(listen) before i go {krbk}

scattered

Humanity is so fucked up. Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking—'Aw, Katsuki, look on the bright side!' Well fuck you, because what the fuck "bright side" even is there when you have to watch your best friend and the only person you've literally ever loved as they're diagnosed with one of the deadliest diseases known to us shitty two-legged creatures, suffer day after day for three agonizing years, and then die because supposedly there isn't a damn thing anyone can do to save him?

Fucking exactly.

Eijirou and I have... fuck, had known each other for sixteen years before none other than cancer yanked him out of my life. We met when we were two, when our parents dumped us both at the same daycare before that shit got corrupted as fuck and people could be trusted to look after other peoples' babies. We instantly gravitated toward one another. We were practically inseparable, and that never changed. Same elementary, middle, and high schools... that was, up until he got too sick to go to school anymore.

Don't take shit the wrong way—our friendship wasn't perfect or anything like that; we had our fair share of fights, most of them being over stupid shit. 'Course, he was almost always the first one to apologize even when I was clearly the one in the wrong or being an asshole, which is basically my middle fucking name.

I can't tell you why he was my friend, let alone my best friend, or the person who stuck around with me during everything. Can't tell you why or how he put up with my bullshit. I never could fully comprehend his endless amounts of compassion and love, especially for things he thought were manly, or how his soul stayed so damn pure right up until his very last breaths.

But I can tell you that all of those things, who he was, were why I loved him. So. Damn. Much.

Growing up in such a huge city with a population nearly reaching 100,000, it was already a fucking miracle that we were taken to the same daycare. On top of that we somehow lived in the same neighborhood only three blocks away from one another—until my parents divorced and my mother moved away, forcing my dad and I to find an apartment to live in because he couldn't afford the house payments on his own. What was but a five minute walk turned into a twenty minute drive, but fuck if that stopped us.

Those first eleven years of living so close to him are years I remember fondly. It was then when we made the memories closest to me—to us.

But those years, full of bullshit I loved so fucking much, aren't what this is about. I wrote about that shit, journaled about it like a little kid keeping a friggin' diary because it was part of my therapy and shit for the damn imbalances in my piece-of-shit brain that causes the mood swings and compulsions. They're well documented, and from times when I was in a much better headspace than I am now because, shit, I hadn't just lost my best friend to cancer.

As much as it hurts, I have to write about his last years. I have to document how he was, even up to the very end, from the amazing sunny days to the terrible ones where a black cloud hung over and filled our lungs, making it so hard to breathe. From the days where his illness and the detriment of treatment was invisible to the eye, to the days where there was no longer a single hair on his body, his skin was white as a sheet, his bones prominent beneath his skin.

It started out as a cough. Innocent enough. It was flu season after all, and no, he hadn't yet had his flu shot. The diligent little fucker was planning on getting one soon, but what was supposed to be an easy doctor's appointment turned out to be one of the scariest days of our lives.

I've had anxiety attacks for as long as I can fucking remember—go figure—but not once before had I felt the crippling, gut-twisting, heart-wrenching, mind-numbing panic that I felt during the phone call that afternoon. While normally he'd have taken the trip down to my house to tell me in person, it happened just over a month after Dad and I had to move into this tiny ass apartment, thirty miles away from him. Things were complicated—though it was only the beginning—and he had to settle for the phone call.