I grew up in a small town. The kind where everybody knew everybody. Classes we small and summers were spent in a drunk bliss. Anyway, there was a kid I grew up with who committed suicide at 21. He had a lot of friends all through school, but they all picked on each other hard. They had mean nicknames for each other and did funny but rude impressions of each other. He made it obvious that he was the one of the group who took these jokes kind of personally and didn't really take part.

Anyway, we all grow up, we graduate, we spend a few years away from each other. When he killed himself, it changed the whole feeling of that town. It's definitely tainted and nobody wants to talk about it. In even the smallest of Midwestern towns, there are several churches. Ours had about 6. His family wasn't religious so they just used the biggest church we had, and his old football coach (who happened to be a pastor) did the funeral service. The biggest church was far too small for his funeral but we made it work.

It was so weird seeing all of these people I grew up with again, and for such a horrible reason. There was this weird combination of nostalgia and sadness in the air. We all got drunk and high together for the first time in a few years, because we knew that's what he'd want.

It turned out that he had actually reached out to a couple of them for help. They didn't exactly take him seriously. He shot himself in the head in front of a relative in a small house at the edge of town given to him by his grandpa.

Even now, I don't see my high school friends often. But every time I do, he gets brought up. We end up talking about him and the good times with smiles on our faces but tears running down our faces. But it's not quite the same feeling we get when we talking other people we've lost due to accidents, illness, etc. It's a completely different thing that's almost impossible to put into words.