This is my first
experience with trying to write something
personal and
emotional on E2. For the record it is not something I am
100% comfortable with. A lot of the people
in charge around here are unrelenting
assholes. Whether or not it is
appropriate to E2 is not being factored into this "
writeup". I have simply read enough
meaningful writeups here that I feel that they can
help people and I'm going to try to contribute my own in the form of this idea: It's never too late.
If you want to immediately contradict what I'm saying, you'll win. Sometimes it really is too late.
I have a friend now that I thought I would never have again. This guy named Garrett was my closest friend in
high school and we had a lot in common. We had the same sense of humor, a similar interest in
music at the time, and really, we didn't need much more to be friends. We went through a lot together.
He had an intense inability to
let go. He wasn't very good at it and this is the first
lesson I learned from this story. You need to learn to
let go.
His way of not letting go was to place this girl on a pedastal and never take her down. This was the first girl he ever felt a connection with and she fucked up every other relationship he had. He literally told all his otehr girlfriends that they would never mean as much to him as she did and they said they were fine with that (though as anyone could tell they never totally believed it and strove to change that).
One day, he got the girl.
They hung out one day and everything came together. His unrelenting pursuit of her ended with the two of them very happily together. This was the most blissful event of Garrett's life I think.
As with a lot of stories like this the bliss was short-lived. They were happy together for only a few weeks I think. The thing that tore them apart was Garrett's inability to let go, again. He had painted a picture in his head of what he wanted and he wanted to be with her forever. He wanted them to get married and settle down and raise a family. He wasn't a stupid person at all, in every other element of his life he was very intelligent, he was senior class president of our high school and was in all sorts of honors and AP classes (not that any of that has to do with intelligence) and he was just generally a smart guy. For all his other brilliance he could never understand why this girl wouldn't want to settle down with him. To everyone else it was pretty obvious, "You two are 19 and 18, it's a bit too early for that". But that fell on deaf ears with Garrett. He had his vision of the future and he was unable to let go.
Skipping a year ahead, Garrett and I aren't friends anymore. A year after he seperated terribly with this girl he and I weren't friends.
This is rather complex, there are a lot of factors in it, but a lot of it centers around drugs. I don't do drugs. I never have and I don't have any current plans to. At the time I saw less value in them than I do now and right now I don't much want to get involved with them. Garrett chose very openly and straight-forwardly to narcotize himself and do his best to hit rock-bottom.
Like I said, the story is much more complex than just this, but to sum it up, he did his best to destroy himself. He wanted to forget everything and I didn't want to stick around to watch.
'Not sticking around to watch' was my way of putting it at the time. Now I think I'd call it more 'cruelly abandoning someone who needed my help no matter how much they asserted that they didn't'. Such is life.
Earlier this year, a few days after Valentine's day I was talking to a girl I was very close to, who was also close to Garrett. She had originally made the same decision I had, to let Garrett do his self-destruction thing but eventually she went back to being his friend and trying to help him.
So a few days after Valentine's day we're talking and she gets another call. When she switches back over to me she barely stays on the line long enough to relay the message: Garrett isn't breathing.
The toxicology report on Garrett's blood said that he had heroin, cocaine and speed in his system in varying amounts. No one was sure if he injected these all at once or if some of it was residual from the day before.
I could write hundreds of pages about this experience, this friendship and all that this has meant to me and how it has impacted me, but I don't much feel like sharing that stuff, nevermind the fact that it's really not that helpful.
What is helpful is remembering that it is never too late to rebuild a lost connection.
I was actually very lucky in this regard, just about as lucky as Garrett was to survive his overdose, which he did. He is not the same person he was at all. In a beautiful and astonishingly painful twist to this story, Garrett got just what he wanted. He forgot all of the pain he was going through and had been through. Being without oxygen to his brain for so long damaged his brain severely and destroyed his ability to form new memories.
See also:
Memento: a Film by
Christopher Nolan.
He accomplished exactly what he wanted and came within a minute or so of dying doing it.
He performed the surgical removal of just what he wanted to remove. See also:
Pi: A film by
Darren Aronofsky.
Again, I could write forever on how I feel about this, but it's not relevant. It's mine. What is relevant is remembering that all the people you write-off don't need to be written off. People can change. You can change. It's a huge task to just
jettison all your hate, all your
intolerance and all your bullshit, but you might have to if you ever take a good look at your life and your decisions.
Maybe this writeup sucks. Whatever.