I miss you, so fucking much.
Yesterday, when I heard about what happened, the only thing I could do was scream. A deep, wordless howl of pure anguish, after a series of peppered and increasing insistent “NOS”. I didn’t believe it. It didn’t seem real. Nothing seemed real. Nothing mattered anymore.
I sat at the little table in my kitchen blankly. I didn’t know what to do, because nothing seemed to have any purpose anymore. My limbs felt heavy. I tried to get up to make some coffee but breathlessly fell back to my chair. My eyes immediately darted to the half full bottle or bourbon sitting on the counter, and my brain calculated the simple addict arithmetic of what and when I would be allowed to drink. I tried to shake the idea from my head.
The first person I called was Bryce. As I waited for him to answer, I tried to gather what I was going to say. I still didn’t feel like I had any weight to my body. The sun was shining, barely a cloud in the sky. An otherwise perfect, beautiful day. I descended the staircase, because I needed a motherfucking cigarette.
All the words I had thought I would say went out the window when Bryce answered the phone. I screamed. Just screamed. “Dan killed himself Dan killed himself DAN’S FUCKING DEAD” over and over and over again. It took a minute for him to even register what I said.
“Holy fucking shit”
I sat blankly on my porch, smoking one cigarette, then another. Recounting the last day’s worth of conversations with Dan, the fact that he never saw my daily “Good night” message on Messenger. To my horror, that told me he was already gone when I sent it.
I sent that message sitting in my living room, joyously welcoming my new temporary roommate, a sibling of my friends’, who was staying with me for awhile. There was laughter and music and warmth. I remember that I sent it a little later than I wanted to, because of all the moving timelines that continually got pushed back. I saw that Kristine was online, and figured “Good, she’s got this.” I almost felt in the last month that this woman I had never met, but who also loved Dan, was trading off care duties with me. The care and keeping of Dan Sartain.
Back to the unreality of the morning. Without anything else to moor me, I walked to Manifesto. I needed a coffee. I needed more cigarettes. I needed something to do with my hands.
I got my coffee in a daze. I think the only way I could feign normalcy is that it was still only 8am, and the sun was shining and if I didn’t think too hard, I didn’t have to exist in the reality that you weren’t in. I talked to Bryce while I walked around the neighborhood. Dan was the first ever artist I introduced him, my ex husband of 10 years, to – standing in line to board the Greyhound bus to San Diego at some transfer point in the middle of the California desert, as we traveled to Rocket from the Crypt’s last show. Dan always loved that story. When I told him me and Bryce were heading to splitsville, he was sad because “the story is just so good!”. I know, dude. It’s part of the reason we held it together as long as we did.
Point being, Bryce knew Dan, and knew how much I always adored his music. Knew that in early 2011, at my very utter and most depressive lowest, I commented on a post on Dan’s Facebook page, letting him know that I got the Red Letter Media reference he posted that day. This quickly led to a messenger conversation, ostensibly about Star Trek. He asked me what I thought of Generations. I responded with a multi paragraph, multi faceted argument of the character analysis of Kirk and Picard being inconsistent, among other things. Dan only responded with “Okay, can I call you? What’s your number?”
We talked frequently from 2011 to 2015, and then sporadically for the next five years, through no fault of either of us. We talked about everything. Music, movies, the nerdiest things you could think of. Dan’s love life, my ennui. The trauma the late 2000s had wrought on both of us. At first I was giddy and terrified to speak to him at length, this was a musician I used to print out blurry images of off an early 2000s internet to hang on my wall, next to Joe Strummer and John Reis. But soon, his weird obsessions, his goofy laugh, his unfailing earnestness changed my viewpoint of him from Dan Sartain: Musician to just…Dan. My friend, confidant, one of the closest people I had to me when it felt like my sanity and my marriage was hanging by a thread. Losing him to circumstance for almost 5 years, and only hearing his sporadic dispatches get sadder, his big personality get smaller, always made me worry for him. When we reconnected in early 2020, it was like a light was back on in the room. It was like he never really left, and like no time had passed at all. In hindsight, I’m eternally thankful we had that time.
As I walked with my coffee and my now 4th cigarette (and to think, I had almost quit before this!), I told Bryce I would be okay. I needed to make another call.
I sat on a bench in People’s Park and dialed V’s number.
I didn’t think he would answer at first, because the past month, he never did. He barely texted me back, and when he did, he was cryptic, unapologetic, and cold. V was my partner, the man I loved, the man up until mid February I was going to move to Texas to be with, so we could have a perfect happy little weirdo life in the hill country.
“I need you please” I wrote. “My friend killed himself. Please.”
“Jesus Christ. I’ll call you in just a few”
To his credit, he did. I told him everything I told Bryce. I was already feeling like a broken record. The last video chat we had. What he said, what I said. How I pleaded with him to go home and be with his family, or friends. How I asked him to please call me, and if he felt too bad, to call his therapist, or the crisis lines I sent him, or anyone. We had been so many weird, sad places on vid chat that week. I had seen my friend as a hollowed out shell, a man completely falling apart. Again, like a mirror, I was also falling apart, and I felt helpless trying to keep either of us together. I felt helpless, even as I begged him to leave Birmingham, to go to LA with Kristine, or SD with his friends, or Tacoma with me. Just for a little while. Just until life became tangible and beautiful again.
I told him how the last thing I said to Dan, as we had started getting in the habit of saying to each other in the last couple weeks, was “I love you, man.” He said he loved me too, and he would call me soon. I will never stop telling my friends I love them, every time I see them.
V, my partner (?) was shaken. He has seen so many parallels of his life with Dan’s, with them both being of similar ages, both having similar struggles that affected their health and all their relationships, having children, being musicians. He was kind to me, expressed how earnestly, totally sorry he was.
I felt it was time to give up the ghost, the grand fuck you I had planned for V, that I had orchestrated just the day before – I was flying to Lubbock, tomorrow, to confront him about the state of our relationship, as I had been slowly driving my self fucking crazy trying to figure out what I had done wrong, and I badly needed answers, I badly needed to state my case, I badly needed to convince V that he was being a giant asshole and I badly needed to hold him in my arms again, like that would somehow make everything all right. V was absolutely silent, said he would call me back once he could process the massive bomb I dropped on him. We did talk later, but what was said is ultimately unimportant. Somehow I had to move my very quickly failing body to the airport and across the country the day after this terrible, unreal fucking day.
Without anything else to do, I sat on my porch, grabbing the Bluetooth speaker from the bathroom. I cracked open my pack, pulled out a cigarette, and sat there. And there I sat, for the next 6 hours.
Sometimes staring. Sometimes crying my fucking eyes out. All the while the sun was still shining, the birds were still singing, and the sky was so goddamn blue.
Eventually, my friends swarmed around me, enveloping me with love and affection as each of them got off work. Eventually, I started drinking, because I’m only human. Eventually I was able to share his music, gush about funny stories and conversations, share these memories I held dear. Eventually, I smoked that entire pack of cigarettes, the first time I had ever managed that, but as it turned out, not the last.
The first song I played, that I must have played dozens of times by the end of the night, was “The World is Gonna Break Your Little Heart”. It has always been my favorite song of Dan’s – I’m a sucker for songs that highlight the inevitable joy yet tragedy that is growing up. It has meant different things at different times in my life. At 14, it meant rebellion, something to fight against, something that would neve happen to me. At 25, it meant nihilism, that no matter how hard you fight, we all end up in the same place. Now, on my porch, with that blue sky, I understood just how many ways the world could break my heart.
I went to sleep last night, heart heavy. I knew logically, time was the only way I would get through this. And I still had a marathon of emotional turmoil I needed to get through in the next week, and I had no idea if I would have the strength to. I felt like I was taking the first steps on a long journey I might never truly see the end of.
I had seen the end of the day, though. The first few frenzied steps in the first few desperate hours.
