The Sum of A Life

The image you see here is what was left at the end of a life.
Thanks to Facebook and the act of reconnecting with high school friends, I just found out that one of my closest, dearest friends from high school died of a drug overdose three years ago. That one brutal line of black text on white is all that I have left to remember him by.
What can I say about him that won’t sound like a cliche? I could tell you how I used to spend hours sitting behind him in class running my fingers through his curly red hair. I could tell you how we came out to each other at the exact same moment on a sunny, summer afternoon. I could tell you about the parties, the laughter, the dancing, the companionship, and the countless hours we spent together, learning, growing, finding our way in the big bad city, finding out who and what we were.
I could tell you how bereft I felt when he moved away two years after high school to pursue a career he had wanted for most of his life. I could tell you about the distance that grew between us as our paths diverged, and how we learned to accept the fracture of something that seemed so permanent just a few years earlier.
I could tell you how happy I was to hear that he was thriving, that he’d bought a home, that he was settled and seemed happy when I last spoke to him five years ago. I could tell you how abruptly his emails stopped, and how I resigned myself to losing him again when ‘delivery status failure’ notices started showing up in my inbox.
I could tell you all of these things, and maybe someday I actually will, but right now the only thing I feel capable of talking about is my anger. Maybe it isn’t the right thing to say, and maybe it isn’t the right time, but I’m deeply disappointed that someone so vibrant, so very much alive threw his life away. I’m upset that he refused all help that was offered by family and friends, and I’m furious that he thought he was so infallible that he could take foolish chances like this. We’ve known people like this — we’ve known people who ended up dead, and yet… and yet…
And yet all that’s left is one line of black text on a white page, and my misdirected resentment.