Suicide and Everything After

May 17, 1999, my best friend killed herself with a shotgun in her mom's bedroom.  Or at least, that’s what I imagine. I don’t know where she shot herself, if it was that room, or her bedroom, resting her back against the wood paneling of her water bed, or with her bare feet pressed into the smooth tile of the kitchen floor. I guess I’ve always imagined it happening in the room where the gun came from because I know she was scared. She had to work up the guts to go through with a Decision like Suicide, at age fourteen, before her life had even begun to take shape (what we don't know when we're fourteen...fuck). And if she pondered it, in that moment, long enough to wander through the apartment, holding the cold neck of the gun in her small hands, with the thought of something as big as Life also in those small hands, she might have chickened out.

About two weeks earlier, Nicole was on the other end of the receiver, choking between sobs. She told me she wanted to die. The reasoning was complicated regardless, but for a couple of fourteen-year-olds, I felt for her in this particular mess of circumstances. She had not long before come out to her family, maybe not as a lesbian, but at least bisexual. She wasn’t sure. Her Christian mother and stepfather were of course completely shocked and unreceptive to reason. No, was their response. No you are not gay, and no more slumber parties, so you can forget about your weekend social escapades. On top of that, her girlfriend had broken up with her, the girl who she’d recognized her own complicated sexuality with had just abandoned her for someone else, a BOY. What the fuck, was all that came out of her mouth. What the fuck, and I want to die. This is never going to feel better. I’ve never been happier than I was then and now I will never feel worse. This is it for me, I can’t make it. It genuinely felt like this was the End of the World, her world. And that afternoon on the phone, I’d calmed her down, somehow made the world seem at least a bit more worthwhile so that she promised me she wouldn’t kill herself so long as I didn’t tell anyone. I promised.

A couple weekends later, we were going to go shopping for eighth-grade graduation dresses. But I was busy with my boyfriend, so I kind of blew her off, said we still had time to go during the week or the next weekend. She yelled at me, telling me I was so caught up in my own life and Josh and that I wasn’t being a good friend. Couldn’t I live without seeing him for just one day to hang out with my best friend? Well, I was fourteen, and I didn’t like anyone telling me I was doing anything wrong. So, I told her to just chill out and we would go next week.

I’m sure you can imagine where this is going. On Monday, when Nicole wasn’t in school, the second I got home I ran to the phone (the age before cell phones) and called her. Her stepdad answered. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what he said. I know he called me “sweetie” and I could hear a lot of crying in the background. I know I slumped to the floor and started screaming, bawling, dropped the phone as the realness of that pain rushed into my body and all around me. My mom ran in, confused, and by then, I’m sure the receiver was beeping.

I have never been a person who is huge on anniversaries. I don’t set aside time every May 17^th to reflect. To be honest, I don’t pay attention to the date all that much. Today, it was late afternoon before I looked up at the calendar and registered the date in my head. I texted Brandon about it, and he asked me if I was ok. Yeah, I’m ok. It’s been twelve years since I wept next to the cabinets on the kitchen floor of my parent’s house in Milwaukee, struggling to breathe, wondering if it was my fault, if my actions had led to my best friend’s suicide. 

What I think about now is all the time that has passed, the person I am now, the person I was then.  I was at the cusp of adulthood— adult emotions, adult situations, adult decisions. I’d experienced almost none of what I would now consider to be BIG life events. In fact, that was the first. I think about everything Nicole never got to do, all the wonderful and horrible things that happen to us in our teens and twenties that make us feel on top of the world, or at the bottom of it, or ingloriously in the middle. I think about the fact that twelve years ago, I was a person that I still can recognize as myself, a more naïve and inexperienced version of me, but not a child (which seems separate). I feel both old, (twelve years and my memory of that day still comes back instantaneously), and young, knowing that in another five, ten, twenty years, I’ll be looking back at where I am now and where I was then in completely different ways.

seventh grade, we were so cool.

I remember the winter night, it must have been 1997 or 1998, I was sleeping over at Nicole's when she closed her bedroom door, whispered that she had to tell me something. She said, "If you want to go home after I tell you, I understand." And then she told me that she was pretty sure she was gay, and she had been recently experimenting with this newfound discovery with someone. Maybe I was a little surprised (we'd been boycrazy for awhile by this point in our lives), but I didn't want to go home. OF COURSE I didn't want to go home. I laughed that she'd even thought I would react that way. "Well, we do share the same bed when you sleep over, so I didn't know if you'd be uncomfortable," was her response. Then we probably put on Hanson, or Silverchair, or Third Eye Blind and danced and put makeup on each other and talked and talked and talked before eventually falling asleep. Livin' the dream.

Yeah, I’m ok, but heavy and nostalgic and wise and confused and melancholic and calm. I scratch Luna behind her ears as she lets out a big, sleepy sigh--it feels especially meaningful, and I don't know why.