I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t like the taste of alcohol. I don’t like how it makes you feel before, during, or after you drink it. That said, I drank three glasses of vodka, took five tequila shots, and smoked twenty-eight cigarettes in my evening with Kind inside Memory’s apartment. One thing led to another. We laughed, we smoked, we kissed, we drank.
At three in the morning, after we had laughed our hearts out, he scooped me up and carried me across the street from the apartment to my dorm room. He held me up like a princess as we moved through the dark alleys, spinning us beneath a streetlamp, nearly making the both of us puke. He gave me four long kisses on our way up the elevator.
After attempting to put the key inside the keyhole of my own tiny dorm room for three minutes, he threw me, while also somehow gracefully landing on top of me, on my bed.
“The stars are moving!” he yelled as he gently placed my bedsheets on top of me.
“Those are airplanes, idiot.” I said.
He laughed harshly and stood up quickly. I couldn’t see him, but I could distinguish his silhouette amongst the darkness. Everything was a pale dark blue, and the room was filled with tiny moving stars and airplanes. The walls were melting and swirling as if we were laughing inside a Van Gogh painting. It was nauseating.
“Kind, I’m really sad about something,” I said without thinking, “why didn’t Memory ever ask me out? Am I ugly or something?”
“You are the prettiest girl I know,” he said softly and gently as he began walking towards the door. “Names, try to have fun at least!”
“Stop saying that!” I exclaimed, somewhat sadly. “It shouldn’t be this complicated!”
He took a short breath, preparing to answer, and tried to turn around swiftly while making finger guns, but he stumbled over himself and fell straight to the ground with a loud crash.
I laughed at his fall and began closing my eyes for longer and longer intervals of time until I finally drifted off to sleep.
I woke up the next morning to an awful, awful smell.
Kind was lying on the floor, with his head twisted towards the door. From it, several long rivers of blood had been flowing towards me, branching all the way up to the furthest wall of the room, resembling the gnarled limbs of a massive, twisted tree. The blood was almost black, and there were flies in his eyes.
He was dead.
His funeral was held two days later, on an appropriately rainy, freezing day. I always thought I’d meet his parents on graduation day, and I always thought I’d see them cry out of pride for their son, not out of pure agony. To my surprise, more than a hundred people attended the funeral, and every single one of them were crying. Memory, being his best friend, was asked to give a speech, but he refused to, so everyone just stayed silent.
© Diego Ballesteros 2024-05-01