Dependency

          He always framed it as a positive. “I keep it clean,” he’d say. “I keep it safe.” The others - the ones in the pictures, the movies, the advertisements, the warnings - they were the result of misuse. They were the propaganda of “The System.” He never got around to mentioning what “The System” was, but then again, I never got around to asking. Those who'd suffered, he'd say, they were fiends, phonies, fakes. He told me he'd never had any issues - never got addicted never sat for hours scratching at the demons that lay just below his skin, never been spit on or ostracized or exiled from the family tree. But it was clear to me that his mental health had taken a turn for the stranger. Like one too many sleepless nights spent screaming at the antichrist had forced him into this reality - this constant state of confusion.

          He was simultaneously one of the most focused and one of the most distracted men I had ever met. He’d talk for hours about the mechanical beauty of the limited slip differential, the magnificence of the word apotheosis, the Tragedy of Othello. He’d talk loudly and brashly; he’d get under your skin and make you itch until you’d found a part of yourself that you didn’t know was there. When I’d drive him home on late nights where the stars didn’t twinkle he’d ask me to go faster. When I would refuse, he’d slowly play at a game he knew I surely couldn’t win. He’d target my soul and my confidence - my sense of self. And sure enough, his “asking” would slowly erode into his “telling” and then into me forcing the cold metal of the pedal down to new depths. I was attracted to him in the way a moth is attracted to a flame. I was drawn to his intensity, to his insatiable desire for escalation - his chase for the next high. Around him, never a dull moment. 

          But his brilliance came as quickly as it went. I knocked a hard rat-a-tat-tat on his front door, and waited for the familiar “cla-tch” of the lock and subsequent turn of the brass doorknob. But it never came. I rat-a-tat-tatted again, harder this time. No response. Perhaps channeling a part of him, I shoved and kicked and punched until a part of the door rotted around my fist.

          There, he lay outstretched before me. The smell of damp woodlands and wasting flesh permeated the air. I hadn’t seen him in a week. He’d asked to hang out, but I’d said no. I’d said no to adventure and no to testing limits and no to his long rants and no to how he kept pushing me and pushing me and pushing me until I thought surely I would break. My actual excuse was something about too much work and too little time. That was a lie. I was a half employed thirty-something bum with no future and no family. When alone, I had an overabundance of the type of time that flows by sluggishly, the type of time that taunts you by its very passing, the type that leaves you listless and dissatisfied by life. Without him, I was directionless.

          But being directionless and alone is in some ways better than being directed by someone else. So I’d decided to cut him from my life. And by the looks of it, he’d suffered more from the withdrawal symptoms than I.

          Kneeling down, I used my shirt to shield myself from the stench of the scene. Little creatures ran around him, busying themselves with the task of moving little bits of something to their homes, their wives, their friends, their communities. On closer inspection, I found that they were moving little bits of him. 

          I shrugged. My friend, this man who’d devoured life with a ravenous desire, a ferocity of focus, was at last being consumed.