Today, I share my story with all of you....

I used to be really, really good friends with a kid a year younger than me named Ian, but I haven't seen him in a while. Two and a half years to be a little more precise, and today is his birthday. I knew it was coming up, I had thought about it a few times in the past few days, knowing the time was near but it somewhat slipped my mind until just a few minutes ago and I immediately felt guilty for forgetting that today was his birthday. Even though we haven't talked in years it still seemed like a betrayal of our friendship to have let even four hours of the day go by without realizing what it was.

I'm sure we all have those friends who we haven't seen in years, but we used to share some really incredible times with, we may even have grown up with them. Well Ian is one of those friends. I didn't grow up with him in the technical sense of the term, but I did grow up with him. I didn't meet Ian until middle school, I was in eighth grade when I first met him, we bonded over the simple shared interest of skateboarding. That's all it took, I liked to skate and so did he, we didn't need more reason than that to be friends. He was a part of the committee that was formed to build a skatepark in our town and so was my brother, I went to every meeting and helped out every event, so we were often in the same places at the same time... Anyways, time progressed, and eventually the skatepark that the entire community of skaters in my area worked so hard to build came to fruition, it was completed. It became a hotbed of teenagers looking for anything from a local skatepark, to a basketball court, to just a place to hang out and kill some time. Summer after summer the same people would come back and do the same things, we could grow and change as much as we wanted but when the sun started shining we found ourselves in the same place each year.

As this went on I got to know just about everyone that hung around that skatepark, and I got to know Ian better, but we weren't close, just casual friends who frequented the same area/had the same friends. We got along well, but never hung out or anything like that. I was still in my video game phase for most of high school, so I didn't really go out a whole lot in general. By the time my senior year hit I was more social outside of school, and I started hanging out at the park a lot more and with Ian a lot more.

I got to be pretty good friends with Ian in the summer of '07, we got high as the sky together and just shot the shit with each other. Ian had a lot of interesting things to say, he had a very unique perspective. The more I hung out with him, the more I'd find myself saying things just to generate a response from him, almost to the point where I'd practically interview him because I enjoyed hearing his thoughts so much. He loved it, he loved talking, he loved to share his views, not press them, but just share them with someone.

The summer came and the summer went, and Ian went back to school in the fall. I was working, at the time it was at a Fireworks store, and come November I started to work at Blockbuster. Sometime around then we first started hanging out at this guys house, we called him Old Dave. He lived next door to one of our friends, and people had been hanging out there for years getting drunk and high, and just doing things in general that as a kid you wouldn't be allowed to do many other places. It became a bit of a haven for younger kids to get fucked up, and we loved it. We 100% took advantage of the old man being lonely, he was happy to have some kids around even if we were using him, which we were. We would go to Dave's and get drunk, or smoke, and just sit there, doing nothing. We'd listen to music and it was just simple, basic enjoyment. At this point I should mention that the usual crew involved myself, Ian, and another friend of ours named Mark.

After a while, we progressed. It's hard to say why, or what lead us to get into the drugs we did, but we got into them. I don't know about them, but the more I think about it the more cliche it becomes... I wanted to get away, from what I'm still not sure, as sad as that is. I didn't have any reason to hate myself, I didn't have anything terrible that had happened in my life to leave me traumatized, but I still wanted to get away. I still wanted to feel good. Sometimes I think it's because I wasn't comfortable with myself, I wasn't okay with who I was or who everyone told me I could, or should, be. But that's another story for me to bore y'all with at another time. Let's get back on track here.....

We started getting high. By the spring of 2008 we were doing heroin. I can still remember beyond vividly almost everything about the first time I did it. As I type this I'm trying to remember why the fuck I didn't stop and think that I was about to sniff heroin, but I honestly don't know why. I wish I had an excuse, I wish I had good reason, but I don't. I had no reason, and that's the honest truth, as pathetic as it is.

After that first time I never looked back, and neither did they. They eventually started to shoot up, but I was scared of that, turns out I had at least some sort of good sense in me somewhere. I spent nights with Ian where we would just walk, walk all around town and just talk. Most nights Ian would bring an instrument, guitar, banjo, or if I was really lucky he might bring his mandolin. He could play anything, and I mean ANYTHING. Any instrument he could pick it up and make music. It was something he got from his father. So it went, we wasted days and nights getting high and avoiding the world. We grew close, I spent time with Ian often and always learned something. I still remember one day at the skatepark somebody threw a bottle into the grass and Ian marched right up to him, looked him in the eye and said "What the fuck is your problem, it's Earth day." And so it was, he made the guy pick it up and put in in the garbage. It was little things like this that made Ian who he was, his love for nature, his appreciation for our world, his respect for it.

Eventually I saw Ian less and less, and Mark became even more of a mystery. In the summer of '08, after graduation, Ian went to camp where he was a counselor for a few weeks, far away from the temptation our close proximity to the streets of Hartford carried. I was doing my own thing at the time, a little distanced from the friends that had brought me into the world of heroin, but never too far. Mark was at the beach, trying to get clean.

After that summer, I never really saw much of either of them again. I talk to Mark occasionally, but very rarely and not more than a text or a meaningless "We should chill soon" facebook wall post. I haven't spoken to Ian since that summer, so he doesn't really know how incredible of an impact he's had on my life. I never told him how much he meant to me as a friend, or how much I've learned from him in all our time apart. At the time it just seemed like we were a couple of kids getting high, chasing the world away and there was nothing more to it. The future was some foreign concept, the present was a gift and that's all we could deal with. I didn't even realize how much he meant to me, I truly didn't, he was just my boy I got high with. He was just a friend I'd known for years and eventually our fearless taste in drugs brought us closer together. I learned more from him then I ever imagined possible, without even knowing it until he wasn't a part of my life anymore.

I'm telling all of you this because I can't tell him. Ian died of an overdose on August 18th, 2008. Today would have been his 21st birthday.

 

It's alright man, this post was as much for me as it was for anyone else. I won't hold it against you lol

 

He was.

One of the best I'll ever have, despite the mistakes we watched each other make.

I can only hope you're right. You're right about bad things happening, all I can do is learn from this, which I've done and am I'm still trying to do.

The real point of that whole huge story is that things become cliche for a reason - Life is precious, you never know what you've got until it's gone, tell people what they mean to you while you can, etc. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in things we forget where we are, or that we're even living, and that can become a great burden to bear when you realize it too late. It took me almost six months to get clean after Ian died, but I did. I've been clean over two years now, but I don't regret my addiction, I learned more about myself than I had all twenty years before that.

Regardless of how much I may despise what I was, or what I watched my friends do, I'll never turn my back on who I am, or what made me the person I am today.

Thanks. I've spent many sleepless nights (like this one I guess, since it's 6:40 a.m. right now) struggling with my own impermanence, I've found there's nothing for us to do but embrace it while we still can.