Last Seen: February 2011
What I loved about Ashley was how he’d often enjoy just sitting at the bar, same as me, even as our friends danced and flailed about. I hadn’t enjoyed a dance floor for years at that point, and even though I didn’t mind just sitting there with my beer and watching the club, it was always nice when Ash came and plopped down next to me.
Sometimes, it was to check on me. He had a knack for knowing when people were glum and needed a bit of cheer, and he had cheer to spare. Sometimes, it was the opposite, because with that cheer came the occasional burst of drunken darkness.
Still, more often than not, he shone gold. He was dating my favorite bartender when I met him, and they were relationships goals. They were young and beautiful and I was certainly feeling like neither of those things at the time.
He was a huge part of those years at Buddys, those years when I descended further down a spiral of addiction. I think we were both often searching for a “something else” and sometimes, briefly, we touched on it during those kind of barstool philosophy sessions that only happen after Last Call is called and you’re left only with the beer before you and the boy beside you.
In all the years, through all the beers, and in spite of the fact that he was obviously ridiculously attractive, there’d never been anything more than friendship. Now, one would assume that was of course because he was in a relationship, but that had never stopped me before. In fact, that was usually the last piece of the attraction; the unavailable are, simply, hotter.
But I was happy with our friendship being exactly what it was. Ashley was pure, and I wanted what we had to be pure, too, untainted.
I watched the lows and the highs and the literal highs of his relationship with my beautiful bartender, watched it rise and fall, and eventually, fall apart. Neither of them were happy, together or not together, and even though it had happened before, this time, they said, it was over over.
The last time I saw Ashley was not at Buddys, but at my work. I came in for a shift, and he there, and he was Beautiful. He was all suited up and fancy, and had fit a visit into his day (a wedding, I think?). Just to see me.
This was a time in my life when I was never sober. My days began and ended with drugs and alcohol. I was out of control, there was no doubt, and I was desperate to find something real that would slow my fall. That he was there, right then, so handsome and just there to say hi, I took it as a sign.
I asked him out, and at first, he laughed it off. But I knew this was the moment. Eventually, they’d be back together so if I didn’t carpe the hell out of this diem, I’d lose out. He was light, and I needed light. And even when he wasn’t light, well, our darknesses meshed.
His last words to me were “isn’t just friends good enough?”
My last word to him was “no”.
A few weeks later, I quit all the booze and drugs for good, and a few weeks after that, he died.
He shouldn’t have died. It was stupid and senseless. He’d been at a party, drunk and angry and lashing out, and his friends left him there. I would have been at the party, but my sobriety was new and oh so fragile, and I doubted my ability to resist a party bus of temptations.
Later, and to this day, I would think that if I’d gone, he wouldn’t have been left alone. I’d have stayed there with him, if I hadn’t been able to calm him down. None of it would have happened. He would still be in this world.
But that’s not the way it went.
I didn’t go. He was left behind. And the world is a darker place without him.
