Gone

Michael, the guy that I had finally been officially dating for the last couple of months, and who even when we weren't dating had more or less haunted me from the moment we met around Labor Day of 2006, died on Sunday morning from a blood clot. He was 29.

At just about the exact same time that I came back to New York from Thanksgiving in Tennessee, Michael started suffering from extreme headaches, and after a couple of days of his doctor not knowing what was up, he was admitted to the hospital in Astoria with what turned out to be meningitis. Since I came back from TN with a vicious cold of my own, I didn't get to see him until I was sure it was beaten back, which was why I didn't see him at all in the handful of days between my return and the night he went into the hospital. They started him on antibiotics immediately, and he was feeling fine again within days, although the doctors kept him in the hospital for a little over a week. Ultimately it was decided that he was going to have to stay on the antibiotics for a total of three weeks, so the doctors installed a temporary IV line in his arm and sent him home, with antibiotics to administer three times a day. His father and mother were trading shifts staying with him to help him administer the drugs, along with a nurse's visits. He was released from the hospital last Wednesday, and went home.

On Saturday night, I had dinner with him and his mother -- we ordered pizza -- and he was happy and vibrant. He was going crazy cooped up in his apartment and couldn't wait until he was recovered enough to go out into the city and see the Christmas lights. When he met me at the pizza place near his apartment in Long Island City, he was driving a remote-control truck that he'd built himself. I found it both mildly embarrassing and completely adorable -- which more or less summed up his appeal.

After dinner I had to leave for a friend's birthday party; while drunkenly waiting for the subway on the way home I texted him to tell him how much I wished I could be with him that night. He was already asleep, but the next morning, he texted me back: "Hey baby, good morning." Sometime in the next few hours, my phone ran out of battery charge without my realizing it. And approximately an hour after he texted me, he started complaining to his mother about a pain in his arm. They called the nurse, but before she arrived, he went into seizure, and quickly passed away.

Michael's brother called me on Monday afternoon, but my phone was still uncharged -- I hadn't noticed it was off until I was on my way to work Monday morning, so I didn't even see the missed call until my phone was recharged at midnight. And I didn't ultimately touch base with his brother and find out what had happened until Tuesday afternoon. I'd been trying to reach Michael for a couple of hours.

The funeral is on Saturday in his hometown in West Virginia. I'm going, although I know I'll be uncomfortable, as I barely know his family and I know none of his friends, all of whom remained in Washington DC when he moved to New York last summer. I fly tomorrow night to Pittsburgh and stay in a hotel at the airport, and will drive down to the funeral in the morning and fly home Saturday night. My first instinct is to just hide in a hole and avoid the funeral. But it feels important to be a man about this. I feel like I knew him so little; the very least I can do is see his hometown, and see where he'll be buried.

For as long as I knew him, I had such a difficult time deciding how I felt about him -- as anybody who heard me talk about him in the last year could attest. He was so different from anyone else that I'd ever known or fell for, that the way I felt about him seemed like it couldn't possibly be what it was. I wish it hadn't taken something like this to make me realize it.

Rest in peace, MJ. Despite all the doubts I had, and everything I thought was wrong about us, there was still something between us that I hadn't felt for a long time. We never said it, but I think we felt it.