At 10:41 This Morning…
…I got a phone call telling me that my best friend of 26 years was dead, and that the cause was initially thought to be foul play, but after finding a note, is now thought to be suicide. It happened Thursday, and that’s really all I know at this point, his friend who called me said that they’d played last Sunday and he’d seemed if anything unusually cheerful and talkative – had he already decided at that point? Did something happen between then and Thursday? All I can think is that I can’t believe it, and that maybe there was something I shoulda woulda coulda done…but… I hadn’t talked to him in a while, we’d done a bit of phone/email tag but we had always had that kind of relationship, where we could pick it up and put it down, and neither of us were any good at keeping in touch by phone. I saw him last November, and he seemed like himself, although I know he wasn’t happy, and I didn’t think that the last time I saw him was going to be the last time I saw him. He sent me an email with a link to the Myspace page of a band he played in on February 25, and three days later he was gone.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to think. When the call came all I could say was “what?!” and “oh my god” and “I can’t believe it”, and all those other stupid things people say, and then I started shaking. I don’t really know what happened, all I know is that his poor roommate found him, and that he left a note with his brother’s contact info. February was always black for him, when we lived together there was one February where he didn’t say a single word to me for something like 2 weeks. I think that February for him was like a whole month of three o’clock in the morning. His birthday is coming up this month, and I know that his health issues had been getting him down. But fuck. Was there anything I could have done? Why didn’t I bother to call him this month, I even thought about how I probably should, given that it was February and everything? But I didn’t. I just didn’t.