We went through the streets of Dayton with only the worst on our minds. Going from house to house, drug to drug, destroying ourselves and helping destroy the lives of others. I've never felt so complete.
I don't even try to talk to her anymore. I've found it's become completely useless, and I draw the line after three unreturned calls. So what now? What is one to do? Purely a Molotov cocktail concoction filled with drugs and alcohol; baseball bats and human skulls. We paraded the streets until about two o'clock. Swinging whiskey and hammers, we made our separate ways toward what we called home.
Ever since John decided to die, my parents decided to give up, and she decided to leave, all I had on my mind was death. I wasn't sure exactly what about that broad concept was being put into motion. I'm sure, though, if you put a diagram of ten descriptive words under death, I would at least fit into nine of them. I couldn't make up my mind. Should I kill myself slowly? Should I make this a quicker ending? Every day I'd get confronted by someone.
"Take it easy."
"Be careful."
"Are you alright?"

The concern was quite flattering, but all I could say to each was a simple "no", and go on my way. She put the icing on the cake; the shotgun to my head, the cocaine through my nose and into my veins; the holes in my liver and the black in my lungs. As much as I didn't want to admit it, I was doing it all because of what had happened. I had never been so infatuated, so happy, so fulfilled, as when I was with her. It was over now, though, and the indirect effect that had on me was catastrophic. I had lost my mind.
I thought every day about John. What had happened, and what I was going to do about it. Should I learn from it? Hardly. All I thought about on a day to day basis was that what he did was right. It was justified. I thought about the beauty of it all, and what I would look like with the shotgun in my mouth. Then I wished she'd find me. I wish she'd come up to my car, interior filled with my brains and my heart on a piece of paper in the glove box. How beautiful it would be, indeed.
When I'm dead, I want to be gone. What is done need not be glorified, the glory of ending a life not worth living is glorious enough. I wouldn't want murals, tributes, or rooms filled with the presence of those who had come to start benign conversation of memories of my life. I was sick of living in a petty world filled with people who could give a shit about anything else but themselves. The people in this world have no concept of beauty. Beauty is brains on the pavement. Beauty is dying for what you believe in, even if what you believe is that the world would be better off without you. I can't say that I know what was going through his head before the bullet; however I couldn't help at this point to trust his judgments. I empathized with him. I was always into protest. I loved changing things, in everything outside of myself. I felt what he did was the ultimate protest.
As I walked into the door, I felt as if a tremendous weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I was home. Doors are a beautiful concept. You can do anything behind closed doors. The world couldn't see, as if it was any of their business anyway. I felt an itch at my nose. I saw the blood hit the floor, and it seemed as if it was falling in slow motion, so I could see every drop fall as one, and separate as a splatter on the kitchen tile. I did nothing about it, went upstairs, closed the door, and took another line. I lied down the bed and felt the blood drip out of my nose, onto my chest and down my torso. I thought to myself, “is this it? Is this what I dreamed of? Six years old watching Disney movies, in junior high playing in bands and going on my first date; was this really what I wanted to become? Was this all but inevitable?”
I woke up the next morning with reddish brown sheets. The blood had dried, and I could feel it separating from my skin as I stood up from my place of rest. I jumped in the shower immediately, threw the sheets in the wash, and headed outside for a cigarette. I looked at the bright morning sun. I thought of her, John, my family, my life. As I thought I wished the sun would come sooner. Demolish the Earth; destroy my need to make such petty decisions. Live or die, love or hate, breathe or just lie still on the pavement. I smoked the last of my cigarette and went inside. I looked at the clock. It was exactly noon, and before I was completely dressed. I looked on the computer screen on my desk. I had apparently been looking at quotes the night before, and left the damn thing on as I usually do. I look at quotes, mostly, because I am a subscriber to the old cliché belief that whatever you might say, somebody, somewhere has said it better before.
"As it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must."
Needless to say, that quote is stuck in my head to this day. Whether separating from governments, as the quote was meant to depict, or a separation from life, which is up to the individual to determine whether it is necessary or not.
Either way, when you talk of mistakes, mishaps, addictions or any score of faults you might have tripped over in life; people give the hindsight advice that these evils could have been easily avoided. They never understood us. Like deer in the headlights my friends and I stared at these eighteen- wheelers of destruction and knew the exact outcome. We danced around in the fire thinking we were invincible, but we knew. Simply stated, we didn’t give a fuck. We were high out of our minds in a suburban hellhole surrounded by feelings of immortality.
It’s all fun and games, however, until people start dying. Nobody gives two shits until so-and-so ends up in a morgue with enough heroin or cocaine or ecstasy or painkillers in their body to kill a fucking horse or someone shoots their face off because they can’t stand the thought of living like this for another second. The funny thing is, no matter how much death and destruction and pain living our lives the way we did caused us, it was never enough. We cried for fifteen minutes and then moved on to the ultimate objective of not being able to see straight.
IT never ends. Even though I’m clean now, every time I drive in this goddamn city and see all these goddamn people I feel dead. There’s no getting out. I’ll be a fucking addict for the rest of my life, and I guess I’m going to have to learn to be okay with it. Fuck this cocaine city and everybody in it.
All I remember now is sitting with Steve at our dead end jobs and remembering how it used to be. How we used to be happy and how shit actually used to matter and make sense and how we were on top of the fucking world. Well, not anymore, I guess. Those days are long gone and no matter how hard we try or how clean we get or how successful we are, we’ll never be innocent again. We’ll never be able to say we’ve never watched our friends drop dead around us like flies and we’ll never be able to forget. Those days are gone.

“We were somebody then,” Steve said.
Well it sure as fuck seems like we’re nobody now.
We turned off the lights and were gone.