The gentle voice that talks to you won’t talk forever. 

You might’ve heard that line before. I have, or had – the tense don’t make no sense, as a classmate in elementary school once told me – years ago. This morning the words came screaming back in the form of 90s pop band Ace of Base, from their quasi-hit “All That She Wants.” It sparked memories from childhood – of throwing lawn darts with a friend, also whilst in elementary school. Those darts were large versions of regular dart board darts, thick-tipped and thrown under-handed in an arc so the tip pointed to the sky, crossed the twenty yards of regulation lawn (grass, dirty; how you keep up with your lawn is your business), plummeting, and they did plummet, point first inside or outside of the plastic ring demarcating points (inside ring) or no points (outside). 

As it turns out, this flash fiction is a what-if, one that comes up occasionally when my mind wanders into the dark recesses where the messy thoughts hang out. That back corner of the pub where everyone’s colored by shadows, only the light glinting off their beer mugs to show they’re anything more than a bad memory. 

Some days, instead of turning away from that dark corner, you take your beer from the bartender, toss some bills on the counter, and turn to those memories. After all, most of the time the things we’re afraid of aren’t that scary. Those memories lurking? They’re people, just like us. Or were, once. Now, they’re memories of people, and the things they did and said. 

This morning those Ace of Base lyrics reminded me not of gentle voices, but of a friend from my youth who committed suicide after we graduated high school. He was a friend who I went to elementary school with, and who lived out in the country by me, and who had similar sensibilities in music and video games. His upstairs bedroom was in the attic of his house, but it had been retrofitted into a sort of huge studio apartment space. For an 11 year old, this was a kingdom. Tack on Sega Genesis games and early 90s jams and we had an indoor playground.

There’s a thought now, of a camping trip I went on with him and his parents. And two distinct memories. These two just had shots delivered to that dark corner of the bar. The first was on the drive to the campground. We were in a vehicle that had an enclosed truck bed separated from the parents in the front cab. That was our hang zone on the long (it felt long for one main reason; I don’t recall the real distance) ride. Boys will be boys, but this boy pinned me down in a game of a thousand needles. It’s a game one of my uncles did to me as well, and one I quite frankly still do not understand. It involves jabbing fingers into the prone chest of the patient, supposedly to make them laugh if they’re ticklish. I am ticklish. I am also not immune to the real pain that comes when people with strength slam their fingertips into my chest repeatedly. That truck ride to the campground turned into this friend giving me the thousand needles treatment, long enough for me to strain under the pressure of his knees pinning my elbows down, eyes bulging, chest breaking, tears leaking. I finally screamed and got one arm out enough to throw him off me. 

The rest of the trip was a camping trip. The only thing I remember is waking up in our tent in the middle of night, realizing I had pissed myself. 

I was miserable. 

We grew older, moving through middle and high school, and that friendship due to living close to each other turned into me finding the friend group in middle school I’m still close to today. He found his own, but not as many, which means nothing, although he strayed, becoming a loner, a bit quirkier than I recalled as a kid playing Sega in his attic bedroom. Was he always that way?

I didn’t think much about him after high school. I went away to college. A year or two later, I came home for a holiday break. My friends and I went to the popular bar at the time. It was packed on a Friday night. He was at a table near the front of the bar, with a crew of others. We chatted briefly, pleasantries really. I was preoccupied with catching up with other, more recent friends from high school. I cut our conversation short. Talked to others. Drank. Danced. Moved onto the next place. Thought nothing of it. 

Until he killed himself. 

“Did you hear?” my older sister asked me one day a few weeks later. 

“No,” I said, because I hadn’t. I had no one close enough to him who would inform me. 

And that quick dismissal of him from that night at the bar rushed back. How lonely he seemed. How desperate for contact. How he was at a table with others but they were in conversation with each other, not with him. And how I was a life raft, a flotation device.

I thought what if I talked to him that day for more than a passing minute? What if I asked him how he was doing? I noticed something off (or so I told myself). I’ve had hundreds of nights with my friends. What if I used one of them to talk to an old friend instead? 

I didn’t spiral too far. I wasn’t sad so much as confused by the scenarios. I moved on, busy with college and my own issues (for instance: what if I was projecting my own insecurities onto the situation, labeling his supposed discomfort and loneliness with my own?). The memory of his suicide receded into a dark corner of my mind, watching, waiting, listening. 

Until Ace of Base came on two decades later. 

Until I know now upon confronting the memory that it was no one’s fault, definitely not mine. I could’ve talked to a friend for longer than a passing second. But the truth was we hadn’t been friends in years. We didn’t remain friends for many reasons. 

It did make me think of us throwing lawn darts though, and how I threw one so high and off line that it landed on the roof of their barn, piercing a hole through the shingles. His dad made us get up on the roof and patch the shingle with tar. Only I didn’t patch the shingle, my friend did. He got the ladder and the tar and climbed onto the roof. And fixed it. 

He did that with ease, without thinking. 

I wish he could’ve done that for his mind, for himself.