By Gena Wynkoop
Spring 2019 Kaplan Award Winner
When I was 22 years old I thought I had everything figured out. I wouldn’t call myself a know it all by any means, but I have always been solid in what I believed in. I was the friend that people could count on for solid, no bull shit advice.
When I was 22 years old I was already in my dream job. Since I was little I knew I wanted to work at a magazine, to write and to edit stories. To talk to celebrities. To live in a big city and go to meetings and happy hours and complain about how our jobs were sucking the creativity right out of us.
I wanted all that. And I had it. Everything in my life had lined up perfectly—I got an internship at a digital magazine by 20 and worked my way up to Assistant Editor by 22.
I was in control. I had the power. I knew what made me happy and what didn’t. Or so I thought.
It was the end of summer in 2017 and I had just gotten out of a yearlong relationship with my partner at the time named David. He was safe, secure—kind of boring. We immediately passed the honey moon stage and were in “old married couple” territory rapidly. I knew he wasn’t helping me grow, or giving me the kind of love that I sought for myself.
The kind of love that drives people mad, the can’t breathe can’t eat without you kind of love you see in all the rom-coms.
I met Matt in the early summer of 2017 while I was still with David. David was supposed to take me out that night but said he didn’t feel good and wanted to stay in. I think that was the beginning of the end. When he bailed, I decided that I had had enough and was going to take my own damn self out. I called up my coworker Sam who was also becoming a very good friend of mine and asked him what he was doing. He invited me to a party with his brother, Matt, and I said yes.
I remember the moment when Matt walked into the room. He was ruggedly handsome, with tattoos all over his arms and hands and had the most gorgeous blue eyes. His smile was sly, his swagger immeasurable.
I was instantly taken with him and realized I needed to leave the party as soon as possible. I mean, he’s my coworkers brother, I have a boyfriend, if I have one too many drinks I will definitely hit on him—I’ve never been afraid to go after what I want.
After a few flirtatious glances and exchanges I called an Uber home and hoped that I would see him in the future.
By the end of the summer, I finally broke it off with David and the following weekend was invited by Sam to a Mariner’s game. At the end of the phone call he said, “Oh yeah, Matt will be there too.”
My heart plummeted to my guts and was immediately washed over with giddy school girl feelings. I later found out that Matt had suggested he invite me since Sam had an extra ticket.
When I saw Matt again, the same magnetic attraction was there. We went to the Mariner’s game and then the following night hung out again. We were beer pong partners and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Every time I felt his shoulder or arm press against mine it was like I could melt into him.
Okay, okay, you’ve heard it all before. The love story, the fireworks, the magnetic energy. You know how it goes. Well—that happened. We did that. We had that. We had the perfect love story—the joy he gave me was indescribable. My family loved him, saying he was the perfect fit for me, his friends and parents saying that he, too, had met his match.
But things started to turn. Matt admitted to me about a month into dating that he was a recovering heroin addict and that he had been clean for three years. He told this to me as we were drunk off our asses playing putt-putt golf. I immediately knew something was off. Aren’t recovered addicts sober in every sense of the word?
Every time we would go out together, he would get progressively more and more wasted and I watched his sobriety unravel before my eyes.
I’ve never been around addiction. Sure, my friends smoke pot and we drink but never anything further—we’ve never been around heroin. I didn’t know what to do. I was a 22-year-old who had the world by the tail, watching my greatest love start to unravel at 28. Wasn’t he supposed to be older and have everything figured out?
It was Halloween night and my brother’s band was playing a gig at the Rendezvous, a bar on 2nd Avenue. Matt was being especially particular that day—admitting to me that he took a Percocet, which is synthetic heroin. He kept leaving me at the bar to go “meet up with his friends.” I knew something was horribly wrong but I wanted to trust him so badly—I wanted to believe that my love story wouldn’t fail, that all the magic we built wouldn’t crumble.
Later that night we were back at my place when Matt slipped into the bathroom. I was half asleep but my intuition forced me to wake up and listen. I heard noises, the cabinets opening and closing, him scrambling around my bathroom. He was getting feverish, like the thing he was looking for was lost in the cabinets and he didn’t have much time.
Then, silence.
He opened the door to my bedroom, and turned on the light. He’s white as a ghost. After walking over to me and collapsing on top of my body he whispered in my ear, “don’t let me die tonight.”
If you’ve ever experience a true life or death adrenaline rush, you will know what kind of super human powers you experience. It’s incredible, these bodies we have.
My hearing became immaculate. My movements sharp, with purpose. I threw him off my body and realized he was gasping for breath, his lips blue, skin white as snow. His pulse was raising, which I later learned is the bodies response to pump oxygen to your brain when your lungs aren’t functioning.
I snapped into reality. No more hiding. No more pretending that my perfect love wasn’t losing his battle with addiction. He was crumbling and I was watching his overdose happen right in front of me.
This was the moment that forever changed me. I was slapping his face, and screaming his name with no response. When you call for someone, they usually respond to you. This wasn’t the case, and it was disturbing.
I could feel and see his soul leaving him.
In his overdose, I saw the true meaning of life, the fragility of human existence. That our bodies are only bodies—a shell, that holds our soul and when our bodies give up, that soul moves on. The soul continues, but not here. Not in Matt.
In his overdose, I experienced God. The universe. I saw things differently; I saw people differently. I thought of every mean word I’ve ever spoke, every malicious action I had done to someone and realized that they aren’t the other—that we are the same, that we are all God, we are all divine.
This world that humans have created isn’t real—it doesn’t exist. War, hatred, genocide. It’s impossible. When you see a soul leave a body, it’s clarity on human existence. When our soul leaves this world, what was the point? What was the point of this whole thing we call life? What was the point of our pain? Our sorrow? Our limiting beliefs?
Matt didn’t die that night. My dad resuscitated him right as I was dialing an ambulance.
Someday he will die—and I pray it isn’t to addiction. Matt isn’t in my life anymore, and I still mourn our love story every day. I love him not in spite of his addiction but because of it—he taught me that no matter who you are, you are still deserving of love. He is not his baggage; he is love and laughter and zest for life.
What he gave me was a gift and is something I can never thank him enough for. To live life in pursuit of joy. In pursuit of knowledge, truth, and understanding. In pursuit of God and to seek God in everything. To listen to my inner wisdom, to create what I feel called to—because in the blink of an eye, your soul will return to the source and we have limited time to make the most of life here.
Turns out, I don’t have everything figured out. Never have, never will. The goal is to just keep living and loving and hopefully laughing ‘til my guts hurt every day.