creepy stories

Ted killed himself

(based on true events..)

Ted killed himself

I always look back and hate myself for being so surprised.... so surprised at how sincere my shock was. As it really began to sink in, I couldn't believe how naive I'd been.

After highschool, we didn't see each other that much. We'd meet up in the park sometimes. A remnant of how it used to be. Everyone else seemed to have packed up and left, and for a while it was just us. Alone, smoking it up on the park bench as if time had refused to acknowledge the years that had passed and were now gone forever.

"Do you ever think about why you don't hate your parents?"

The question jarred me, completely out of the blue as it was. I froze up, knowing how hard it was for him at home. I worried that he might have resented my stability. I loved my parents and we were always really close. We still are to this day. Ted wasn't so lucky. remember a couple of times that I went by to see him I'd heard screaming and things being thrown during whatever domestic situation was taking place and I just kept walking. I just... didn't bother.

"Nobody asked to be born." Ted sank a portion of the bottle, swapping it for the joint between my fingers. He didn't speak again for some time. "Think about it, we're all here involuntarily. Doesn't matter if you're King Shit or an earthworm, we're all just...
dragged here... whether we like it or not..

I was uncomfortable. I couldn't handle dysfunction like that. I was still just a kid. I'd just reached my twenties. Getting ready to move out of the house and into the real world. I didn't know what to say. So Ted continued.

"You just think about all those new parents out there. Laughing and fawning over God's beautiful creation. A fucking miracle!"

He was starting to raise his voice and it snapped me out of my stoned, frozen state. He seemed to catch himself as well, stifling his clear desire to yell and turning it into a near whisper instead.

"Meanwhile, that innocent little baby is destined for the same shit world we all grow into. The one we all squirm in. It's all the same.
Always. For all of us. Me or you, it doesn't matter..."

"Listen, Ted." | began, flustered and too high. Only wanting to get away. To leave him there alone. "I just remembered, I have to go pick something up for my dad."

"Yeah, sure. Whatever."

I handed him the bottle back having not imbibed and he finished it off, dropping it on the grass by the bench. "Just think about it, right? It's all a fucking joke..."

We locked eyes, and I felt my gut wrench. So I looked away.

"Tomorrow, okay?" | could see that he was upset that I was going already, and I really did mean to meet up with him the next day. But, I was busy... and I didn't see Ted again for another two months.

Same park, same bench. Same brand of cheap dark rum, some other ambiguous strain of bud. Mine this time. Ted set me up with my first 'dealer' way back. We were thirteen, and someone's brother had an ounce to sell. We used to spend a lot of time together. For a while, I'd say that he was my best friend. But not for long. I didn't even really notice that we were drifting apart until I hadn't seen him for over a year.

"It's good to see you."

That same exact look in his eye, same as before.
Desperate. I felt awful for being just as uncomfortable again as when we'd last met. I could tell that he really meant it, and I couldn't imagine myself in his place.

"Ted," I felt my breath catch in my throat. I was never good with confrontation, and that's what it felt like. Some self-righteous intervention. "I know that you're hurting. It's... it's going to be okay... I get it..."

He was taken aback and I saw a look comsume his face that I'd never seen before, gone in a flash, but so clear nonetheless. Then he took another draw and let the smoke drift out lazily in a shuddering breath. It lingered overhead in the spring breeze before being cast away by the wind to meet a pair of irritated joggers down the path. He looked back up with indignation, like he was about to hit me, before taking another puff and initiating a pass.

"I know you mean well, man, I do..." he thumbed the bottle lid as I smoked in suspense, regretting even trying in the first place. "but you don't get it. You just don't."

We sat there wordlessly for a while, every second seemed to get a little heavier for me. Heavier with guilt, but something else too; a grim acknowledgement. I realized there and then that he was right, that I didn't know what he was going through. And I knew that I wasn't going to see him again after that, and that anything else I might have said would have been hollow and we both knew it. I was going to college, I had proposed to my girlfriend not long before and I was moving on from the town I grew up in. I was leaving him behind.
When Ted spoke again, it crushed me. Made me feel sick, because I knew he was right, but what was worse was that I just didn't give enough of a shit to help him. I think he knew that too.

"You don't get it..."

I couldn't look away from his face. Empty, enraged; as if he was talking to me from deep down inside of himself while his mind wandered elsewhere. I hated myself for how much I'd ignored him... How much it had hurt him.

So, suddenly and very unthinkingly, I took his hand. I didn't even think about it, I just did it. I held his hand, and he looked at me in disgust at first but then his eyes softened. They began to well up. The bottle fell to the concrete below and bounced as its viscous contents spilled out and onto the walkway as Ted grabbed me and pulled me in close.

He wept all over my hoodie for a minute or two, and it was as if we were the only people there. Nobody even batted an eye, really. I didn't know how to feel. Embarrassed at the time, and Ted pulled away when he noticed it in my face.

"I'm... I'm sorry."

"No... no. It's alright, it's okay to cry sometimes. I get it. I mean, no! Shit, I don't get it. Y'know what I mean. It's just, I don't know... It's okay. That's what I mean. I'm here for you, man..."

Ted looked up at me with his swollen eyes, red like he'd been crying for hours, not just a moment, and I still don't know what he was saying with that look he was giving me.

"That's the thing, man." He stood up, back to me as he looked out over the park. Fountain down the hill.
Children playing on the swings. Little boats on the little lake. "It's never going to be okay..."

Then he walked away, and that was it. I didn't even go after him... just sat alone until the dwindling joint burned my fingers. I never came back to that park again. I heard about it the next day. Ted used a belt and a beam, and that was that. I didn't think about it at first... I couldn't. Not until much later. Now he crosses my mind pretty much every day, when I think about what I could have done differently... if any of it would have even mattered at all. I torture myself with it, with how apathetic I was. With how I just walked past Ted's house when I saw his dad hit him as I watched from the street. With how I know that he saw me standing there through the window and then just walking away. Leaving him.

I wake up sometimes after my nightmares, and it's like I can see him there, just before I slip back into consciousness... dangling from those rafters with his head craned tightly against the beam, the leather creaking under his weight as he croaks,

"Nobody asked to be born."