Page 36 of Mayhem

“This is good stuff, man,” I say quietly. He’s been picking at the loose threads on his ripped jeans as I read, and I can sense his discomfort. It’s not easy to share your soul like this. I get it.

He lifts his shoulder slightly in response, not meeting my eyes, or saying a word. It’s almost painful to watch.

But curiosity is killing me. I need to know what this is about.

“Can you give me some context to this?” I ask, still treading carefully. I really don’t know Dakota at all, and this feels like an important moment. “If you can, I mean. I don’t want to pry into your personal shit.”

He shakes his head slowly, obviously considering whether to spill his secrets or not. I can relate.

“It…was about my wife,” he finally says, his voice barely a whisper. His face is stoic, but his eyes are deeply haunted.

“You’re married?” I can’t hide the surprise in my voice. I think he’s around twenty-six or seven, but he still seems too young to be married for some reason. There’s a quiet innocence about him that I think I project on to him since he was originally just a fan. But now that I look closer, I can see that any age about him comes from experience.

“I was…” he starts, hesitating and looking away. The ghosts in his gaze brightening. “She died two years ago.”

Fuck.

“Shit, man. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get so personal.” The pieces start clicking into place in my brain. The lyrics. The haunted expression. The not partying. The story. It all makes sense now. And it puts a lot of shit into perspective for me.

He waves me off. “Nah, no worries, dude. It’s cool.”

It’s a standard brush off, and I recognize it, because I do it too. We all do. Saying things are ‘cool’ when they’re not. I can clearly see in everything about him that his late wife’s death still affects him deeply.

I brave another question, wanting to know all he’s able to tell me. “Can I ask how she died?”

He leans forward then, resting his elbows on his knees as he plays with the wrap-around snake ring on his ring finger, his head lowered. It’s then that I notice a line tattoo underneath the snake. The old wedding band tattoo that was popular a few years ago. My heart wrenches at the sight of it.

“You don’t have to go into it if you don’t want to, man,” I clarify, not wanting to make him any more uncomfortable than he obviously already is. We don’t know each other well enough yet for all our life stories to be told.

“She OD’d,” he says bluntly, and there’s an edge of animosity in his tone, or maybe it’s plain old anger. That’s fair.

Click.

So, I was right, at least. Everything added up to that, but I didn’t want to assume anything.

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugs again, but stays silent, still twirling the ring around his finger.

There are moments when people share things when words just won’t cut it. Or too many words will diminish it somehow. This is one of those. He doesn’t need a long diatribe about how much his situation sucks. He knows it already. He also doesn’t need a monologue from me about any of my own experiences with people who have OD’d. They don’t matter to him. I don’t matter in this situation.

It's his situation.

All I can do is keep it short. To the point. I’m sorry.

Sometimes that’s all a person needs to hear – that someone is sorry that they’ve had to go through something. They don’t want the full-blown pity party, just the greeting card. Just a few words to make them feel seen.

And, man, do I see him right now.

Not that I’ve lost a significant other to drugs, but I’ve lost people. Friends. It’s an unfortunate side to this industry, hell, to life in general. It happens.

Shit happens.

I feel a bit hardened to it at times, but shit like this, like Dakota’s story, softens me back to it. His lyrics give it all meaning again.

“Would you mind if we used these?” I pick the notebook back up and point to the page in question. “In a song, I mean.”

The hesitation is back, and I can see his mind running a million miles an hour behind his hazel eyes.

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