Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Not the ideal way to spend a Tuesday…

I have to blog this because I don’t know how else to process this.

Police arrest man in standoff in Shelton, CT

I took a quick 5 minute break a few hours ago and checked out Facebook. I was overwhelmed with the number of statuses that were about my friend, Bryan. (Better known around these parts as “Soulmate Boy”.)

He defriended me on FB a few weeks ago, after our last e-mail exchange, so I had no idea what could have caused the interweb to go all insane like that. Well, I DID have an idea, but no way to prove it.

A quick FB message and a phone call later, I got the news I was dreading…

His Facebook status read: “God forgive me for what I have done and what I’m about to do.”

It turns out he had (yet another) incident with his estranged wife and thought it’d be a good idea to barricade himself in some random house with a shotgun.  There were two shots fired and the major news stations in CT were reporting that he had surrendered peacefully. I had, of course, assumed the worst. It was hard not to, knowing his history of suicide attempts. (I had actually been there to talk him out of one of his earliest attempts… this behavior goes back a loooong time.)  He is dangerously off-balance and in major need of some big-time psychiatric help. Maybe being arrested will FINALLY force him to really get the help he needs.

I wish I could have been strong enough to continue pointing him down the path he needed to take… he WAS listening to me, at the very least. I just wasn’t strong enough to continue and so I let him go. It’s easy for my friends to say that I had to let him go because it was what was best for me and God knows, I’ve said that to people myself, but… With our history, with that deep, deep love I still have for him, letting him go this final time was just as hard on me as losing my father. I downplayed it a lot, but it hurt me every bit as badly.

I have too many opinions on this - opinions that I cannot, will not, put out here - but they’re there and I will have to find the best way to rip him a new one. I don’t want to reopen the lines of communication with him, but it’s gone too far. I know him too well to let this go.

I’m not a religious person by any means, but this is running through my head right now, and I think it’s a sign…

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Wish me luck, ya’ll.