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Self Development: My boyfriend committed suicide
A fucking decade on... In memoriam to a boyfriend who killed himself
by Ashley 'Danger' Meeks
It is hard enough for anyone to wonder what might have been if they had stayed with their ex. If you separate because your boyfriend killed himself, there are some things you will never know. Some things - like the boyfriend who died - will stay with you forever.
This is the last thing I want to write about. These details have been relived so many times they are nothing more than the worn jeans and old black leather belts and scuffed shoes and tee-shirts you can grab without looking and combine without thought as to coordination after years of the same routine, the same costume, the same sad clown face.
Ten years ago today, my first boyfriend died. He was 16. He put a 12-gauge shotgun in his mouth in his parents' bedroom and pulled the trigger with his toe. He left his wallet out on his little bed in his little bedroom open to his driver license. Or the police left it there. He had green eyes and straight, oily dirty blonde hair and wore a gray fedora and wanted to be Bob Dylan. He'd bought us tickets to the Dyan concert, which went on, Bob unknowing, two nights after the worst night in my life.
Last night, I relived that Saturday night, where my tears touched no one and no one touched me. I had a nightmare, one of the ones that lasted all night it seemed. My husband of 15 months and "some change" as they say, had been on a plane when it was bombed, or exploded, or something. I was part of a crowd gathered below it, and as the debris rained down on us, I reached up and grabbed the first thing that fell, an American flag. We all searched through the exploded shit that had fallen among us and found nothing. Finally, I found my husband, wounded, delerious, who smiled like a child from his twisted metal box where he had landed.
I did not reach out and touch him or kiss him or say anything to him. He smiled and I took his picture. I took two pictures. Then, I ejected the memory card, a small white pill, and, stupidly, ate it, destroying the last image I would have of him. Then he died.
The next few hours of my dream were much less methodical. I wandered through airlines, passed off by uncaring supervisor to uncaring supervisor, no one knowing about the air accident, no one caring. I was in the most desperate, numb, Indian-widow tears you never get to see on the evening news because they contain no sound bites.
When I finally woke up I was disoriented and the real world was only as real as the dream where I'd come from. The man sleeping next to me with the white sheet tugged carefully over his shoulder, his brown curls motionless on the pillow, warm, breathing, peaceful, was as unreal as someone returned from the dead.
I didn't think until later that it was the 18th, a date that means just short of nothing to everyone. It's now the 19th. Three days, again, before my birthday, which seems less and less meaningful ever since that day.
It is ten years later, and though I do not interject his name into every conversation I can, though I no longer ape his handwriting, though I have tried the therapy and the Zoloft and the illegal drugs and the cutting and the deep dark late night talks and the kicking-the-shit-out-of-myself for being so selfish as to spend any time grieving and mourning for someone I dated for less than a month, technically, though I have spent these almost four thousand days telling myself this is death, this is a cul-de-sac, this is nothing, this is over-exposed, over-talked, nothing more can be dredged from it, you should move on, you should be better.
This is the last thing I want to write about. Unfortunately, it's the only thing I can write about.
My pain is the greatest pain.
Because I am that girl, wondering about some guy who, if the relationship were allowed to go to its normal term, would have probably ended within twelve weeks or so, give or take a day. How often does someone remain in touch with the boy who first kissed her? Never. But because he blew his brains out, I have spent the last ten years, nearly four thousand days, where not a single one passes without serious and dark and ultimate thoughts about this boy who just couldn't stand it - the suburbs, the high school bullshit, the getting in trouble with the police for being out past dark, the PSAT test on a Saturday morning, the kids who were more interested in gleaming white smiles and sex appeal than jazz and blues and John Prine.
He just couldn't stand it, and since then it has made it so much harder for any of the rest of us to handle it. And in the one year after he died, I wrote about 200 horrible rhyming poems about how I couldn't handle it. I got drunk on old amontillado and learned how to give blow jobs in stucco suburban houses. Poor me. I graduated high school, which he never did, went to and graduated from college, and got a job that wasn't in a mall selling Cinnabons, which he never did.
Unlike him, though, I have never found a solution.
About the author
Ptiza Odelay was created in a factory by Nazi scientists during World
War II. She was to be the ultimate weapon against the Allies, but
before she grew into maturity in her birthing tank, the war ended and
the project was scrapped. Years later, she was found still in her tank
in a hidden sub-basement of a warehouse in Berlin and inadvertently
shipped to the United States. During transit the casing of the tank
was ruptured and she was born seemingly in her early twenties with all
of the knowledge of mankind programmed into her brain. She speaks
eighty languages and has been known to crush diamonds with her bare
hands. She is wanted in twenty countries and was last seen diving into
an active volcano somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In her spare time,
she writes popular children's fiction, erotica and groundbreaking
journalism under the name Ashley "Danger" Meeks.Read her 'Confessions of a Recovering Teenager' column
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