Breathing Lessons

The suicide note arrived by text mid-afternoon on an otherwise unremarkable day.  Sadly, typical of my friend Gregg.  I call his cell to talk him off the ledge and get an automated recording telling me that his mail box is full.  Also typical.  I try many times. Then I wait.

I first met Gregg when I was 17.  We  went to vocational school together. I fell in lust with his shag haircut, his thick neck and his (a miracle in highschool), mustache.  He wore his shirts open revealing a hairless chest, a feature I still fancy today.  When I first laid eyes on him I decided he was the guy I was going to give my virginity to. In later years he confessed he thought the same thing.

We were both wrong. It never happened.

Throughout our teens we flirted back and forth trying to define what we were to each other.  Friends? Dates? Something else? We kissed a few times, stiff and awkward, something I translated as indifference, but later discovered it was his profound social anxiety.   We made out once in my 68 Mustang.  It was good, but then I was full of hormones, everything felt good.  But by 19  I had a sense that if we got together, became a couple, I could never pry myself free that I would get pulled down into his  self-absorbed world. I would drown trying to keep his head above water.

 

I have to resort to texting him back my worry, my concern, my love.  Then I look at my phone: silence.

In our twenties, he chased me by phone, calling from Georgia, from Virginia from Greece. I was safe quarry: I  was happily married to the Booger Picker at the time and too busy planning the rest of my life to respond to Gregg’s overtures. When my marriage fell apart, I reached out to him , told him of my love and desire to build a life together. He said he was flattered.

It was too late.

He had started what was to become a bunch of serial attachments to women who had children with multiple baby daddies. Each of these relationships fell apart when the day-to day of blended families failed to deliver the Brady Bunch fairy-tale he imagined they should be.  This is the first time I started to get a sense of his  overly unrealistic expectations which ended in crushing disappointments.

In our thirties we came close to hooking up. Both of us were single at the same time, it seemed possible.  I had an invite to come spend the weekend with him in Atlanta.  I wrote him a smutty letter designed to be foreplay. He claimed to never received it.  We talked before I was to make the 600 mile trip.  “What happens if we fall in love ?”I asked clinging to an illusion of a fantasy teenage romance come true.

He said,”I don’t know.”  I cancelled my trip frustrated with the lack of certainty and communication.

I remember a couple of years later seriously seriously considering calling him up and asking him if he would like to run off to China, adopt a baby girl and start a life together, be a family.  That week as I stewed in this fantasy I was practically walking into walls. I screwed up my courage and called him.  I got his answering machine.  I kept my cards close to my chest just asked him to call me.  I left several messages.  He didn’t call back.  Said he lost my contact information.

When I look back now I mark this as the first solid time I can define recognizing the irony of our 41-year relationship:  I revel in the intimacy of sharing thoughts and feelings honestly.  The one thing that I find to be the air that makes relationships breath and live is the ONE thing Gregg can never do.  Inside his anxiety he is closed off in a protective shell building layers like a pearl. He becomes isolated.  He lives in a world of unrealistic romantic illusions that he never gives voice to, and then is devastated when they fail to manifest.

I get frustrated. My texts turn to triage.  Go to the ER, call a hotline, get help.  I send this message several times. Silence.

In my mid-thirties we were in the same town. Another make out session in another car. I’m semi-attached he’s single. Before I can untangle myself Gregg slips into radio silence.  Three years later he’s married, they’re pregnant.

I’m 40, dating.  Gregg’s marriage is falling apart, he calls for help, for advice.  He is going for custody of his daughter.  Her picture takes my breath.  She is the 2 year old daughter I always wanted. She even has the red hair I thought my daughter would have. It feels like light under the door, maybe.

We talk a lot during this time: strategy, parenting and attorney woes.  We never talk about us. He moves in with his parents with his daughter.  I get married.

3 hours after the suicide note text Gregg responds. He’s been in trouble at work for using his phone, if  he had responded he could have gotten fired.

I’m 50 and my marriage has ferried into uncharted waters of disbelief and deceptions. An unseen  bankruptcy looms and stands to derail all of my professional licenses. I proposition Gregg once again : lets run away, spend a vacation in one of our favorite mutual haunts. Do what we thought we would do when we were 17. Do THE DEED.

He declines says he understands he’s on my bucket list but he can’t.

I unload…you texted me a suicide note while at work? When I am helpless and 1500 miles away and can do nothing but worry?

Christmas a couple of years back.  We talk.  He says he regrets that he never took the chances and opportunities I offered him.  If he had reached out to me in that moment I cannot say what could have happened. I might have been weak. But he doesn’t and I remain safe.

I do not reach for him as he confides to me. Too much water under the bridge, too many images of drowning.

We text back and forth he’s just blue.  He  dangles a sick bait, be with me, save me, make me happy. I can feel walls of water start to close in. It is suffocating.  I decline to reach for the hook.

 Three months later he’s still breathing. So am I.