Carrie Bartkowiak v. 5.0

I won’t even go into details. Here’s the short and skinny of it: There was a database flush. I ended up wiping out 7 or so sites. Gotta start all over… YET AGAIN!

Someone just shoot me. Please.

What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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Tonight as we pulled into the driveway, a certain old Metallica song started playing on the radio.
You know how songs can take you back… suddenly clear as day I could remember standing next to a freshly-covered grave with a huge group of my friends. This song blasted out of the speakers of a minivan backed up to the site. We all just stood there and listened to Joby’s favorite song, still stunned that he was gone and wasn’t coming back.

The night he died, we were hanging out at the Park & Ride like we always do. He was acting really strange… going around to everyone making amends, apologizing for things that had happened years and years before that we’d all forgotten about. We all just figured he’d been drinking some and was just getting sappy. I was sitting on the back of my car, flirting a bit with this new guy Toby that had been hanging around lately.

So Joby comes up to me, dead serious, and asks me to kiss him. Out of the blue.
He said he’d always wanted to kiss me but had never gotten the balls up to ask.
I laughed it off, gave him a hug, and told him he was drunk and I wasn’t gonna kiss him when he was drunk because he wouldn’t remember it anyway. He told me if I didn’t kiss him, he was going to kill himself. I’d never see him again.
I actually told him if he killed himself, I’d come up “there” and kick his ass. We all kinda laughed about it.

A little while later he left with a friend, pulling out of the park and ride onto the main road. He stopped, right in the middle of the road, and looked back at us. We were waving at him and telling him bye. He yelled to me “are you sure?” and I laughed and told him I’d kiss him tomorrow.

Tomorrow never came.
He drove his friend home, turned the car around to head home… actually passed me on Route 8 and as I was driving Toby home, and he was flat-out flying. We saw him fly past us and were shocked at how fast he was going. I really did think for a moment about turning around to see if I could get him to pull over and talk, see if he was upset… but I figured I’d never catch him. He was easily doing 100mph.

About a mile further up the road, he drove his car straight into a telephone pole.
Killed himself instantly.

For years, nearly decades, it’s haunted me; wondering if giving him that one simple kiss would have changed anything. Wondering how I could have been so selfish, and such a prude that I wouldn’t kiss a guy in front of a crowd like that; not even one I’d grown up with. Wondering what in the hell could have been so bad that he decided it just wasn’t worth living anymore. I mean, god, we were 18 and 19 years old. We had it all - or so it seemed. Our whole lives were ahead of us. We were young, beautiful… just like all teenagers, we were gods. We’d survived the hell of high school (and believe me, it was hell) and were just living it up, blowing our money, hanging out together, enjoying being young. What the hell could have made him do that? And why the hell didn’t I just kiss him, for god’s sake?

I dunno.
But now here I am, 36 years old… 3 kids, in my second marriage… and suddenly out of nowhere I’ll hear a song, see a picture, hear someone talking, smell a certain scent… and I’m right back there on that night, sitting on the back of my car, laughing with him… not knowing in an hour or so he’d be gone forever. I wonder if he knows that, wherever he is. That sometimes we still think about him, and wish things were different.

I hope he does. I hope he knows that if I had the chance to do it all over, I’d have thrown my arms around him and given him a kiss that would have curled his toes. I’d have told that little punk surfer kid to find someone else to make his moves on and I’d have sat my ass down and talked to him and listened until the sun came up, or even longer… until he got it all out. I hope he knows that I’m so, so sorry. 17 years later, I’m still sorry. I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.

What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
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