What I Miss Most About My Dead Best Friend, Along With Why and When
I’ll try to keep this as least sad as possible, while still saying what I need to.
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I don’t even have a lucid conscious memory of ordering it but very soon after my best friend of over two decades passed away tragically and suddenly from an overdose on March 25th, 2021, I ordered a 12 by 16-inch canvas photo of the last picture we ever took together. Sadly now, one of the far too few pictures we ever took together, over more than a twenty-year span.
In part first, because we grew up before smartphones. The golden years of our youth were spent without them, at best you had a pager, or your mom’s work cell phone for a few hours on the weekend. Then later in life, I guess it was because neither of us wanted to be the “let’s take a picture together” guy, for reasons that probably only straight guys get.
But also, I guess because we thought we’d be able to whenever, for the rest of what we assumed would be our reasonably long lives, together as friends. Friends who were closer to each other than they were most of their own flesh and blood.
The almost perfectly sized canvas picture of us came shortly after I ordered it and has been hanging over my desk in my room every day since. Some days I look up at it and it gives me strength. At least enough to get out of bed, be semi-productive, and not hate everyone and everything for no justifiable reason at all.
On others, it makes me incredibly fucking sad. Sad I had to pick that picture, and that it was without a doubt the last one we’d ever take together. It makes me angry, that I didn’t know that day, would be the last I’d ever get the chance to take a picture with my best friend. A person I called brother, because I considered him one, not cause I thought it sounded cool. We didn’t have to try to sound cool in front of each other, and thats why we were real friends. That’s why I miss him as much as I do because I find it impossible to believe anyone will ever truly know me or get me as he did.
Nobody could accept me exactly as I was and not make me feel bad about it while still constantly getting on me about how much better I could and should be doing, all at once. Nobody could put the…
