I haven’t been able to play Magic for quite a few weeks now, but I wanted to write something for this blog. This is unrelated to MtG, and a bit depressing. I recommend not reading further if you aren’t into sad, personal stuff.
When I was 17, I met a guy 2 years older than me when I was a senior. He was a high school dropout who hung around a few of my friends, as it was a small town and people kept in contact for years. He ended up cornering me one day on my way home, gave me a ride home, and we ended up being together for a year.
Thing was, he was seriously damaged. He’d been abused constantly as a kid by his father, who ended up getting arrested 5 years prior to me meeting him. He (my ex) had been addicted to hard drugs since he was a kid, though he’d been relatively sober while I was with him. He just couldn’t cope on his own with all he’d suffered, and I became his therapist/mother/father/everything while we were together.
He also liked to play around with guns. He had a hefty collection; being born and raised out in the country like myself. He would grip his pistol when he was feeling anxious, which he kept in his car and his room. He had a habit of waving it around when he went on one of his rants, something I ended up getting used to after a few weeks. Telling him to put it away would just make him threaten you with it, but he’d just as quickly start laughing and tell you he wouldn’t hurt a fly. I believed him…he was so capable of kindness and affection, when he wasn’t raging about some great injustice he’d seen or experienced. But then again, that may have been another manifestation of his good nature.
He lived with his mother, who was all but despondent the few times I saw her. She took care of elderly people in their homes, so she was rarely home. He basically did whatever he wanted, had the run of the house like it was his. I felt for him, not having a parent around that gave a damn. He’d told me it’d been like that for as long as he remembered, which was another reason his father got away with all he did to him for so long. We bonded over the lack of parental bonds; I too am an orphan.
The real trouble began when I started college full-time, in the next town over. Once summer break was over, I got busy with my courses, and he hated it. I’d tell him that I needed to study, but all he wanted was for me to be with him. He had this need for me to not just be physically near him, but touching him. I’d loved his love of physical affection, having been deprived of that my whole life, but I just couldn’t do it 24/7 anymore. He needed me; like I was his drug. But I was starting to get absorbed in my schoolwork. When I wasn’t with him, and when I told him the reasons, he got angrier and angrier.
It culminated in me wanting to spend Thanksgiving out of town with my adoptive family. He got so mad at me, that I was leaving him for a week. He pulled his pistol on me, in the heat of the argument in his room. He screamed at me the words I’d gotten used to hearing when he didn’t get what he wanted from me…”I’m your fucking boyfriend!!!” I’d had enough at that point, especially seeing him pointing a gun at me from across the room. I burst out laughing at him, so annoyed with the constant drama. He would normally start laughing at that point, and put the gun away, but he started crying. I’ll never forget how he sounded, bawling with the pistol in his hand, as he started scratching his head with it. I walked out of his room, and walked home in the middle of the night. I was done…I’d given up on him.
I saw him a handful of times after I got back from my trip. I found myself increasingly apathetic to him, even when he’d be extra sweet to me as an apology for his last meltdown. I ultimately broke up with him over the phone, worried what he’d do if I’d told him to his face. I expected him to call me nonstop for days, to come to my place and honk his horn nonstop until a neighbor called the police (which he’d done on occasion). To my surprise, he just accepted that I didn’t want to see him again. I didn’t see him after that phone call, and I didn’t hear anything from him directly. A few mutual friends told me that he was heartbroken; that he’d been crying for days. But I couldn’t be bothered to care anymore. I was so drained by him at that point that I’d forgotten how much I’d loved him. I’d forgotten about the nonstop kisses he’d give me, all the late night conversations about anything and everything, and the way our heads would spin with overwhelming pleasure when we had sex. I…was emotionally vacant for weeks after the breakup.
A little over 6 months later, I ended up getting a call from his mother, which had happened only 3 or 4 times. She sounded terrible, like she’d been chain-smoking for a week straight. She told me that her son had killed himself, that “he shot his brains out all over his headboard”. When she said that, the image of his rusty metal power rangers headboard flashed into my head, Just as the shock and disbelief hit me, she told me that he’d blamed me for his suicide in his suicide note. She said it in a suddenly spiteful way, like a one-two punch to my soul. I couldn’t say anything…I just held the phone while she spoke, unloading all of these random facts about the suicide to me after she blamed me for it. How the police told her he’d probably been dead for hours, since she’d gotten home around 2am when she found him. I just froze…I didn’t even move while she spoke. She ended the call by telling me that the funeral was in a few days, and that I could come; that she’d been mulling it over to even let me. I managed to thank her. I immediately felt like I’d said the absolute wrong thing, then she hung up on me. I started shaking, tears coming to my eyes, but I didn’t cry. I just….I still to this day don’t know why I couldn’t cry, but I didn’t. I just laid down, shook some more, and fell asleep.
I can barely remember the funeral. I recall being the only black guy there (my ex was Italian), and the service being very somber, but I can’t remember what was said. I had my head down the whole time, ashamed that I was there. His mother was crying the whole time…and I remember being mad at her. She was barely ever there for him, and yet she was crying. It pissed me off, because I couldn’t even empathize with her. As the service ended, and I was heading back to my adoptive mother’s car, his mother stopped me. She managed to yell her son’s words at me.
“You were his fucking boyfriend!”
She yelled at me, making a scene at the funeral. I started to say sorry, started to cry, but the friend I went with grabbed me and got me into the car. My friend kept saying “You should be ashamed of yourself. He loved that boy.” to my ex’s mother. I continued to hold my head down in shame as she gave me a compassionate talk on our way home. I wasn’t even listening…I was just going over the reality in my head…that I would never be able to make things right with my ex ever again, because he’d just been buried in the ground.
A year later, my dead ex’s mother sent me a long Facebook message apologizing for the way she’d talked to me at the funeral. She admitted to some of the negligence everyone knew she had shown him. It made me tear up a bit, while I read through her humble words. She’d attached pictures of my ex’s 4 page suicide note, which I couldn’t believe. Reading through it dredged up a lot of feelings that I’d left behind months ago, and it tore through me. The letter was filled with vitriol for his family, especially his parents. He truly hated them…more than he’d even told me while we were together. He’d always made it sound like he’d forgiven them for the bad they’d done to him, but the note made it clear that he hadn’t.
On the last page, in the last paragraph…he spoke about me. He called me his rock, his sunshine in the rain. It was more like a poem than the rage-filled hate letter he’d written to his family. It made me smile, reading the first few sentences, until I got to the last one.
“If only he’d stuck around, I wouldn’t have had to do this.”
When I read that, I finally cried. I started bawling like he’d bawled when I laughed at him. I hated myself, I truly and completely hated myself for leaving him. I yelled, and started beating my chest. I curled up in a ball on my bed, and wanted to die. I wanted to die and go to hell for what I’d done. I cried myself to sleep…exhausted in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a kid after a brutal beating.
It took me years to stop blaming myself for his death. Years of studying psychology, years of traveling and meeting people who’d been through similar relationships.
But I suppose…I never completely stopped believing that. It’s more like I stopped thinking about my dead ex; spreading out my remembrances of him to a twice a year affair. Twice a year, I spend a day or two crying and useless, unable to do anything but despair about the loss of my dear handsome love…my Italian stallion….my big man…and all the other things I called him affectionately. Sometimes it’s the way a random guy laughs that sends me into reverie about him…a reverie that becomes a nightmare. I still hear him yelling at me in my head…
“I’m your fucking boyfriend!”
Sometimes I’ll wake up hearing it; like a curse. But sometimes I wake up feeling his big hands rubbing my back, or his thick brown hair rolling through my fingers. I wish I had more memories like that. I wish….urgh, it doesn’t matter. It’s too late, either way.
Disciple of the Vault 