you get older and you realise, you’ll never have the same kind of friendships you used to even if it wasn’t so long ago. life will get to the point where you have to go one way or the other and a lot of the time you end up having to leave those you love behind. sometimes that hurts too much. you see too much and you loose too much, you end up burning a part of yourself that you can’t get back. that’s what growing old is, it’s when the past is better than the present.
i didn’t know it then but i was already old by the time i finished my junior year in high school. i’m just older now than i was then. everybody one day becomes old, older than they should have to be. oldness doesn’t really come with an age and age isn’t really a number. you know you’re old when that’s something you’ve come to understand.
i wasn’t there the day bruce tried to kill himself. he didn’t want me there. should it hurt to know he planned it that way? or should i be touched to know he was trying to somehow keep me safe from it?
his father.. so stupid. you don’t keep those kind of guns lying around where your fucked up kid can get to them.
then again, i guess it doesn’t make him much of a father when he couldn’t even see how blatantly fucked his son was.
in retrospect, i was probably one of the best friends bruce ever had. because bruce, when i think about it, he didn’t really have friends as much as he had people he tolerated for one reason or another and rewarded with his presence; he kept the company of people who were convenient. there were two or three people out of the group that he hung out with that he seemed to genuinely care for and enjoy spending time with, but their friendships didn’t go much deeper than that because for someone who seemed to know everyone, none of us really knew him; bruce didn’t talk much about himself or his life, and the things he did say, were mostly lies. what it came down to was that bruce didn’t believe he was worth anything and up until meeting me, he hadn’t felt he was worth anything. but suddenly that wasn’t true anymore because there was me, and to me, he was; and he went from not being anything to being everything; and he didn’t know how to handle that.
for a couple of years i was friends with this boy randall. randall was different from anyone i had ever known because of the way he thought, he was years ahead for someone his age. he remains one of the wisest people i’ve ever known. what was so beautiful about randy was.. he couldn’t ever see himself one day being truly happy and he was more than fine with that. he was, as long as i knew him, always discontent, but content with it. i think, in a way, in the last few times i talked with him, he was beginning to go mad, to fray at the edges. but knowing randall, this must have been something wonderful. i think randy is probably one of the most pure people i have ever known simply because he knew without a doubt and he relished the fact that life was most likely going to be miserable most of the time. he didn’t want things to be easy, he had such a strive for greatness. to me, he was always great, and i wish i had told him when i had the chance.
whatever randy sets out to do, he’s going to succeed. because that’s who randall was, that’s who he is. it doesn’t matter what he does, he’ll succeed simply because everything he does, gets him one step closer to becoming more.
when I was fifteen, i was with this boy, bruce. bruce was two years older than me and at seventeen, he had already wracked up his fair share of fuck ups. the thing about bruce was that he didn’t give a damn, and really, when i think about it, he didn’t have anything to give a damn for. bruce had been worked over enough, just by growing up. he’d been fucked well and good and then twice over by the time i met him. the way he saw it, life was a tough ride and rather than follow through and make it to the end, he wanted off as soon as possible. he wasn’t poetic by any means, it didn’t matter how he went out, whether it was with a bang, a slow burn out, or any kind of that kurt cobain type of shit. he just wanted out. because out, out was convenient and life.. wasn’t.
