This weekend, he shot himself in the head 6 days before his birthday. He was 22 years old.
I found out the other night around 11:30 through Facebook. I was, I still am, shocked. I felt adrenaline run through me and little memories came flooding back:
His favorite band was the Beatles.
His favorite thing to say was "Life Goes On"
He was a Leo.
He had dyslexia.
He loved German class.
He hated to take off his shoes.
He had a smiley face magnet on his car.
He hated cigarettes because they killed.
He said "I love you" to everyone.
When we met, he was a senior, I was a freshman. He was a sociable, hippie guy with a crooked smile. I found him intriguing. After school one day, a random person handed me a box of cookies. I took them, walked outside the school and saw him standing there talking to someone. I didn't really know him then but I wanted to, so I handed the box to him. "Here have some cookies!"
He was surprised and smiled. “I'm going to call you Cookie now!” He offered me a ride home. I thought it was so cool how he could drive and had his own truck.
That was the beginning of hanging out with him after school and getting stoned. We laughed, we had tickle fights. We twirled around in the street. We listened to music and watched Spongebob. Mainly we just talked. We talked so much. We sat in the McDonald's parking lot and talked for hours. We laid in the middle of the road looking up at the stars and talked. At the time I never knew a boy who actually cared what I had to say. I felt free around him, like I could say anything. I could just be myself.
One day he was driving me home and said "I'm not a good person, Cookie. I'll hurt you".
I dismissed it. I thought he was just being hard on himself or had low self-esteem. I saw a light in him, a goodness. I thought I could help him by loving him. But he was just being honest.
He hated the small town we lived in. He said that frequently.
"Then why don’t you leave?"
"I can't. I was born in this town and I'm going to die in this town"
"But why? If you hate it you can leave"
"I just can't."
I didn’t understand.
I showed him the horror movie Triangle. It's a story of a woman caught in a hellish loop as punishment for her sins, a spin on Icarus. He loved it. He raved about it after, saying it was his new favorite movie. He said he was going to go home and watch it again. Being stuck in a meaningless, repetitive hell that’s impossible to escape from really resonated with him, goddamn.
Underneath his happy social demeanor, he was a deeply hurt person. He hid it well, but there was a deep suffering he denied. That's part of what made him so mysterious to me. I wanted to make it better.
He told me he tried to kill himself before. We were in his black pick- up truck in the McDonald's parking lot and he told me his dad kept a gun in the house. It was always loaded. One day he walked over to it, unlocked the box, put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. It just wasn’t loaded the day.
He said "I guess there's a reason why I'm here."
I asked him why he wanted to kill himself. He just shrugged. "Why not?"
I didn't understand that at all.
He broke up with his girlfriend to unofficially, secretly date me. He told me we had to keep it a secret because I was 14 and he was 18. His friends would judge. I told him for someone who prided himself so much on not caring what people think, he cared a lot.
We dated for about two weeks, winter break. We had sex for the first time a few days before he dumped me. That broke my heart.
I knew he was going to end it. He was acting different, more far away. He stopped randomly showing up. He wasn't texting me as much.
He texted me saying he need to come over to talk to me. I said, "you're dumping me, aren't you?"
He said yes, and gave some explanation. I freaked out and sobbed. He came over later and talked about things. He said life goes on. I wanted to punch him in the face, he let me punch his shoulder. I screamed as loud as I could in his truck. He screamed too. I thought it was a beautiful moment in a strange way.
He left things ambiguous. He said I was too young, maybe in the future we could be together. He texted me later and said, “Cookie, stay sweet”.
I really loved him. I loved him as much as a naive, traumatized, codependent 14 year old could. Which was a lot, considering.
Because there was no closure, and that glimmer of hope that one day we’d be together, I pined after him for months. I dreamt about him, I thought about him constantly. I wrote so much bad, clunky poetry. I distanced myself from people, put up coded messages on Facebook so maybe he would talk to me. I didn’t understand how someone who seemed to genuinely like me so much and looked at me with so much warmth could just leave.
After everything I had ever been through in my life, all the abuse I had endured, the boys who broke my heart then I met someone I really felt like I loved. Then it was gone just as quickly as it came. I didn’t see the darkness in him, the glaring red flags, I didn't care. I saw potential. Besides we could still be together, it was still possible… one day.
WARNING: A terrible, incredibly cringe-worthy love sick poem by 14-year-old me:
The world is littered with black pick-up trucks,
Though I never noticed until yours came around.
Now I see them everywhere and I'm struck,
By you and this god-forsaken town.
I'd will to see your headlights down the road every night,
Then you'd suddenly appear out of thin air.
Seeing you walk up my driveway was an amazing sight,
But I don't think you can read my mind anymore.
Even though time was fickle and never on our side,
We'd sit for hours to talk, debate and yell.
And lay in the road, staring deep into the sky,
Most of all, we would just be ourselves.
We were never bogged down with generic talks of love,
or those meaningless sweet nothings.
We had an unspoken agreement that rose above,
Our eyes told each other the important things.
Our time together wasn't all that long,
But in that time,
I felt truly free.
Though sometimes I question if we happened at all,
I then remember we were quality over quantity.
The world never understood what we had,
With you being eighteen and me just a kid.
Being told at every corner that we were bad,
We couldn't get away no matter where we hid.
I float in and out of people's lives, I easily leave dozens of people behind.
When I have change, that's when I thrive,
But how come I just can't get you out of my mind?
You used the nickname you gave to me,
As you said our last goodbye.
Even though I'm not too sure what it means, You said, "Oh, Cookie. Stay sweet."
I started to feel guilty that he left his girlfriend for me. I reached out to her and apologized. While we were talking she mentioned they had sex on New Years, the day he canceled plans with me to "go to Universal". I stopped being sad, I was angry. Why did he even break up with her in the first place? Why did he cheat? I needed to know.
I confronted him at his house, felt resolved and moved on. Until he wrote me a year later apologizing. I accepted it, we started talking again, spent a night together then he ghosted on me again.
When he reached out again, I thought that maybe one day had come, maybe I was old enough. I felt myself starting to get sucked back into that dark, depressive spiral. One day after I woke up in the middle of the night crying in my sleep I knew I had to break this cycle he always managed to put me in.
So I wrote him a love note. It was three or four pages long of my sweetest, most vulnerable feelings. I put my heart on the line and held absolutely nothing back. I don’t remember exactly what it said but it was raw and incredibly emotionally intimate.
I asked him to come over, I said I had something to give him. He did, I sat in his truck and handed the letter to him.
"You know I don’t like reading, Cookie- I'm dyslexic"
"Just read it."
It took an agonizing amount of time. He read it slowly, he read every word. Then it was over.
He chuckled. I don’t remember exactly what was said it was pretty much a "not going to happen". I felt humiliated and rejected. I felt lighter.
I told him to keep the letter because it was true. I walked into the house, closed the door. I started laughing manically. I seemed insane but I was finally free.
He reached out to me in February to apologize about everything. This was our last interaction ever:
I'm glad he could find my message oddly comforting. Honestly, things ended the best way they could've.
The day after I found out he died, yesterday, I remembered when he came over to my house on Christmas and gave me a plush Spongebob because we used to watch so much of it together. I had completely forgotten. He never seemed too sentimental but that was so incredibly sweet and thoughtful coming from him. That was the first time I really realized that he’s dead. I cried at my desk at work. I never thought I would cry over that boy again.
He was a strange, conflicted, complex person. That's the slice of him I saw. I've never met anyone like him before and the impact he had on my life is just as unique as he was. I think the best way to honor a person's life is to see them as the person they were, not try to glorify or demonize them in any way, this is who he was in my life. He always did appreciate my honesty.
It’s so surreal to me that this person who occupied so much of my life at one point, is actually gone. I'm the most sad because I saw so much potential in him. I saw a light. I hoped he'd find true happiness and make the world a better place. I hoped he thrive. It’s tragic that his potential… is just gone. It breaks my heart. I bet he didn’t even think I would care this much.
I hope he's finally found peace and I really fucking hope he's escaped the Triangle.
Rest in peace, Blake. Thank you for existing.
Terrible quality screenshot of a video we took in 2012. It was rare to have pictures of him smiling.