I want a better life. I do. But I keep getting caught up in the idea that those I wanted a better life with, and those I wanted a better life for, too, aren't getting or won't have the chance to have that. And that's where my rationality stops because at that point emotion takes over. Maybe it's too fresh still or too raw or I haven't forgiven them or myself but how does one?

I had that conversation with my best friend today and she's the one person who can truly say she has known me through it all - literally from the first time I tried to kill myself to the first heartbreak that tore me open to my assaults to my first drug use to my last, through my sobriety and my relapses, my hospital visits and police station stays. She's the one who convinced me to leave my first abuser and I know she came to me today for answers. I had to sit there and tell her that I don't have them. It's been three years since I walked away but all I learned was that it's terrifyingly easy to travel the same path when the road to a new one is blocked by all the unresolved pain from the past. And you can't start sorting through that pain when new trauma keeps getting piled up.

Lately, I've been saying "people wonder why I'm an addict" in response to emotional events happening and it's been ironically, but today, honestly, I ask you: is it any fucking wonder that I don't know how to process anything when the first friend I lost to this disease, I lost at 12? Then 14, twice, then 16, then 19? I'd had a body count of five when Carlene died and I didn't know it could get harder then, 19 and scared shitless that the drugs didn't numb me enough anymore, desperate enough to try something I'd sworn never to touch. I thought watching my partner go through the grief of losing two children and then her own ex-partner was the worst it could get. So I left, I walked out with bruises on my hips and on my heart and left her with a black eye and a mess to clean up that could've been so much worse "had you not been drinking"...

I digress.

I fought through Nick without a support system that I'd grown to rely on, and I managed to get out without completely hating myself, until he fucking ripped my life out from underneath me without my expecting - a life that I didn't even know I'd had until it was gone. I'm so glad I don't have a lot of my journals or my writing from that time because trying to remember who I was, the things I did, how I acted, makes me sick to my stomach and ends with me dissociated. I don't recognize the life I chose to life after I didn't think I was going to have one anymore. I often think that all this is so painful now because I threw away what I had before, the emotional courage and cushion to lean back on to process, and I chose drugs instead.

I don't know if there's a worse way to die than by suicide, except for maybe what they did to Dustin. It's bad enough to have your child, partner, friend, father die from suicide, but I think the only way that could've been made worse was when it was so obviously not, yet got the label since it was "easier". Nothing about murder is easy. Nothing about Dustin was easy, either, it took us fucking months of mushroom trips and forced hang outs for us to stand being around each other, let alone be in the same room together. We fought each other on so much. Probably the hardest friendship I've ever had in terms of how hard we tried to care about each other, and just couldn't because of arrogance (him) or annoyance (me).

And then there was the trip that changed drugs for me, and Dustin was a part of it, and will forever be a part of that group in my mind, the four of us running the town, fearless, unafraid children really, none of us were old enough to really understand what we were doing. And I, the youngest, always angry that they'd laugh at my naivety then tell me not to lose it. I held on as we lost everyone, one by one, to jails or hospitals or the cemetary. Carlene was the first of us all not to come home, and I had one foot out the door at that point after watching Dan get shot. That's all I needed to take off, cut everyone off to the point where I never even got to meet your son before he was taken, my third god-child (but thank God for that, because his mother is just like Alex now, I'm surprised she's alive, and thank God, too, that you didn't have to see her like that).

Almost three years later, I didn't expect to find out on the tail end of my first coke binge since I'd last seen you that you'd been murdered. I never dealt with that. I never let myself feel it. I remember hanging at the top of the rock wall, Julius belaying and yelling for me to take the wall and just being frozen, suspended there, unable to move, think, staring across the gym, out the window, the mountains and their darkness, the heavy weight of them both pressing against my chest and lifting me up simultaneously.

I need the mountains to take me home again, and I don't think I'll be able to start working through Ryan's death until I work through yours. I need to let it go, let you go, and forgive myself for everything that happened between us, to me in between our friendships, even now. And going there, going back to the only place I've ever felt home since being seventeen underneath the stars falling on our faces, is the only idea I have left of getting through this.