For Matt

One of my best friends died of a drug overdose almost exactly a year ago today. I woke up thinking about him this morning. I must have dreamed about him. There’s nothing like waking up sad. It is weird how close you can be to someone without even knowing how much they mean to you. Just teaches you that you should never take anyone for granted.
With that said, I guess I should reflect…or not. I don’t really know how to deal with this, even still. It is hard to talk about. Hard to write about. No one can really know what he meant to me and I will never know what I meant to him. It sucks. It sucks that such a brilliant, wonderful person was taken so young.
When I tell people it was an overdose, they automatically assume that he was a long-time user and that he did this sort of thing all the time. People tend not to sympathize because they look down upon the way that he died instead of considering or even caring what kind of person he was. Like his death is somehow cheapened because he wasn’t perfect. But if he were killed by a drunk driver or hit by a bus, saving a child’s life, people would look at it differently. The truth is, he had just moved back from graduating from school and was about to start his career. His life.
He had only been back a few weeks and was hanging out with all of us (the people that he knew best), enjoying being home. And then he was gone. None of his good friends really know what happened. All we know is that he was taking morphine. We know where he got it, and we know where he was, but as far as why, and how much: who knows? He knew about those things. He had taken drugs for many years while he was a teenager, he knew which ones he could handle, which ones he couldn’t. But he rarely touched them anymore. And things were going so well. Until that night. And then it was like “being punched in the chest with a Buick” as Henry Rollins once said.
I grieve every day for Matt. I think about how terrible it must be for his family, having to put their lives back together after he died. I think about how heart wrenching it must have been for Matt’s best friend since he was six to write his obituary. I think about how much he has missed since he has been gone and how much he has been missed.
I guess my point in all of this is that if you are my friend, I love you and want you to know that you are special and appreciated. I don’t know if I say those things enough to the people that I am lucky enough to be surrounded by. I don’t know if you all know how much you mean to me. There you go. Right there, so you can’t say I never told you.