What Once Was Mine

Warnings for themes of death, grief.

When you’re young, you have all these dreams and passions.

As a young lad, I wrote and created stories with my very best friend- Adrien. We were just 7 years old when we met.

Alaster and Adrien, if anyone knew one of us, they were bound to have at least heard of the other. Completely inseparable, we were. Our mothers doted on our friendship.

The very first creation of ours was a comic strip for a school project on the dangers of not paying attention when you crossed the primary school playground.

The strip featured two people- the careful one, and the ignorant one.

The pair were on the soccer field, but they wanted to cross to get over to the swings.

The careful one says to the ignorant one, “We need to look both ways before we move. Anastasia is out, and her kicks have some zip to them.”

Of course, the ignorant one tells the careful one that they just need to move quickly, and that they would be fine.

The next box features the ignorant one stepping onto the field with closed eyes while the careful one is depicted standing in the background, looking worried.

Then, the last box shows the ignorant one getting hit in the head with a fast-moving ball.

The entire thing was no more than six boxes long, not including a title box and the message box at the end- “Always be aware of your surroundings!”

It’s funny, we only met because Adrien and I were put together for that project entirely at random. It quickly became clear that he was the artist and I was the writer.

He approached me after our presentation to the class and asked if I wanted to help him make something else. We spent the next several lunch periods making our shared ideas come to life.

We continued this throughout secondary school. The more strips we made, the more well-known we became to our classmates. It didn’t take long for people to start commissioning us to make things- and thus, we created A+A Commissions. We made strips for school events, local businesses, newspapers, and even for people to ask out their friends or whatever to dances.

I ended up receiving the English Department’s Creative Writing award when we finished school, while Adrien received a small scholarship for an art university.

When Adrien moved away, we didn’t talk as much, but we did send letters once in a while. They were full of life updates and random doodles. The little conversations mattered to us.

When we both moved back to our hometown, we got a small apartment together while Adrien began working as a freelance artist and I wrote as a journalist for the local papers.

Even in the real world, we were still Alaster and Adrien with our A+A Commissions business on the side. We didn’t get requests as often as we did in school, but when we got older and social media became a thing, we made a joint social media page and business picked up again. People that once knew us had found us once more, and word spread around the community.

When I married Michelle, Adrien was my best man. He was there when my first child was born. He let me move in and stay with him during my divorce.

Even after the divorce settled, he let me stay, making room for my daughters when they would come to spend time with me.

He never found love, had the nicest things, or the largest house. He never seemed to have a lot of money- on the outside, at least-but he was always so content with the life he led.

If something was wrong, he knew exactly where to go to fix it or who to talk to for a solution. He always helped out anyone that asked, even if he got screwed over as a result.

A very modest man, he was.

And now, his death haunts me still.

One year, one entire lap around that big ball of a sun.

If there’s anything about our friendship that I’ll hold onto forever, it’s how he always made sure I was taken care of. Even in death, he did that once more.

He left the house to me in his will, along with the rest of his money. He even set aside some for my daughters, despite them being grown and on their own.

As I said before, he was a modest man. He was very quiet about his money and a very admirable saver.

Adrien always told me that even though he didn’t have any family of his own, he always thought he was a part of mine- and I always made sure to let him know how much he truly was. That what’s mine was his.

When we started to get a little older, we started to talk about what would happen if something happened to the other- if we fell ill or passed on.

Having that “what if” conversation versus living the reality of it are two entirely different things. Terrible, awful feelings, really.

Yet here I sit, still struggling with the mortality of my best friend in the whole wide world.

My family and friends try to comfort me, make me feel better. But nothing can save me from that grief. They try everything, they try it all.

Some people speculate that we were secretly lovers, and that that’s the reason my wife left me.

I never loved Adrien like that, I thought of him as my dearest friend- a brother, if you will.

I don’t believe he ever thought of me like that.

To be quite frank, I never wondered if he had. I never had to.

It wasn’t until after the funeral that I was sitting alone in our favorite pub that an old friend came up to me and started talking about it.

“I know it has to be hard to lose a loved one, let alone a lover. You don’t think he suffered, do you?”

The entirety of the two sentences caught me so off-guard that I almost dropped my whiskey glass. I had to wonder if I had even heard him correctly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Everyone thought the two of you were a thing. That’s why we thought Michelle walked out.”

How many people thought that about us? Astonishing, really.

It never concerned me ever before, yet this one encounter- this one baseless rumor- had me rethinking our entire friendship, and my entire life. It made me rethink the many years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds we spent together?

I think the worst part of thinking about it is the fact that I’ll never know for sure what the truth is. I’m doomed to just keep wondering.

If there’s anything I hate about grief, it’s how different my life can look day-to-day. One second, I’m totally fine, but then I get triggered by something and I start thinking about the lives we led together. What we could’ve or should’ve done differently.

And that spiral always leads to wondering about how he felt about me.

It’s a vicious cycle, and many would probably suggest therapy, but I’d rather just forget it all.

Oh, the other horrible thing about this grief?

I haven’t written in a year. The several, unfinished projects that lay untouched in the study, across the room from Adrien’s vacant art desk… I haven’t been able to enter that room in months, it brings me far too much pain.

My desire to create has disappeared right before my own eyes.

No matter how much I read, I can no longer create the way that I once could.

There is no imagination, no world building.

My social media has grown quiet, the unread inbox filling with inquiries.

After the funeral, my daughters helped me make a post explaining what happened to Adrien, and that I would be taking a break to grieve.

That break seems infinite. No matter how much I wish it wasn’t, I can’t bring myself to even try to make things different.

And now, an entire year after that fateful funeral and his fateful death that brought him peace yet destroyed all of mine… My daughters and I are having an anniversary wake in honor of Adrien.

My mind is absent as the three of us go around the table, taking turns telling stories about Adrien. The girls are speaking about how much they loved growing up around him, how lucky I was to be his friend, how grateful they were of me for staying in touch with Adrien during the divorce, as it was the hardest time in not just my life, but their lives as well.

But for every story my daughters tell, I drift farther and farther away, trapped in my own head, questioning the same things I’ve been thinking about for far too long.

They're so happy thinking about Adrien, but I am so, so sad.

There’s another thing that plagues me painfully: the memories have begun to fade, I fear. Yet all of this horrible, tragic grief- it stays.

How do you recover from one of your greatest losses?

How do you power through that grief?

How do you deal with no one being able to begin to understand what happened inside your head- inside your heart?

What would you do? Where would you try to begin?

How would you continue on?

How should I, for I know not…