WE’VE ALL GONE TO SLEEP

The first night I met Barry, I was on a “date” with his friend Georges. By “date” I mean we had showed up together to the apartment where everyone was taking ecstasy that night. Georges’ mother, ironically, was the dean who had very sympathetically informed me I had failed out of college, weeks beforehand; I found it all hysterical in a “haha I feel nothing” kind of way. Barry lived there, and the three of us went in his room and ate the pills and sat on the carpet and I think I made everyone watch me “DJ” between two Youtube tabs. As soon as the pills kicked in it became dogmatically clear that this “date” thing had been arranged all wrong, and I knew Barry knew it too from like 2 seconds of eye contact. Georges disappeared down the block to get cigarettes or something and he may as well have fallen off the planet. I more or less moved into Barry’s apartment from there; we never really talked about it, so much as I showed up and didn’t leave.

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to depression as a concept, or rather, it seemed so obvious it was beyond consideration, like when you zone in on the action of yourself chewing and it gets too weird. In retrospect, that apartment was like a think tank for finding new lows in depressive living. Who cared. My mom was dead and my family was fucked and my old friends were bitches and when I drove my car drunk nobody said “hey wait.” Barry was some kind of major where he had to do really hard math problems and use literal test tubes, which I found hilarious for some reason, but he stopped going to class. We started drinking White Russians in the afternoons which would segue nicely into Molsons and vodka in the evenings. For about two months we slept on a mattress with no sheet because the other option required putting a sheet on it.

I thought I had pretty good taste in music but it was nothing compared to Barry’s. He taught me how to use torrents and invited me, after I begged him for weeks, to this super-secret forum he belonged to where nerds argued endlessly and I saw the life I wanted. He was into all the shit I was into but then also Julie Doiron and Sun O))) and Grouper and The Microphones. I had never heard any of that stuff before, but when I lay on the mattress dizzy and listened to “Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping” playing from the desktop PC that sat on the floor, I thought that it might be alright to just very quietly die there.

When summer came around he drove his shitty silver car back to Connecticut, where he was from, with the little white bunny we bought at the mall in the backseat, and I realized I had no choice but to go back to Chicago. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend because I’d always felt too weird to even bring it up, but I wanted to drive off a bridge. I moved into a studio apartment in Lakeview and spent my days g-chatting him elaborate sad faces I’d copy-and-paste from JapaneseEmoticons.net, until eventually I got a boyfriend, a Canadian guy who I tolerated, and our correspondence trailed into ellipsis. One day months later Barry called me and said he was driving to Chicago and I felt sick and confused because why did you take so long? When he got to my apartment, I made him udon noodles and when he tried to kiss me later, I told him that I had a boyfriend now. He got up and drove somewhere I’m not sure and I never saw him again.

Two years ago I got a DM from him in the middle of the night. “I’m remembering you from what seems like long ago and I hope u haven’t changed too much because you were perfect to me then.” I was so shocked I forgot to respond. Two weeks later, I got a message from his roommate in Oakland. Barry had gone to sleep at his ex-girlfriend’s and didn’t wake up. Something with pills. I put on my headphones and sat there for a long time listening to “I Felt Your Shape,” a song that used to make me want to cry when I first heard it in his room and that had now revealed itself to be a message from the future to the past, or a message from the past to the future, or something extremely fucking crucial to which I had been oblivious, anyway.