2010 #4: Daniel.

"Write what you know".

Daniel

Today I learned of something that would change me for the rest of my life. Today I learned that my best friend died.

I sat idly amongst a crowd, staring at my glowing phone screen, upon which read a message that struck me numbly at first. I was fifteen, a youth, on an excursion with my school to a place called The Reach Foundation, in Collingwood, where they would educate us about the years to come, and about how we would change and develop throughout our teenage lives. Tears were shed as they stirred us to feel saddening emotions about who we were as people, and about our fragility as human beings. We were inspired to look into our pasts, piecing together what shards of innocence we had lost, and were allowed to get up on stage in front of a collective crowd of several hundred students, and apologize to people we had hurt, as well as forgive ourselves for hurting those we had apologized to. Gazing down at my phone screen, speaking the message to myself over and over, I did what they had asked – I delved deep into my past, and ran over the events that had been a prelude to this day.

Some had called me a fool, a child, for ever allowing myself to place my trust in someone so decrepit, yet it was not his befouled moral centre that struck me as so curiously intense – rather, it was his will to go on despite all obstacles and shortcomings that drove me to love him. This person was my best friend. I knew I was not much else but a child, yet every bone in my body that had the sense to recognise right from wrong told me that this man, though scarred and corrupt he may have been, was not a bad man. Evil may take many forms, but no form as beautiful and fine as his could possibly have been shaped by the Devil. This was something I had been taught many times over, to trust nobody whom tempts you to try or take anything that alters your perception, as like the wind they may surely turn harsh, ferocious and transient, til you are left with nothing else but what plague those demons brought upon you. So there I was, a fool, and a child, knowing all of what he did and the implications behind it, yet still I gave him my trust, and my heart – and never did he spoil it.

When we met, I was of no greater age than thirteen, although I professed many times to the dismay of many people that I possessed wits far beyond my years. He was fifteen years old, tall and brooding, and anyone else like him I would have run from for fear they may steal my wallet, yet from him I did not run. Greeting me with a smile one day, from a step outside Flinders Street station, I found myself speaking to him, with not a fear in the world. He was not frightening as many of my friends had depicted him, nor was he aggressive or challenging to speak to. He humoured me, in fact, was kind and impassioned to learn of my name and who I was, and I found myself wishing to speak to him for even longer when the time came that he had to depart. He told me he to go somewhere, to get something that he needed. I never asked him where he was going, instead left him to his own devices, and took off on my own way – hoping that we would meet again. In retrospect, if I had challenged him that day, and told him to stay with me regardless of whatever matter he had to attend to, be it a superficial plight or something of great importance, maybe I could have prevented his death.

Fortunately, we would meet again, the following weekend and every weekend thereafter. We spoke many times, about all manner of things in his life and mine, and I learned many things about his life. He was an only child, with a father and a mother both stern and cold that had him under an iron hand, a steely grip that rendered him unable to communicate with them lest they suspect him of engaging in illegal activities. In contrary to my own parents, who at the time had me placed under a similarly strong hand, he had chosen to abandon his education as well as what little contact he had with his parents, making way for a life lived mainly on the streets where he had nobody to rely on but himself. It was when he was at the start of the path he had chosen that our paths begun to intertwine, and throughout what rare contact we had each weekend that followed I slowly came to identify a suppressed longing within him – an innate desire bound only by a pathos, a sorrow, which not until years later I could unravel the meaning of. Curiously I took after him many a time when I saw him, following him as a new friend does to wherever he sets out to go. Through being with him in those many strange places, so many that today I can only recall several; I was led by his hand into a world I now wish I never could have seen - down the rabbit hole and on the other side of the looking glass.

One of these days he took me to a park in the middle of the city – a park that these days still bears negative meaning for me. He sat me down in the middle of this park, and proceeded to pull out a tacky-looking vaporiser from his backpack. At the time I knew little of what these devices were made for, however today I am familiar with the implications behind their use; implications that have lead me to hate them, even inanimate and soulless as they are. He pulled out a tin which he revealed to be full of something green and leafy – a drug, what I should have recognised instantly to be marijuana; however I was young and little-knowing of the ways of the world. “If you want to try this, you can,” He said to me, stuffing bits of the drug into the smaller of two protruding tips of the vaporiser, “However, I wouldn’t like you to.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a lighter, put his mouth to the larger tip of the vaporiser, a gaping hole exposing the insides of the chamber within the device, placed his thumb on a tiny hole on the rear of the device, and placed the lighter near the other protruding tip. A flick of his finger, and the flame was ignited. He pulled deeply with his mouth, and the chamber began to fill up with smog, as though like a vacuum he drew the smoke out from within. Several more moments of this pulling technique and he released his finger from the small hole. The smog inside of the chamber frantically escaped into his waiting mouth. Several moments later, and he exhaled the substance into the air around us, with a sigh.

That was my first experience observing his illicit behaviour, my first sample of the drug-taking that slowly claimed his life. It would be a lie to say that I did not witness him doing this again and again many times after that day, and an even greater lie still to say that I was not at all curious about the acts themselves. For him, however, I denied myself the opportunity, a decision that I knew was for my own good. I went home after many of these awkward and frequently intense occasions, to my parents and my sister who knew little of who I was engaging with, nor what antics I was engaging in. They often spoke of how little they valued drug-takers, about how they barely considered them human, as well as educated me on how much they loathed to the core many of the people

whom they knew partook in the acts I had previously witnessed. To them, drug takers were scum. I looked at them with confusion when they told me this – that word, ‘scum’, still echoes in my ears today – and I didn’t even think for a second that they might have had experiences with drugs in the past to begin with, nor whether or not they had lost anyone in their life to the ghostly hold of the substances. Instead, I sat in my bedroom and had a long, hard think, about the things I was doing, and the people I was associating with – and made a decision. For him, I would tell my parents nothing, I would tell them nothing of my ‘friend’. I would hide that part of me from them. Little did I know back then that this decision would seal a part of me away forever – perhaps this part was my innocence? For him, however, I would hide it all away in a dark corner of my mind. Fortunately I knew even at such a young age that this part of me – the child – we all suppress eventually.

From that day, I could safely call this man a friend of mine, without lying through my teeth or exaggerating the facts. Every weekend I saw him, and talked to him chirpily without the curiosity and sensibility that I had adapted before. Often some weekdays I would sneak away from school and allocate time to him, venturing to eerie locations with him to do not much at all, standing in school attire as a cruel irony to the rules and laws that governed my world – the world with him I had come to associate as my ‘other world’; where anything was possible, and I felt true freedom, light as a feather.

“You’re an odd one, you are,” He said to me one day, while we dallied around in a park, six months from the birth of our friendship, “You try to pretend you’re so mature, and sophisticated, yet I’m fairly sure you’re more of a child than all of the people you pretend to be better than.” He said this while dangling from a tree by the knees, so I laughed it off.

“You’re one to talk,” I stated sternly, yet the smile on my lips would not fade, “I don’t suppose your ego has gone to your head along with all your blood, what with you hanging upside down like that?”

I gave him a quizzical look, and he leapt off the tree with a questionable display of grace. He grinned and ruffled my hair, before taking off some yards in front of me to do a handstand. We went to the city that day, where we bought coffee – something at the time I had not yet acclimated to the taste of, so when my face expressed my disgust he laughed outrageously - before escaping down to the park that day so that he could do what he did all too often – take drugs.

One day I asked him where he got all of his money from, for him to be able to buy me food and purchase himself drugs. He replied in a far too matter of fact fashion, that he stole all of his money from his parents. I thought, judging from the way he spoke of the act so casually, that this was normal for someone such as him, and even more normal for teenagers. Little did I know that it was not normal, and the thievery he conducted soon led to the disassembly of his already-crippled relations with his family, eventually leading to their feelings of disgust for their son. One day, I came to him with a smile on my face, meeting him at Flinders Street Station, our choice location to see each other, and he confessed to something that truly struck me as awful. His parents, he said, had kicked him out onto the street the day before. He had slept in a park that night, yet even in the dire situation he found himself in, he still made the effort to come and see me. I then

began to realise the severity of the situation with his parents. They hated him with a passion, as though they deemed him not even a blood relation, and this was something I could never understand, what with my parents being so loving and protective of me. I looked upon his frail form, and saw the loss in his eyes. His pathos was shining through that day. With that, I helped him to his full height. I lit up a cigarette for him to smoke, which he did, and instead of him caring for me that day, I cared for him. I bought him food and water, and smothered him in my dearest affections. It was then that I began to realise that this man needed my help.

Many days passed, until days became months. I was long since fourteen, he long since sixteen, yet the contrast between our lives was far too great to think common. His state of homelessness persisted, and he found himself being kicked out of shared houses and refuges alike, usually due to the violent denizens within accusing him of doing troublesome things he truly did not do. Yet nobody listened to him, as he had nobody to support him. He grew weaker and steadily weaker, until his state was so diminished that several times I was forced to take him to the hospital for treatment, or to somewhere that he may find food. His urges for food by that point, however, had been outweighed by the urge for something else, and as much as he tried to hide these pressing urges from me, in the end they unravelled him, and he could do nothing to hide these cruel desires from me. As the rain pressed down upon our heads one day, in another park as the first day – a cruel motif – he pulled out a syringe from his pocket, and a bottle full of a substance that I learned was heroin. The events of that day were too sickening to properly envision, as I am sure my mind has repressed the thoughts of what things he did and subjected me to, and yet I was forced by my nurturing conscience to relive each and every one of those days for the next few months afterwards.

By that time we were an inseparable team - yet this was no team I wanted to be a part of. Tried he did, to convince me that the things he was doing to himself were appropriate for the crisis he was going through, yet never could he convince me that the things he said were true. I begged him, over and over, time and time again; to stop harming himself for the trouble his parents had put him through... yet he would not listen to reason, and instead resorted to abusing me for daring to trespass with my words onto his personal life. His impassioned self was lead to ruin, and with each twitch of his eye and scarred look on his face, his pathos shone through with merciless ferocity. It was one day down the line, when I was fifteen and he was seventeen, which changed us forever.

We stood outside Flinders Street Station, where I asked him yet again to heed my words to seek help for his troubles, and his addiction. I pleaded with him, as he was insistent that we “take off” and I knew where he meant to go. Then something hit me – a part of me spoke out against his leadership. I spoke the words calmly; if he did not come with me to get help, I would walk away and never see him again. He flipped around at that, and pierced my soul with his tormenting gaze. “Turn around and walk away, then,” He shouted at me, “ If you want to go, then you can just walk away. Just leave. You’re never going to see me again.” His words were harsh and fierce, and I found myself unable to respond with words. I did then what I thought I would regret doing forever – I turned on my heels, and walked away. I ignored everything that reminded me of him,

which by that stage was mostly everything, including all of the text messages he sent me begging for my forgiveness, for the next three days – until after that time, it came time for my school and I to attend The Reach Foundation in Collingwood, and I did so with a guilty resting atop my heart - a heart that was about to be torn apart.

This is his mother. We’re sorry, the message read. Daniel has died of an overdose.

I sat there, surrounded by many saddened faces, all mimicking each other, with their inspired emotions of sorrow and realization. The whole thing was a stark frenzy, a fit of tears and emotions. Yet I felt nothing. No emotion, no rationality to take the pain away. The only thing I knew at that time was the message glistening silently on the phone screen in front of me. With that message, I felt my world break away before me.

Today I learned of something that would change me for the rest of my life. Today I learned that my best friend died.

I am the fool, and the child, that knew all of what he did and the implications behind it, that walks the path of righteousness now with bitter memory pressing hard upon my back; yet still I gave him my trust, and my heart – and he gave me his.