Grief, in the first few days (2024)
“Best of all he loved the fall, the leaves yellow on cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills the high blue windless skies. Now he will be apart of them forever.”- Ernest Hemmingway
“Fall because it’s a contemplative season. The leaves are falling and the weather is changing”- Ryan, age 17, on his favorite season for the local paper
Ryan greeted me first on the porch of a rotting house in Akron. A forgotten city once a crucial beating heart of American industry. The house we stood upon functioned as a venue, an art space, and a general home of freaks. "Shows”, concerts, of punk bands that were touring the United States and we were there for just such an event. Ryan and I both sat on the porch, smoking cigarettes. He greeted me with a warm smile and a huge hug that would become completely synonymous with him. We had met once before, but this was the first time I felt as though I got to be with Ryan. He asked me to catch him up, remembering little details.
Some months later Ryan, Jack, Hunter (my high school friend turned roommate), and I huddled on the couch, readying ourselves to watch “The Shining”. Jack, Hunter, and I just moved into the house. The rooms were painted in the original turn of the century colors, the houses make-up felt like a mirror into the past. I remember the couch was an antique salmon color and rock-hard; we wondered aloud if maybe it was haunted.
The house still seemed clean then. It was free of the weight it carried later. The only thing we had hung up was two of the same John Wayne posters on the far wall of the stairs, done so for the absurdity of it, not for admiration. Faces of the past peering at us crammed on the couch. “The Shining” made us feel as if the new dwelling lurched and hummed with dark energy. Ryan loved the film. We made a joke that “The Overlook” would make a perfect nickname for the house and Ryan agreed before he left for his own home. It seemed scary upon second thought, but The Overlook is what everyone would know our house as.
People came and went, but Jack and I remained in the house. A year into our stay, Ryan moved in. We all grew up in the same small rural area of Ohio, though coincidence brought me to Jack and Ryan, who grew up together. We spent most of our days trying not to work and taking tabs of something we would have liked to imagine was “acid.” We would spend whole days laughing, hallucinating, and reflecting on the past, sometimes in fear, but always together, binding us to each other in our own world. The house felt alive as ever then. The cemetery across the street felt like a sanctuary of green wooded groves. Jack and I walked through there in our deepest reality-shaking moments.
Not Ryan, his experience took him to a mirror in his mind. He would insist on evaluating an imagined slight from a friend, the way a lover may have looked at him during sex, or trying to find the ghost he was sure occupied The Overlook. I couldn’t see the ghost, but somehow, he could nearly convince me of it. One day Ryan and Jack even saw the apparition. I only wanted to look at the trees and listen to something warm, feel my body on the grass. But Ryan couldn’t stop searching, prying himself open, gazing into the back of his beautiful, scarred mind and inward he went.
A year after leaving The Overlook for some other cheap rotting house, I stopped drinking, mine, and Ryan’s favorite past time. We would get loaded and listen to music, chain smoking long into the night, memories I cherish now. Thinking clearly for the first time ever in my adult life was double-edged. I could see right through problems that plagued me for years, even decades. The other side was what it showed me about others. Ryan’s persistent drinking was part of a growing cynicism in him. Like watching him in a cage, he became insatiable and ravenous, one long night after another. My love still lay with that uncorrupted smile and laugh, but a fear took hold, and he seemed like a shadow of the thing I loved.
I drove across town to visit for a night. It had been a few months since I had visited the Overlook. Ryan laughed and hugged me hello, which I took for granted by then. We listened to music and caught up. Any nagging feelings melted away into that timeless space that anyone can recognize. A space where the forgetfulness of youth gives birth to, an undercurrent that life is vital, real, urgent, and only right here; now. Those are the times I already missed then; Ryan was a natural in these moments. His casual attitude, his persistent iconic laugh, and his open mind brought the best out in everyone. These are the things most people would remember him for.
After another smoke break, this veneer tore open. We headed inside and sat on the couch which had a wood coffee table with a glass top in front on it. Ryan brandished a large hunting knife and a small, zippered bag. He poured what could be a large amount of cocaine onto the table, separating it into lines with the knife, and ripped it up his nose. The image was violent and disturbing because I knew what would come next. A seething conversation about the stupidity of people he knew. How they all looked at him funny now. How he couldn’t wait to leave this haunted town and house. How he knew he screwed things up, but why were people mad at him? I knew this conversation would go late. I would regret nights like this.
Maybe I should have pleaded with him to get help. Or maybe I should have hugged him a little longer. I should have told him that no one thought anything but the best of him and the chemicals pulsing through his mind were making him paranoid. That he hadn’t made any mistakes, that it’s okay to forgive yourself, it’s just a misunderstanding. Something I regret the most is not being able to just talk to him, to listen, even in his darkest hours.
A year passed and Ryan moved to his family’s farmhouse. I went to visit and help move things. Ryan seemed in good spirits, but there was something about the empty farmhouse and collapsing barn behind it. Ryan laughed when I asked him about it, it’s just old he said. Jack would later tell me, the day after he died, that Ryan and his brother made a movie in and around the house. In the film, Ryan was chased by demons or ghosts in the house at night. Ryan ran with a flashlight in hand laughing and a little scared, as his Ryan’s brother and friends haunted him. Jack mentioned too that his grandfather and uncle lived in the house at one time, and both died in quick succession. Neither of us know why but I know Ryan loved those men, and he spoke of them in the same breath as his brother and father, the most important people in the world to Ryan. These stories silenced me, I felt my stomach lurch. Jack and I think that these are some of the things that haunted Ryan the night he took his own life.
I learned that you stayed up late most nights, alone in your family’s farmhouse, in those later days. You would drink until it was safe. Safe to let go, let the shadows at the periphery scratch into the world, to feel the pain of loneliness. I learned that you would grab a flashlight and look for the phantoms that you knew roamed the house. I learned your grandfather and your uncle withered in that house. That demons chased you there as a child. I wonder now if you were looking for them. An anxious ghost dance, a conjuring of the men you revered so much and fears you longed to face.
Maybe you were crazy for this, searching for ghosts; I think they were real but what they actually were was not just a spirit. Searching for something that we all long for. Misunderstandings take no effort, and you eternalized them all, a flagellation for mistakes you’ve made. To be understood is to be bare to others, vulnerable, and humbled. Your attempts at this left a bitter smokey taste in your mouth. A specter would understand, a bitter soul trapped in that house. Ghosts of the understanding you felt at one time had to be in other room. If you’re drunk enough, they could listen to your smallest words.
Since you died, an apparition has roamed my life. I imagine it’s how you felt that night with Jack in The Overlook or the ones you hunted for in the farmhouse you took your own life in. This is the ghost of the words stuck in my throat when you were still breathing, of late nights talking to each other and the secrets you told me, and infinite weight of the growing silence between us. A moving shadow of the love we still held close.