29. A Creepy Year
When I was eight years old, my best friend and I found an unalive body in a forest. It was almost completely decomposed. Then, when I was 12, I moved to California and saw more gang activity in two months than in one season of The Sopranos. Around the same time, I watched my cousin’s wife end her life, right as I was sitting literally four feet away from her.
I also went to visit my older brother in Sweden that year and I walked in on him cradling the body of his girlfriend, whose life was brutally taken by dealers in their apartment. The most painful part was watching him, a 6-foot-4 hulk of a man, scream like a banshee with tears streaming down his face. I would later see the people responsible for the incident hanged in an abandoned warehouse.
Then, finally, when I was 15, my best friend’s fiancé got pregnant. The baby didn’t end up being his, so they broke up and he eventually began dating a certain kind of dancer. She invited all her friends over, and I ended up locked in a bathroom for 18 hours with one of them. She had enough substances to end a horse. During one of her bouts of paranoia, she absolutely lost it—she ended her life with a blade about eight or nine hours into the ordeal.
I think bad vibes just follow me wherever I go…