Tyler never locked his bedroom door; there wasn’t a key. The front door of the house where he lived with a friend was often locked, the key stuffed inside a potted plant on the porch, shoved under the welcome mat, or stashed in some other hidden location accessible only to those deemed “part of the family.” I shuffled objects around, my hands searching wooden slats, the early summer sun pumping my head with buzzing stars. No key. Probably, then and there on the wraparound porch, I should have known to turn around, should have left it all to someone else—the missing key an omen. But I was always going to find it.
A soft, gnawing certainty woke me up that morning. It knocked on my heart as I swayed on the rocking chair in my parents’ living room. The creak of the old springs, the tick of the analog clock, his voicemail greeting as I called repeatedly—this was the soundtrack to my worries. Tyler had begged me to come to his house the night before, but I had other plans: tequila, a pack of Newports, a party on a college campus. Though his texts felt desperate, I’d shrugged them off. This again. Yet here was this knowing as soon as I woke that morning. I awaited his call back, my sister sprawled on the couch across the room, not daring to say aloud what I knew.
Minutes into the search, and there was the key. There was the groan of the door. There was his roommate just inside, passed out on the living room couch. I tiptoed around furniture, careful not to wake anyone. It was slightly after noon, and with each step from the front door to his bedroom, I knew. Beneath the alpine ceilings, everything seemed to echo: each footstep down the hall, my hollow, jagged breath, the jangle of a doorknob locked tight. My heart slid from its nestled spot between my ribs, sinking, sinking, sinking into the writhing pit of my stomach as I stood at the threshold and shook the doorknob again. There wasn’t a key to open it.
It was probably Tyler who had taught me how to jimmy a lock. How to find something slick enough to fit into the keyhole—a bobby pin, a paperclip, an earring—and poke around until it pops. I slammed my bobby pin into its pocket. The crunch of the lock should have woken him. He was such a light sleeper that he would complain when I picked my nails at night. But the lock clattered, the door swung open, and nothing moved inside.
I looked up to the top bunk of his bed first and didn’t see him. Next, underneath the bed’s metal frame to the loveseat. Nothing there either. My arms covered my chest, muffling my heart’s rapid thuds. I checked the closet, though there was no room for him there; a hydroponic system he’d built to grow weed filled the small space. The top bunk again. Under the dresser? I thought of his friend’s house down the street, the corner store, the pretzel shop he’d quit working at three days before—before I stepped toward the window and peered out to the yard. Just in case. Behind a pile of clothing. Top bunk. Couch. Closet. But I didn’t say a word, couldn’t call his name. I didn’t try his cell phone to see if I could hear its ring. Something kept me quiet, spinning in circles in the tiny room.
Roll the clock back two months. Picture a boy with a short blonde buzz cut, just turned eighteen, tall and skinny frame, skin loose from drug-induced weight loss. Squinty slits for eyes that only sometimes reveal a deep brown. Daily black band T-shirts paired with dark, baggy jeans. A plastered smirk, never showing teeth. And then there’s me: shoulder-length, mousy-brown hair and all-black clothes, under eyes hollow and dark from sleep deprivation and too much alcohol. But don’t worry about those details. Instead, watch me lift one hand, watch it meet his sunken cheek. Watch his used needle, found in a crisp, white envelope behind his bed, fall from my limp fingers.
You have no room to talk, Tyler said.
We had broken up two months prior, almost no contact since, our split a sudden, clean slice. But a few evenings before finding the needle in Tyler’s room, I saw him unexpectedly at a friend’s house. His glassy eyes anchored me as they always did. I saw no one else that night. He’d heard I wasn’t doing well, asked if I was okay since an arrest for a DUI, and I told him I’d heard worse. He’s doing drugs, people said. And not the ones we all did—prescription pills, ecstasy, the occasional acid trip.
You said you’d never try heroin, I said.
He shrugged. I’m not doing it all the time.
For the next month, I spent my time in Tyler’s bedroom, uncovering powdered lines and needles like some Hidden Pictures puzzle game. He soon admitted during our two months apart that he’d squandered thousands of dollars on opiates, incorporating heroin into the constant stream of drug deliveries to his mailbox. His new reality was a blurred haze that numbed his gentle spirit, already prone to dark lows and aimless daydreams.
I sunk back into our particular version of hell with ease: me, taking shots of Vladimir vodka from morning until night and starting fights about the drugs; him, slipping farther away from me with each bag emptied. We gave each other permission to be the worst versions of ourselves—or rather, our addictions granted mutual acceptance. Maybe it was resignation. Whatever it was, it felt like love. Whatever it was, it was ours.
My only clear memories of happiness that May were of us in the Chinese restaurant down the street, where he’d shove into the same side of the booth as me, our bodies warm as we forked bright orange chicken and soggy broccoli and never touched our tea.More evident now, in hindsight, is this: something was coming. I had even asked God once for a way out, though it was for Tyler to seek help. I didn’t know God then, didn’t care to—we had submitted willingly, we thought, to our repetitious days: his house, my car, the alcohol and drugs to cushion our vulnerable hearts. But desperation is a child clinging to the first leg it sees.
Tyler admitted to me that month he wanted to change, to find a reason to live—but only once—and I didn’t have enough hope to share with him.
Shock could be the clinical term to describe my body’s response when I finally found him on the top bunk that morning. There was rapid, shallow breathing. My feet fastened to the floor beneath me—an altered mental state, a profound confusion. But a medical prognosis feels insufficient. Still, ornate language does too. I’ve tried metaphor: horror movie jump scare. Analogy: the revulsion of running into someone you once knew on the street and now no longer recognize. They are accurate, but the description doesn’t capture the moment. How could it? Mostly, there was stillness.
Mostly, a sinking. In my gut, in my limbs. In my splintering heart, a basement staircase rotted through. I would have stood there forever, open mouth, pupils dark. Me, the body, and the drum of just one heart. But something spoke to me. Go, get out of there, leave. So I did.
I want to tell you that Tyler and our friends were good kids, but we were just a bunch of skate-rats. My board, a baby blue Almost with clouds on the deck, had hardly a scratch; still, I carried it under my arm to meet the boys in the back lot of Trimmer Elementary. They spent afternoons ollieing staircases, dropping in on backyard spillways, teaching me kickflips in the grass. When I wasn’t around, Tyler and the boys lifted their decks over their heads and brought them down in swift thwacks over other men’s necks. They told me stories about a matted homeless guy under the Highland bridge, out cold with his soggy brown bag. They told me about someone’s dad, slumped on his green grass in suburbia. They brought back splintered skate decks like deer heads.
It was late summer at our usual five-set in the school’s parking lot when I noticed a group of boys in baggy clothes and buzz cuts walking through the field toward us. My boys didn’t see them at first, preoccupied with relentless attempts to ollie the stairs, their bodies’ wooden push puppets collapsing with each failed landing. Who are those guys? I asked, worried.
But my boys weren’t. Not until the guns were drawn—from their waistbands to our necks, our temples, the space between our eyes. No one said a word; we were told to sit down and shut the fuck up, and even after we realized they were only BB guns, we listened. With our backs against pasty red brick, the boys and I watched Tyler do push-ups in front of our audience, shout Yes sir and What now, sir, and never take his eyes off the pavement. We watched him scowl as his knees hit the gravel between seven and eight, struggling to find stamina with a body that only knew Dance Dance Revolution at the mall arcade and throwing punches. The group, not much older than us, laughed and shouted fat ass and pussy, and none of my boys said a word in Tyler’s defense. Neither did I.
We won’t call the cops because punks are ACAB. We’ll only say what the fuck was that? and start skating again when the group gets bored of us and walks away. I’ll listen to the story shift with each retelling—Those dudes were like forty. I think they were real guns. Of course, we could take them, but they just fucking left. Only I knew the way the boys trembled on the blacktop, knees hugged to their chests. Only I had witnessed how they looked straight ahead, past the barrel of the guns, avoiding one another’s eyes.
I won’t be the only person to see Tyler on the top bunk that afternoon. I will shake his roommate awake from the couch and yell at him: Go look at Tyler, go look at Tyler, seriously dude, go. His roommate will get up slowly, will side-eye me.His other friend, asleep on the loveseat, will wake up and say nothing. The boys will walk back to his bedroom and back down the hallway, and Tyler will not come with them. Fear is clear as the sunlight coming in through the deck’s doors, but they will not use the word scared.
Is he wearing a mask? his roommate will ask when he finally speaks, the only complete sentence I can remember.
No. He’s not.
And the rest of the details of the afternoon will not matter. Not the call from the corded house phone to my parents or to the cops. Not the chair thrown in the kitchen. Not the hustle of the boys hurrying the pot plants from the closet to the woods, quick, before police arrived. Not the swing in the front yard on which I sat and rocked or the interrogations by officials. Not all the visitors who drove up the long, secluded driveway.
I saw none of it. I only saw him lying there.
And I will not describe the face because I never want you to picture it. I have done so much to stop picturing it myself.
Sheriffs and investigators marched in and out of the house: over the threshold of the front door, past the living room and the kitchen island, up and down the hallway toward, then away from him. After each round, they paused to throw worried glances my way, whisper my name, or ask me how I was doing. I sat on the couch with a tan throw pillow hugged to my face, refusing to uncover my eyes. As they cleaned the mess from the walls, the metal bed frame, the sheets, I gripped the pillow and wondered who was screaming—no and why and please and my baby—wild and ridiculous, a jammed-up jukebox of hysterics. It was only me.
I clutched the pillow tighter, expecting Tyler to burst out of the bedroom any minute, smiling as he ripped a latex mask from his neck. I saw him coming toward me over and over; I begged him to stay back. Instead, a police officer would force me outside, close the door to the skintight front seat of their car.
Why were you here? they’d pry. What do you know? Where are the rest of the drugs? Yes,he’d threatened suicide in the past, last night most recently. Yes, there were drugs: pills, heroin, weed. He took them all. Please, I’d beg. He’ll never forgive me for this.
Of course, I knew the truth. It didn’t matter how I answered their questions. Tyler would never walk down that hallway again.
Still, I didn’t believe he was gone until the coroner promised, promised, promised it to me.
Wind-up dinosaurs, empty gift cards, and a small stack of books about marijuana cultivation with notes in the margins. One of those disco balls that spins on its base, a tool set, a safe locked with a missing key. A lot of black T-shirts—my favorite, a Metallica long-sleeve I’ve lost since then—and a set of drug-addicted friends were all that was left. We were still here. We were forced to clean up the mess.
For weeks after Tyler passed, his presence remained inches away, the hairs on my arms reaching out toward his ghost. I was haunted. I saw him in dark rooms. I saw him down hallways. I couldn’t fall asleep without someone beside me. I refused to step outside unless it was daylight.
I tried to cherish our memories, like everyone told me to do, but they’d shattered, too, with the force of the shot. Our love felt like a delusion; I was sure of nothing. Deep in my bones, Tyler’s regret rooted, sprouted, and grew. And I swore I could feel him watering it, his repentance lingering like vines tightening, wrapping, clinging. It was crushing me.
After weeks of the body accompanying me, even into my dreams, my therapist asked me to write our story from the moment Tyler and I met until that afternoon on Alpine Road. It was a final attempt to exhaust the memory so I could live my life again. Willing to try anything she suggested to get relief—besides quitting drinking—I sat in my bedroom one night and wrote.
The evening on the rabbittransit, my head on Tyler’s shoulder as we rode the bus from one mall to another. The nervous sweat dripping down my back despite autumn’s chill. The smell of his daily black hoodie with the ripped wrist-cuffs. The flashing neon of the arcade from four to ten every Friday evening; his quick jumping feet, left arrow to right to pivot as “Irrésistiblement” played on the DDR machine. The grimy basement on North Gotwalt Street. The wall we busted clear through while we were drinking. His mattress on the floor, no boxspring. Chicken patties and biscuits for every meal, if we ate anything. Back porch slabs on summer evenings. Half-gallons of something strong and cheap. No more skating. The spoons, the mushroom caps, the powder in rainbow colors. The sleeping all day; the not-sleeping. The move to the boonies.
My lungs tightened asthe scene from that afternoon on Alpine Road approached. Only a few sentences into the recollection, I slammed the laptop shut and grabbed my car keys, my breath coming in rapid gulps. Tyler was everywhere I drove: reclined on the side of the street, gazing from a passing window, there, in my rearview mirror, sitting in my back seat.
But it wasn’t him—not the person I loved, who I knew would’ve held me through this if only he could. It was a body, that body, and it was the last time I would ever see it.
A few days before he took his life, Tyler quit his job, stopped answering calls, and avoided friends even in his own home. He picked up drugs only from his mailbox and sent me texts about wanting to die, then about wanting to live, then about wanting to die again. He overdosed alone in his bathroom, woke up, and admitted to me he needed help. And at some point, when no one was home, he secretly searched his roommate’s parents’ bedroom for a gun.
The signs were classic, but what could I have done? Should I have told someone? Tyler’s parents weren’t in his life. His roommates would have agreed with me—he’s depressed again, he’ll come out of it. Tyler’s facade was unshakable: strong but reserved. Demanding an unchallenged respect. Tough. He shared his emotions with almost no one, only me. How could I not assume the responsibility for what happened that night after he’d begged me to come lie next to him?
It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could have done to save him. This canned response is still the typical reaction if I talk about him. But I never believed it. I couldn’t. I was a hero in some people’s eyes for finding him. To most: a shame, a poor girl, a tragedy. What was I really? A child—desperate to feel okay, just as he was. I was a seventeen-year-old with the hubris to think she could handle another’s life.
What could I have done? I could have told someone. Yet the only thing I did as he sent me frantic texts was respond with a dismissive ‘stop,’assuming he wasn’t serious.I wanted what Tyler wanted: silence, reprieve. To be left alone with my drugs of choice in blissful, naïve ignorance. What was I really? I was an alcoholic, an addict. I was just like him.
Some months into our relationship, there was an evening at the house where he lived on North Gotwalt Street, an evening when there were still parties in the basement soundtracked by Streetlight Manifesto and Leftover Crack. An evening when we clutched our stomachs in laughter between nose-fulls of methamphetamines and ecstasy, drinking forties of malt liquor on a dirty futon. An evening before blackout curtains, when we still let in the moonlight.
This evening, Tyler and I drank Vladimir vodka, “Shot-For-Shot,” a game he rarely played because he didn’t enjoy being drunk. I’m sure I’d begged him to join me, sick of drinking alone while he hit bongs across the room. Six shots in, we sat on his bed facing one another, knees touching slightly, hammered and harmless, and promised if we ever did it, we’d do it together. Two guns, one pull of the trigger. We sealed our pact with a pinky-swear. I can still see his eyes as he wrapped his finger in mine, the steady dare, the nothing-to-lose stare.
After Tyler passed, I told my mom about our agreement, and she admitted her suspicion—a suspicion I had too but never would have mentioned. If I’d driven there that night, like he’d asked, would I have joined him?
I didn’t have to. Addicted to my mourning, my body tossed and turned and shook in my sleep, attempting to release the finding of him—or to hang onto it. I’m not sure which. My survival depended on destruction: consuming half-gallons of cheap vodka in two days or less from twenty-four-ounce gas station fountain soda cups, driving drunk on backroads into early morning hours, snorting any pill someone crushed for me, taking too many of my prescriptions (Adderall and Xanax readily handed over by doctors who had no clue how to handle me), keeping myself surrounded by his friends, and obsessing over boys I could “save.”
I was only seventeen, yet I felt like a widow. My grief was public, regularly up for discussion—and I craved the attention while pretending to resent it. To the people who loved Tyler, I was still his girlfriend. I would forever be. Though honored, I knew I was destined to betray him, the title enveloping me like Miss Havisham’s rotting wedding dress. One could say the judgments of those watching, especially people who loved Tyler as I did, were warranted. But they were as merciless as my sorrow. And beyond that, they were naive. No one understood what I’d experienced, and I clung to that like a warm body.
But my grip on my suffering wasn’t admirable—and it wouldn’t bring him back. No one told me that. Or, more likely, I wasn’t listening. He was gone, he was gone, he was gone.
Maybe death was the only light Tyler could see in his room the night he made his decision, propped up on his elbows with a snow-capped straw shoved into his left nostril. Maybe his lonely mind became preoccupied with the gun he knew was stashed in his roommate’s father’s bedroom closet. Perhaps he heard it whispering, whispering, whispering a solution. I can picture it: his roommates leaving for the grocery store, Tyler listening for the click of the door behind them. The ascension, one foot in front of the other, like a ski-masked thief up the stairs to the lofted master bedroom. I can see him back on his top bunk with the gun, maneuvering the safety and deciding where to aim. Researching the quickest kill, the surefire way. But likely, he’d done the research long before. That sounds more like him.
Perhaps the bullet was the quick fix the pills and needles could no longer deliver. Maybe—I can only hope—he was happy with his decision, and he floated away, light as an emptied plastic capsule, smiling his half-smile. Or maybe, if he could, with one breath, he would blow the bullet back into the canister. Come back to us. Whoosh. But it doesn’t matter now. It really doesn’t. You become so sad sometimes you think you can’t bear it. I assure you, I understood that sadness, then. I know it sometimes, still.
An arrow pointed into the stars, a box set of Sublime, a faded black-and-white ID card. A heartache as explosive and elusive as a meteor shower, a note with three I love yous back-to-back, a steel necklace full of his ashes. Rain every June, two tattoos, a shoebox stacked with pictures held close to my beating heart. A final text: I cant do this anymre I’m so srory. I know he meant it.
Why did I ignore the final message? I didn’t believe him. The earnestness of his gaze when we made our promise that evening on Gotwalt Street was the only faith I had. I trusted our innocence; I trusted he wouldn’t leave me here. But his choice wasn’t about love, and it wasn’t about me.
Only now, more than a decade later, can I see how desperate I was then—not to die but to live. That was the primary difference between Tyler and me. There was one way out. I saw the quickness with which it worked—and I didn’t choose it. There was the pinky-swear, there was the final message, there was the moment with his finger on the trigger, fleeting, yet infinite. And there was me—still here. If I’d been faced with the decision that night, if I had driven there hours earlier, opened Tyler’s bedroom door, and found him with the gun, with two guns even—I wouldn’t have joined him. Only now can I see Tyler knew that before I did.
I have to believe he knew that as he powered off his phone, as he steadied his shaking fingers, as he made his final decision without me.
***
Artwork by Onur Genes
If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal ideation or opioid addiction, help is available: Call or text 988 to connect with trained counselors at 988 Lifeline who can provide support for mental health crises, including suicidal thoughts. The CDC’s Naloxone Toolkit provides information on how to access and administer Narcan (naloxone), a life-saving medication for opioid overdoses. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also offers comprehensive resources for those impacted by opioid addiction.
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
