damn merciless image – of him sprawled out on the bathroom floor against the yellow-white, outdated tiles. His face was flushed to a pale lavender, heroin on the counter, Narcan in the cabinet. His lips were blue like they were on movie dates when we were 14 after sharing a blue raspberry slushie, or at 15 on the coldest winter nights after walking miles to each other at 2am to sneak around and sleep together. We’d meet at the 24/7 Dunkin’ in the middle of town and we’d joke that the man behind the counter would get an invite to our wedding, and we shared a pair of gloves so we’d each only have one hand near frozen, but we would have shared a body if we could’ve.
His eyes were closed, but if they weren’t, I bet they’d be the only thing on his physique that was familiar to me. It was his brother who broke the door open, his brother who called the cops, his brother who administered the Narcan. I only fell to the floor and held him – maybe that’s all I was able – and I looked at his face, and it was purple because he was dead. Only for a few minutes – his brother saved his life – but he was dead and I was there, the same girl who spent all those years trying to save him. I was there and I was helpless, still.
I picked up his body – so heavy, I was forced to accept he’d changed, he’d become a man and I barely knew him – and I placed his head on my thighs. He’d fallen asleep here before—there was one day we took a long walk and he got so tired, he fell asleep, his head to my thigh for a full 45 minutes before I woke him up to walk again. I watched him twitch in his sleep and I worried he was having nightmares, and I rubbed my fingers over his cheek to comfort him. Here, there was no twitch; there was no sign of life. Here, I rubbed his face like I would have back then, and I thought it looked purple, purple like that night I totemized him for what has felt an eternity. It was a different purple though, an ugly one, like that of a corpse before the embalmment, but I hadn’t realized that yet. I thought it was the lack of windows in his family bathroom or the overexposure of 4am against the backdrop of the rest of the house in darkness. I blinked twice, wondering if it was my very own tiredness peeking through on his skin. It took me until his little brother told the 911 operator that he overdosed that I realized the purple gleaming wasn’t any manipulation of light—it was death. That’s when it hit me. It was the soul leaving the body, it was the lack of circulation through the blood, it was the lack of a heartbeat. It was the boy I’d loved since I was 12 years old laying limp on my lap. It was the ultimate heartbreak, like he hadn’t torn me enough. I was only here because I couldn’t let him go, because I answered a desperate call and I became the desperate one.
I am not anyone’s savior, but on his constant vow – his constant, drunken, opioid-infused vow that I was the person who understood him most – I prided myself in being there for him long before this night. I found love for myself in being the ‘angel voice’ he so loved me for. That love, that godforsaken love that fooled me into deeming it my purpose for so, so long, this is what became of it. Death.
I cradled his neck as I placed his head back on the cold tile where the paramedics would receive him. This was the most hefty hurt—putting him down, leaving him there. It was almost a total, a complete, a most consummate goodbye.
The ambulance came, light shining red white and blue out the half window hung above his father’s shampoo bottles and behind the dirty shower curtain. There were sirens loud in the distance, like fireworks. That’s when he woke up and he called out for my name, half-unconscious and choking over his words. He said Danielle, Danielle, I’m sorry, Danielle I’m sorry; I often wonder why I didn’t answer him; why, at this moment, I didn’t tell him it was alright.
The universe gave me the image of him dead – a mark in my memory as if he stayed that way – in the same way I saw him most alive. An experience I had twice – the smell of drugs burning, chaos of sounds and colors bursting in the distance, him and I in the center, ever-changing perspectives, his figure quiet and calm in front of me, the curse of amethyst skin – a loop of a love story, a beginning and an end.
Later, after he was hauled off to the hospital, his father skimmed his phone contacts to mark who they’ll tell the bad news to. There were only two people named: his best friend, Gio, and his girlfriend, Veronica. I did not know he had a girlfriend.
I was in his house, a leftover, thinking I’d fall asleep in his bed to feel close to him that night, his brother would wake me in the morning when his hospital nurse called, his grandmother would make me eggs. I was thinking I would stay; that trauma would bond us, that this was only the tragic thing that would earn us, finally, the life we promised each other freshman year of high school. This was just the means to the end. But he had a girlfriend, and she should’ve been here, and it was only me because I am the easier thing to face.
I embraced his father and his brother with my sincerest goodbye.
This is when I realized it didn’t matter if I was in his life. To him it didn’t matter. For me, he was colossal. For me, he was the soulmate. For me, he was the meaning, and for me he was the god. But for him, for him I was a highschool girlfriend, a very kind soul, but I wasn’t magnetic enough to keep him alive. I could attach all meaning behind how badly it hurt to love him, claiming that it was all for this moment, it was all for me to be there at 4am so his brother would be awake and call the police when he overdosed on Heroin. That’s something I tell myself often to equal out the fairness of it; to try to make it worth it, the so many years I held onto a boy I swore loved me just as badly, all for him to give me only the image of his face marked by death with a different girl by his side through his recovery, but for him to be alive, nonetheless. Maybe I’m not as good a person as he believed; the proof of his life does not make it feel fair. Attached meaning or not, it’s unfair that I am the one stuck desiring.
The next morning he called me from his hospital room because he is selfish. He told me how sorry he was, that none of it was my fault. He asked if I’m okay, said he hoped I didn’t think he wasn’t ‘having a good time.’ (I wasn’t, by the way, even slightly concerned with whether or not he had enjoyed his ‘time’). What he said didn’t matter; it was all to relieve his own chest, to return to me his burden of not being able to breathe. He asked me for his brother’s number, see, mine is the only one he’s memorized. It’s with this information that I know he didn’t want to talk to me; he didn’t even want to talk to his brother. I asked him, accusingly, when he’s going to call his girlfriend. He became angry at me for being angry at him; he said it was because he didn’t want to hurt me that he kept her a secret.
He didn’t want to hurt me. This is what he said when we were 13 and I asked him why he didn’t tell me he’d smoked weed for the first time. He said this again at 16 when I asked him why he was hiding texts with his ex, and again at 17 when he resolved on doing what he thought was right and settled for me as a prom date instead of Belle (though he was expelled before putting this into action). He said this again at 18 when I wondered why no one told me he had slept with my best friend, and now at 20, at 20 after I was finally there, right where I thought I wanted to be, but truly, truly shouldn’t have been. He said he didn’t want to hurt me, but that is all he has done.
I wish I could reflect on his place in my life and smile at the naivety of young love. He does, when he thinks of me. He does because that’s what I am to him; because he felt his purest love for me at 16 and the rest of it has been collateral damage for a drug addiction. I was but a heroin high of nostalgia. For me, on the other hand, I loved him in love’s purest form all the many years later, when I was left at no reward, when it was all for who he was, for his depth and his beauty and his pain. I needed that visage—he had to die in my arms for me to see that he was meant to die there years before. Oh, desire. Is that god’s mysterious way of showing me I’ve been holding on to a ghost?
Recently, I was drinking with some friends and I drank a bit much and hit a sentimental valve. I cried to an old friend of Gabe’s and mine, and I begged him to tell me that Gabriel’s still sober. He told me again and again that he hasn’t spoken to Gabriel in years and has not the slightest clue if he’s sober or not, but I pestered anyhow. Three days later this friend sent me a text, he said you’ll never believe who I saw at shoprite today. He said, he told me a few days ago he hit a year sober.
I took a walk that day around my neighborhood, and I saw a rainbow for the first time that Spring. Today we live on opposite parts of the same town. I dream of him sometimes, and often sweetly, but when I wake he’s always gone, and I’ve finally mastered that state of being. He’s been in a relationship for over a year and I hear he’s stayed sober. I’m still on my own, though it doesn’t always feel that way, for I love to read things that make me cry and to write things the same, and I love to listen to music with earplugs and run whilst watching the sun set. I love to watch films that teach me about life, and to see places that teach me about history, and to indulge myself in exotic flavors of tea, and I love to forgive, always. I do sometimes wish I could know Gabriel now, as he’s grown and sober, but that I don’t is not too bitter a loss, for I often see him in the fabric of myself – my once very best friend – and it’s through him that I’ve come to know myself as a profound and resilient lover. But, what I don’t understand, even with all that, is if my purpose in his life – to love him greatly when he needed it – already came into fruition, will there ever be (and, oh, please what!) a great resolution – some grace – for his purpose in mine.
