This post includes discussion of mental health challenges and drugs. Take care.
She said he was dead, but I needed to call him to make sure.
I called his cell phone, again and again and again, and I expected he would pick up each time. There was a sort of disconnect in my soul.
His downfall started a few years after our college graduation. He was let go from his company, but it was okay, because he had hated his employer and he had a few personal clients he could do consulting work for. I could see he was moving on. He had a long-term girlfriend who was a good person. They had been together as long as I had known him.
I caught up with him once or twice a year with no exception. He was the most well-read friend I had, so as my love of books evolved, I yearned for his point of view and asked him a lot of questions. We talked about life, you know, the actually important stuff you don't talk about with most people. Things like, what we were looking for in life, how we had thought this was important but it turned out wasn't, what happens after death, how being bullied in our youth affected the way we were.
But now looking back, I could see that his spool had been unravelling. He told me about a best friend he had had a fight with, then another, then he started being interested in polygamous relationships, then he broke up with his girlfriend, and then it seemed like he woke and slept to drugs.
One day in 2019, we met at a coffee shop in Sawtelle. He arrived in a delirious state. He could hardly keep his eyes open, he was so out of it. He said he hadn't slept for three days. He had come back from Spain a few weeks ago, where he had sat on a bridge with a coin in his hand and a woman he had met sitting next him. He tossed the coin— If it was a heads he would jump, if it was a tails he would continue to live. It landed on his palm, tails. He came back to the U.S. with three cheap paintings that he put up on his wall. He had had a revelation that he was destined to be this century's modern Napoleon, bringing back the Renaissance to the United States.
He told all this to me in the corner of a coffee shop.
After, we walked to his place around the corner. I wasn't as scared for my safety as I should have been, because he had been my friend for so long and the levity of his condition hadn't processed. I knew something was terribly off, but I didn't know there was a thing called psychosis. I remember thinking something like, "Wow, he has a really different reality right now. But who am I to judge him?". Isn't that a weird way to process the situation? I knew it was serious, but I didn't think to stop and call his mom at that moment.
I entered his apartment with him and walked around. He showed me the few paintings he had started collecting for his Renaissance awakening. He spoke in dark puzzles, referencing emperors and the Death Note manga. This last part really freaked me out, because I knew a bit of the plot — A character wrote names of people who had wronged him in a notebook, and their names were marked off as they were killed.
My eyes glazed over his bathroom counter. Empty pill bottles were strewn along the counter, toppled over this way and that.
One year later, his ex-girlfriend messaged me on Facebook.
"hey. PK died. thought you should know."
I called him, then I called his mom.
She told me he was found dead on his bed. His friends should have been there for him, he had been so lonely.
At his funeral, I saw a body with a gross blown-up face in a wooden box.
I didn't cry because I hadn't fully believed he was dead.
He had left me a voicemail six months before.
Oh, I didn't tell you that, did I?
In the voicemail, he said he was sorry for everything. Voice and hands shaking, I called him back and asked how he was doing. He said he was with his parents and had been going back to church. I kept the call short because I was traveling, I told myself and him. I knew I would not reach out to him again, at least until I felt more safe being in his company.
And now, he is dead.