Hi Jenn, this is Your Past speaking...

Two nights ago I got a phone call. I vaguely recognized the phone number, but there was no name attached to it. I recently deleted all of the numbers in my cell that I haven't used in long enough to merit their erasure. I had had a feeling that I would get a call from one of them at some point.

I had just finished the last presentation for one of my two harder classes, and Molly and I had come home with two of our school friends to bask in the afterglow of a job done, not necessarily well done, but done nonetheless. I was in a fantastic mood, was surrounded by good people, and feeling relieved. And this phone call sent me reeling.

Molly and Tim had gone to get another bottle of wine to extend the celebration when the phone rang. I answered, distracted.

"Heyyyyyy, Jenn!" Fuck. I recognize that voice. But from where? Its familiarity held in it something foreboding, something that made me wish that I hadn't picked up the phone in the first place. "Hi, who is this?"

"Oh man, you don't... this is Mike! Now I feel weird for calling!"

Mike Bell was a guy from the Springs that I had met in rehab. He was a couple of years older than everyone there, and was best known for buying cigarettes for everyone else in group. He, like everyone else, was there because he was forced, and never had the desire or motivation to quit doing drugs, save for the periodic piss tests that would make him violate his probation.

He was the only person I became friends with in that group of people, most likely because we were the two oldest. He was perpetually unhappy, very quiet, and laughed easily at my jokes. He had a best friend, Corey, that had been forced to live under arrest several hundred miles away. He had no car to visit him. I, in effect, became his closest friend.

We remained friends for a good portion of that year, i suppose partially because going in to rehab, I was on the downhill slope of a long period of time where I disappointed, hurt, lied to, and betrayed many of my friends and everyone in my family. When I hung out with Mike, I knew I made him happy. And it felt good to make someone happy and inspire laughter again. It made me feel real, and grounded, and more like myself than I had in a long time.

I always knew that Mike had a thing for me. We never messed around, or even flirted really, and I never strung him along or tried to play games with him. It was always just something that existed as a backdrop for our friendship. It was obvious, for many reasons, that we were not going to be together, and he was not going to pursue it. That's just the way things were. I was the motivational member of group, I listened to him and gave him advice about his family and Corey and girls, I prepared myself to go to college, he listened as I tearfully apologized through him to myself and to everyone in my family for all of the horrible things I'd done to them. At that point in our lives, he was lonely and needed a friend, and I was ashamed and needed a boost. We played very special parts in each other's lives.

I came up to college my freshman year, and Mike and I didn't talk very much during the first couple of months. I began to make friends, and every friendship distanced me farther and farther from the person I was when I started rehab. I felt loved, and surrounded, and connected, and responsible, and I felt like I had so much power to made decisions for myself, and yet I was still making the right ones. Mike came up one weekend to go to a rave, and bought me a ticket. I was hesitant to go, but I hadn't hung out with him in a while, and decided it would be fun to make fun of the e-tards, since this time I would be observing instead of participating.

He brought pills with them. And he offered one to me. And I'm not saying it was a simple or short decision, but at the end of the night, I ended up taking half of one. Granted, this was about one fourth of the dose I had grown accustomed to in high school, but half of one was more than the none I had taken since I began my journey to being clean. Within twenty minutes, I began to panic. Through some strange powerful force I managed to block out the feelings of being high once they started, and didn't play any of the wild and crazily idiotic games that rollers love to play with eachother during a high, and that I was so crazy about just a year prior. I shut down. Instantly, I saw my fortress crumbling around me, every bit of moral ground I'd gained in the last year disappeared, and I felt like I was right back where I started. Weak, unable to say no, hiding behind a wall of drugs to deal with my problems. I cursed Mike for bringing me back here, I hated him for offering this pill to me. After all of the tearful conversations and all of the anger and struggling, I felt like I had been betrayed. I didn't call Mike again after that night.

I had gotten a couple of voicemails from him, but not an actual conversation. Not until two nights ago.

"Oh man, you don't... this is Mike! Now I feel weird for calling!"

He was wasted. He had filled the void that used to be completely packed with cocaine and meth and ecstacy with alcohol. After a couple awkward exchanges of, "Wow, how are you? What are you doing? What have you been up to?" he began the conversation that I'm sure was the reason he called.

"Jenn, I just wanted to call you to tell you because I never had the guts to before that I have been in love with you since the day we met in rehab. I have always loved you, and I know you don't love me, but that's ok, because I know you've always just been better than me. I have always admired your strength and I have admired you as a person because I think you're one of the best people I know. I have a girlfriend that wants to marry me but that I don't want to be with because she's fucking crazy."

I'm speechless. I don't know how to respond.

"I wanted to tell you all of this because I have been dreaming lately about my death, and I'm not sure how much more time I have here on this earth."

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck what do I do fuck fuck.

"So, I just wanted to tell you that you've been everything to me. And I wish for only the best things for you, because you are the best thing to me."

I've never listened to a voice so hollow, so out of touch, so desperate and so sad. I talked to him for several minutes before promising him that I would give him a call when I go back in town after Christmas, then quietly hung up the phone and burst into tears a few seconds later. My past flashed before me, stripped, raw, searing my eyeballs and burning my skin and making me sigh audibly between the hitching of my chest. I was so close. I was THAT close. I was there, in fact. I remember reading a note I had written to my best friend in the depths of my meth days that spoke of an indescribable feeling of emptiness that had taken over me. I had been reduced to laying my head in my hands through every class period at school, crying for something I couldn't put my finger on, weak from not eating, tired from not sleeping. I wrote that my legs and hands felt like someone had stitched lead weights onto them, and that every morning seemed to start earlier and be more difficult. One more month, one more week, one more binge, and I might have been Mike Bell. I would have been in Colorado Springs, alone, unhappy, weak, addicted, and reaching my hands out for someone to care who didn't exist. I have come so far and could have fallen so hard.

I woke up yesterday morning, thankful to be alive, and once again repeated my promise to myself that I will never ever be that unhappy again.