I long imagined the day I would turn 21 as an earth-shattering milestone, and a step out of the teenage years I navigated with affected poise. I'd head out for a night with my friends, my close friends, some of whom had been with me for many years, some of whom I might have met just that evening, and we'd fill our glasses with concentrated poison. I'd raise my glass and poison myself to celebrate an escape from a prison that had been constructed around me.
I imagined this day long before I first tasted alcohol, long before I first even had an interest in trying alcohol. As a teenager, everything about the world outside seems alienating, and you begin to think that the sole things you find happiness in are the only things that can understand you. This myopia fades as you grow older, but the same feelings of alienation can sometimes creep up on you.
Only when I systematically dissect the way I thought about everything back then do I have the audacity to say I struggled with depression. At the time I dismissed a lot of it as just me being an idiot teenager with no problems.
I dismissed it as that when I left those years of my life, thinking I'd left the beast that'd sit on my chest and suffocate me to sleep behind me as well.
I began to drink when I realized it had followed me and would follow me no matter how far I went from where I'd first met it. Drinking blinded me to it. It blinded me to insecurity, but it also blinded me to measure. I became a truly toxic individual to be around, and I lost a lot of people important to me. One would later kill himself, and the friends I lost during this time would ignore me at the funeral.
It was long after I'd started pathologically drinking to induce a particular mind state that I realized that all the faces around the imaginary table of my dream 21st had disappeared. In fact, the table had gotten lower, the bar had morphed into a ***ty apartment, and the liquor had been replaced by a 6 pack of Lone Star tallboys, and I had an incipient beer gut.
You were there for me during those first few attempts at truncating my tenure on this world. You left shortly before the last of those series of attempts. We were never real. We were both fundamentally different people than we were in our heart of hearts when our crumpled paper balls mingled in the unlined trash can that was our home town. I will never truly know the magnitude of what was going on in your life. If I had, perhaps something better would have come of us, but as it was it was doomed from the start. I was your bastion and you were my angel. Neither of us was suited to be those things.
Maybe when I do turn 21 I'll spend it with friends. At this point that seems more like a reality than it did even a year ago. In 9 months, I think I'll be okay. I don't know if that'll be how I want to do it though.
Perhaps it is simply how I view these issues, and my fundamental inability to be angry at you. Perhaps it's just because I'm a stupid sentimental idiot, who cannot stop seeing your face, years removed from the last time I ever saw it, even though I no longer bear any of the feelings I ever did for you. I fundamentally do not have any conception of you, all I know is that somewhere you are happy. Soon you will be married, I think. I don't know. That's what I gathered from the last time we spoke. I think I will be in the next 10 years, and I think I know who I'll be married to as well. This makes me happy, I think. Mostly it just feels like everything worked out the way it was supposed to.
Yet it follows me. I don't feel its fingers collapse my windpipe anymore, but I see it sometimes. I'm walking away from it faster than it knows how to follow.
The last time I tried to kill myself will be two years in the past when I turn 21.
I need a beer. I need to delete this album from my hard drive.
