She said he was dead, but I needed to make sure.
I called his cell phone, again and again and again, and I expected he would pick up each time.
His downfall began a few years after our college graduation. He was let go from his company, but I thought it would be okay, because he had hated his employer and he had a few personal clients he could do consulting work for. He had a girlfriend who was a good person. They had been together as long as I had known him.
I caught up with him twice a year without exception. He was the most well-read friend I had, so as my love of books evolved, I wanted to hear his point of view. I asked him a lot of questions. We talked about life. You know, the important stuff you don't talk about with most people, like, what we were searching for, how we had thought something was important but it turned out wasn't, what happened after death, how being bullied in our youth affected us.
Looking back, his spool had been unravelling. He told me about a best friend he had fought with, then another friend lost, and then his interest in polygamous relationship. He broke up with his girlfriend, and suddenly, it seemed like he awoke and slept to drugs.
One day in 2019, we met at a coffee shop in Sawtelle. He arrived in a delirious state. Eyes closing and opening slowly, he said he hadn't slept for three days. He had been in Spain, where he had sat on a bridge next to a woman he had recently met. He had tossed a coin. If it was a heads he would jump, and if it was a tails he would continue to live. It landed on his palm— tails. He came back to the U.S. with three cheap paintings that he put up on his wall and a belief that he was destined to be this century's Napoleon, bringing the Renaissance.
He told all this to me in the corner of a coffee shop.
After, we walked to his place around the corner. I wasn't scared for my safety, because he had been my friend for so long and I hadn't processed what I'd been hearing. I knew something was off, but I didn't know there was a thing called psychosis. I remember thinking something like, "Wow, he has a really different reality right now. But who am I to judge him?". I didn't think to stop and call his mom at that moment.
He showed me the few paintings he had started collecting. He spoke in dark puzzles, referencing emperors and the Death Note manga. This last part freaked me out because I knew a bit of the plot — A character wrote names of people who had wronged him in a notebook, and they were killed. My eyes glazed over his bathroom counter. Empty pill bottles were strewn along the counter, toppled over this way and that.
One year later, his ex-girlfriend messaged me on Facebook.
"hey. PK died. thought you should know."
I called him, then I called his mom. She told me he was found dead on his bed. His friends should have been there for him, he had been so lonely.
At his funeral, I saw a body with a gross blown-up face in a wooden box. I didn't cry because I hadn't fully believed he was dead.
He had left me a voicemail six months before.
Oh, I didn't tell you that, did I?
In the voicemail, he said he was sorry for everything. Voice and hands shaking, I called him back and asked how he was doing. He said he was with his parents and had been going back to church. I kept the call short because I was traveling, I told myself and him. I knew I would not reach out to him again, at least until I felt more safe in his company.
And now, he is dead.
Written by Sandra Rhee. Originally published at sandrarhee.com/writing/a-friend-i-abandoned.