My eyes were shut with labored breathing.
I didn't want to be alive anymore.
For almost two hours I forced my eyes to stay shut dreading what’s going to happen in the next few minutes when I step out of this backseat, walk into the dorm and open the door to that dorm room. I can already smell the smell of the hallway that leads to our room and I want to puke.
Questions have stock-piled so fast in my head that it feels like my mind is giving itself a severe spaghetti-western-style gang beating: Will he be there waiting for me? Will he even be there? Will I be alone? Will he want to talk? Will he want to fight? He’ll probably want to fight. I don’t want to fight him. Where would I punch him, in the face? In the throat? Can’t you break your wrist that way? Will he have other guys there to help him? Will he want to talk? Will he completely ignore me? How did I get myself into this?
This is the second to last place I wanted to be. I wasn’t going to kill myself, but I didn’t want to live either and in that moment I wished some act of God would finish me.
It was then, for the first time ever, I didn’t care if the driver went to reach for a piece of gum that he dropped to the floor and accidentally veered off the road, down the embankment, head-first into the streetlight, or a tree, or a freakishly oversized deer.
Being in my dorm room is the last place I wanted to be. But as much as I dreaded it, I went back. It was Sunday night and when you attend an out of town college and go home on the weekends, Sunday night is when you gotta go back.
A friend close to the sitch let me ride in his backseat and he hadn’t said a word to me the entire hour and a half we were in the car. Probably for good reason - maybe he didn’t like me anymore, maybe the air felt so awkward that he didn’t know what to say, maybe he felt sorry for me, but probably, he didn’t like me anymore and felt obligated to keep giving me a ride. It was there, in the silence of his backseat, with my eyes forced shut, that for the second time ever I didn’t care if the driver fell asleep at the wheel and the car plunged into Lake Pepin. I wouldn’t swim.
The night of that party, if that would have turned out to be my last day of college, yippee, bring it on, that sounds great. Getting a job in telemarketing, or landscaping, or asking for my old job back at Arby’s, seemed like a dream.
I didn’t want to be going back.
I didn’t want to be home either.
The first weekend that I went home after the “best friend’s girlfriend, fiasco,” I spent in my bedroom, reading. In my bedroom is my dresser. On my dresser was an envelope. The writing on that envelope was instantly recognizable and the instant I recognized it I completely broke down. I cried because I didn’t have to read it, I knew who wrote it and I knew what was written. Didn’t matter. I read it over and over again. Before going to bed, before getting out of bed. While in the bathroom. Constantly rereading, as if punishing myself. It would be almost a full year before my girlfriend (yep, I know, jerk) would take my phone call to talk about her letter, and us. He called her and told her everything, and everything included a lot more nights like that one.
What other phone calls had he made? What seemed like overnight, my friends from home stopped calling me.
What was literally overnight was that all the friends we made that freshman year at college were now just friends with him. Most of them wouldn’t even look at me.
Party’s stopped. We didn’t go to any and we didn’t have any. My best friend became a roommate and this roommate became a stranger to me. All of his time was spent anywhere that I wasn’t.
The nights that us guys on the same floor would stay up and play card games of Rummy 500 and hearts until early morning, continued, in secret, without me. Maybe they weren’t in secret, but I was never invited again.
All the group trips to lunch ended.
The day after all the finding out was found out, life was over.
It felt like the end of the world.
In all seriousness, I’m not under any grand illusions about this. I messed with the wrong girl and violated a million different codes of ethics, including my own. I’m now 40 years old and realize that wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me.
But please, understand, I didn’t know that. When we’re 18, we’re so simple. We’re so naive.
The reason this one event means so much to me is because it was the first time I had truly gotten myself into trouble and the only time I wanted to be dead. It took 18 years to move past this, but it’s still just beneath the surface.
See, this one event marked the first fight of the biggest battle I’ve been apart of.
Addiction.
It was a big red flag for what was coming every time my lips touched the bottle.
Nothing I was about to bring to my doorstep wouldn’t stop me from drinking for the next 12 years.
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