All The Ways We Never Lost Each Other

📅 Late 2018

【ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ ᴅɪsᴄᴜssɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛᴇᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ғʟᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ】

“What-if”ing was the world’s least productive hobby, and Anarchy tended to avoid it as much as he could, especially having seen the havoc it wreaked on people close to him. It seemed like a one-way ticket to spiraling despair, or anger, or any equally uncomfortable emotion. What-ifing the future bred anxiety; what-ifing the past trapped you there all over again. Anarchy much preferred the present. But oh, sometimes the compulsion caught up with him. Not in the spiraling, obsessive way it seemed to catch Kato, but in a way that strained his heart with grief he was thankful to not need. 

Chey had been “over it” by the time they’d met in their early teens—“it” being suicide, “it” being whatever the fuck it was within him that had put the scar across his throat and which had seemed so alien to his nature that Anarchy hadn’t ever truly internalized it as even relevant. Chey had been so far removed from suicidality in their time together that it got filed away as something aberrant which Anarchy had never known in him; a fluke of the past that would never come up again. Even in the depths of addiction, with them both wasting away under the palms of greedy, groping men, it hadn’t come up. Not really. Anarchy had been the one who voiced ambivalence to death in the face of withdrawal. Chey had been the one to force a spark into his dull eyes and say that spring was coming.

And then he’d been gone for seven years, and when he came back he still had that smile of his, and those lively eyes, and he was off dope and laughed easily and Anarchy hadn’t had reason to spare much thought to “what if” because of how apparent it was that his most feared “ifs” hadn’t happened. 
Neither of those ifs had been intentional overdose, though, and he got thrown headlong into that concept one night not long after Chey returned, where he confessed that he’d ended up in the hospital multiple times after their separation, because “it” had come back.

Suicide. 
What if I’d lost him to suicide. 
Somehow it ached worse than all else, because murder and fentanyl were more external, more concrete-feeling in some way, or maybe more like Acts of God that he could see and know but couldn’t anticipate or affect. But suicide was “it,” was internal, invisible, was something Anarchy had dismissed in Chey because he’d never seen it and then it had nearly stolen him. Nearly stolen him like it had tried to steal Aetos and Seth and Kato, like it was still trying to steal the latter two. Anarchy hadn’t seen it before, back in his teens; hadn’t known it, watched it at work. But by now he was familiar with “it”, and the idea that it lurked around in the deepest reaches of the minds of his loved ones and bided it's time until it could try again shook him to the core.

Chey had what he called “body flashbacks.” It meant he was present mentally: He wasn’t feeling young and terrified and stuck in his history all over again—but sometimes his body would seize and he’d retch; his stomach would spasm so violently he’d struggle to breathe and end up coughing and then dry-heaving again. The first time it happened, Anarchy had asked if it was a Water Memory, even though it seemed sicker than he remembered them.
Chey shook his head, eyes screwed shut, a pained grimace carved into his expression. “Overdose.”

That had made Anarchy’s heart leap to his throat, because it hit him, violently, that it had been That Bad: That his boyfriend had taken that many pills and his body had been forced to fight them out, that Chey had been that desperate, that sick, that intent, and even years later his body remembered all the trauma of choking down a death sentence and spitting it back up.

Chey gave him no reason to worry in the present day, but Anarchy asked anyway, more than was necessary, undoubtedly:

Is it over? 
Do you ever feel that way now? 
You’d tell me if you did, right?

It’s over, ‘Key. 
Never, I never feel that way. 
I know I can tell you anything. 

“What if I’d lost you?” Anarchy asked one evening, some TV show they’d watched having paired poorly with the alcohol in his Jack & Coke and filled his chest with grief which dampened his eyes, “What if it comes back? What if you feel that way again?”

“‘Key, you don’t have to worry,” Chey soothed. “I’m not the kid I was back then. I’m off heroin; I’ve gotten therapy. And I’m back with you: Even if I somehow thought I had nothing else to live for...I’d live for you.” He nuzzled against Anarchy’s chest, a space that had been his almost from the day they met. “I couldn’t be farther from those thoughts, though. It’s all worth living for: You, life, the world and my own place in it… I couldn’t see that back, before. But I can now. I can. I promise.”