Testing testing

Hey, I'm M, and now that I'm middle-aged and nearing fifty, I thought I'd start a blog. I tend to have a lot of random thoughts, so I will most likely write about whatever I'm thinking...memories and so on. I guess I'll start with something not so happy.

For example, when I was 23 and living in Worcester, Massachusetts, I wanted a change of scenery. I moved to Providence, RI. I basically broke up with my 36-year-old boyfriend of a year or so, P. P told me of a couple, L and S, who lived there and had just had a baby. He gave me their number. I got in contact with them and we ended up hanging out...then hanging out all the time. I didn't really get along with my new roommates, so I stayed at their place a lot. We would party, and things got sexual between the three of us at some point. They all meant a lot to me--we were briefly like an odd little family, the four of us.

I didn't think much of it until one day L and S apparently got into another fight--S took off with the baby to stay with her parents for awhile or something. He told her not to come back. Then it was just me and him. S was not happy about it. One time she keyed my car with the word "Bitch".

At some point, L and I stopped spending time together. I was still friends with his landlord who lived downstairs, J, and was kind of mending fences with S, when she left me a voicemail at my job. I was working at a nearby home for troubled kids. She told me that L was dead in the voicemail. I got immediately upset, and I was sent home. It was brutal. I went straight to their house in time to stand there with S, J, and the baby as they carried L out. Just thinking about it 24 years later brings tears to my eyes.

He'd overdosed and apparently lay there for a couple of days--having ostracized everyone with his downward spiral, no one had really checked on him until S did.

I remember one time I'd seen him in his truck parked in an alley somewhere, ostensibly to score. I tried to talk him out of it, but he just ignored me. I remember one of the last times I hung out with him at a bar, and he was wasted--trying to get on stage with the band, insisting they wanted him to sing.

Not to be morbid, but sometimes I wonder why I am still here when friends like L I've lost are not. I try to make the most of my time now.