To the Man I Thought I Could Save

In the spring of 2018, I was an impending disaster. When I picture the colour of that season in my mind, I can see sunsets of flamingo, fire, and gold seeping through the blinds of my third story apartment as I listened to the turbulent theme song of the trash cartoon show I watched to keep the ghosts at bay. That spring, I desperately wanted a saviour, but I would not turn out to be the one who needed saving.

One of my regular 3am night walks that April lead me straight into the path of someone who would forever change my life. The first time I saw James* (*name has been changed for privacy), he was smoking a cigarette and as I passed by, he asked to pet my dog. Despite the fact that I had a friend waiting for me in my apartment, I soon enough found myself sitting down in the wicker chair across from him and letting him convince me to have a quick smoke. Two cigarettes later, we were sitting and discussing our favourite literature and the cosmic implications of theism. I tore myself away reluctantly, and we exchanged numbers — phone and apartment. It turned out he was just a few doors down.

Disclaimer: I am the type of person who tends to get fervently caught up in the moment. Passionate, but flighty, I figured that once the magic of our conversation had faded, James would be relegated to the upward-head-nod from a distance crew, and his peripheral involvement in my life would be rendered into obscurity along with every other stranger I had talked to while in a bar, on vacation, or during the slow song at a concert.

But James was a medical professional who worked strange hours, and I was working shifts that ended in the wee hours of the morning, so later in the week after realizing we were both awake, I called him to come over. It became a habit. The night of my college graduationin May, he brought whiskey to toast my achievement. Long after my other friends had left and my roommates had gone to sleep, we sat on the couch in my apartment, smoking Parliament cigarettes with the window open to the summer heat and watching some dumb show. The most salient part of this memory, two years later, is the fact that we both sat perched on the back of the couch with our feet on the cushions for no reason other than because we could. After enough cheap whiskey, the chatter turned intimate. It was like truth or dare, but for older kids with more frightening secrets. It turned out that James, who outwardly seemed so well-adjusted and happy, was struggling with an addiction to heroin. I was floored. He didn’t…look like a heroin addict. He was well-groomed, well-dressed; handsome. He smelled of expensive cologne and cheap tobacco. He gave excellent hugs and had a brightness in his eyes that could make a shooting star throw in the towel. I am ashamed to say that for a moment I didn’t believe him, that I thought that he must be joking or being melodramatic. But that’s the thing about addiction. It comes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and functionalities.

I valiantly thought that I could help save him. As our friendship grew, I tried to reach out to him frequently and be available for support as he tried to quit. He told me that he had to use before his shifts so that he would be normal, and that once he had several days off in a row, he would slowly start to detox, using a variety of prescription pills, so that he could quit completely. I didn’t know better. He was the expert on the subject, and I was caught in the orbit of the way he poetically described his love affair with heroin. He described to me the pains of withdrawal, the sweaty sheets, headaches, dizzy spells that wouldn’t abate. I soberly wrote stories about him.

One night late in the summer, I went over to James’s apartment. I nosily pushed my way inside his bathroom, assuming he was getting ready for bed, but instead, James was cleaning up needles. He calmly put away the kit full of needles, medical equipment, and the substance that would be his undoing. It was something I had never seen before and hope to never see again. Moments later, James fell into my arms. He was bigger than me, but I lowered him to the floor and held his head while his eyelids fluttered. He grunted and moaned. Somehow, I manhandled him into his bed and laid next to him, my hands on his neck to take his pulse. The way it sped and slowed was different. The beat was wrong, too staccato. But the numbers were within the normal range, and he was breathing. He was mumbling responses to my questions. I should have called the ambulance. I wasn’t sure if this was an overdose or if this was just what heroin looked like… I should have called the ambulance, but he had begged me not to, and I was afraid he would lose his job at the hospital. Instead, I monitored him that night. I took his keys. I periodically made sure he was still breathing. I made him talk to me about Spiderman, his favourite superhero, whose posters decked the walls of James’s small bedroom.

The next morning I texted to see if he was okay, and he told me a story about his friend who had died using because no one had been there to check up on him. He thanked me for being that friend, but I worried for next time, when I might not be there.

The summer wore on and his medical assignment ended. I moved away from grad school, and he moved to a new city to begin a new residency. Over the next year, I reached out to him with varying degrees of success. When his answers grew short, I worried that he was using again, but he posted to social media often enough. He was getting his tattoo sleeve done little by little, covering the scars on his arms and hands and posting the results.

In the summer of 2019, I was scrolling my social media feed when I saw the post. It was his post, but it had been written by one of his relatives, informing his friends that he had passed away. He was only twenty-nine. I sat numbly, staring at my screen. In the moments after reading this, I couldn’t summon a reaction. Guilt shrouded me for my inability to produce tears, but James couldn’t really be dead. At any moment, I knew that it would be revealed as an early-July April Fool’s Day prank. All I wanted to do was call him. “Hey, your family posted this really weird and kind of not funny joke… But I know its fake. You know it’s fake, right? Wanna meet for a drink?” It was a sick joke for sure, but there was no way that it could be true. But the hollow pit inside my stomach knew that it was.

And then came the meticulous processing of grief. I stood at the kitchen counter for what felt like hours, seasoning my cast-iron with salt and cleaning it, scouring until my hands were raw and pink. Over the next few days, I wanted to shake everyone who approached me. Don’t talk to me, you fools. Don’t you know my friend is DEAD? The things I didn’t know began to plague me. Where had they found him? How? Did he still look like James? Was he happy when he died? Eventually the tears came. They still do. At the strangest of moments, I will remember that he is gone, and in the moments after, it begins to feel as though the Earth is tilting from its axis and the thin reality in which I exist is slipping away. Once, when it happened as I was walking home, nothing felt real until I crossed my own threshold. I attribute these glaringly existential growing pains to the suddenness with which James was ripped from this mortal coil.

He always said that heroin would kill him eventually. I never got answers about how James went, whether it was by overdose, his own hand, or whether he was doing better than ever and got hit by a random car and struck down by the hand of fate. A part of me will never come to terms with the injustice of not knowing, or the terrible injustice of my friend being gone for good. I hope often that his last moments were full of bliss, happiness, and warmth. And I am certain that if there is a heaven, on summer nights the residents might just be able to catch the smell of Parliaments on the breeze.

A friend of mine asked what I would say to James if I could talk to him one more time. Since then, I have stumbled through this clumsy monologue so many times, alone in my car, into voice recordings on my phone, sometimes on a fugitive scrap of paper that blurs with tears, and I have never gotten it right.

James, I want you to know that I love you. You give the best and tightest hugs. Thank you for all the times you were there for me at 1am and 2am and 3am and 4 in the afternoon. For letting me bum cigarettes and whiskey and catch good advice even though you knew a minute later that I would turn around and disregard it. Thank you for petting my dog so often and so nicely. In fact, he might love you more than I do, but now he is gone too and I miss you both so much some days that I feel I might burst. James, sometimes life feels like it isn’t real without you. If you are gone for good, how can the rest of it exist? I miss your dry laugh, even though I can hardly hear it anymore, but it is one of those things that I know I miss, because it feels like a small part of me is missing. There are many things I wish I had told you while you were still alive, and one of them continues to be how much I cared for you, because a small part of me wonders if that could have made a difference. I hope that some day I will see you again, but in case I don’t, I will forever cherish the memories we made in the short time we had together. And when I am up in the stifling heat in the dead of night, when the summer breeze blows in through the window and the air conditioning hits just right, and when that stupid theme song plays every time I am hiding from my ghosts, I promise that I will think of you.