Ziggy Stardust

The move has been okay thus far. I’ve only been here for about a week, and although I still have much to adjust to, I feel like I am slowly, but surely, getting acclimated to this way of life. In this stage of life, one can only feel nostalgic of the good times past. I miss my friends. Now we are all dispersed around the country, and a few still at home. I remember when Bowie would say how excited he was to go to college together. How we would play sports every day, like we did during the school year. How we would go to parties and hook-up with girls, and how we would live in the same city after college. He was my best friend since birth, and fortunately, my neighbor. Bowie was a 6’’2ft tall skinny, long blonde-haired kid with a sharp jawline, a baby face, and a mustache resembling the work of a 14-year-old. We had a blast in high school. Classes were always easier together and doing whatever with friends brings back only the sweetest feelings.

Bowie had a hard time grasping the idea of Alexa and me. We were meant to be bachelor’s until we raised families, and when we started dating in the end of junior year, that seemed to have foiled his plans. I loved Alexa. I knew we wouldn’t get married, but I still enjoyed my time with her. I knew it was over when we both declared for universities in different states. We cherished the time we had left, but the relationship turned sour before summer, and we broke up. Bowie, although ecstatic about its end, was there for me. We must have watched with a few other friends that summer at least twenty different romance films, my favorite being La La Land. We were all searching for our Mia’s that summer.

I, although sad, was able to get past missing Alexa over the summer, and we stayed in touch as friends. The summer turned out to be an almost perfect one. Bowie and I and a few others from our friend group had almost identical summers. We all worked at this day camp as counselors, and our schedules consisted of as follows: Wake up, go to work, get home, meet up with the gang for dinner, then go out to some party, club, or throw something ourselves, then wake up the next day hungover and do it all again. And on the weekends, we would drive up to our friend’s lake house and just have a time. We all competed to see who could hook-up with the most women (I know, disgusting behavior, but come one, we were a group of teenage boys), and of course, Bowie in all of his greatness won by a mile.

We started ordering things online we would want for our room by the beginning of August. Flags of our favorite sports teams, posters with supermodels on them, and a picture of us two, drunk at the lake house taken earlier that summer: We were candidly clinking our beers together and smiling. I had a special kind of love for Bowie. And no, it was not any sort of gay thing or anything like that, it was a best-friend, brotherly sort of love. The type of love where you put that person before yourself. He was truly my best friend and would be for life.

About two weeks before the move up date, two months prior to today, we were all hanging out at a friend’s house. It was a classic day up to that point. We finished our last day being camp counselors and had been celebrating with a crowd at our friends house the entire second half of the day. Then, it was just us six or so, coming down from our drunken haze, eating the pizza we had ordered 30 minutes prior, talking about ridiculous high school memories. It started getting late, and we all decided to head home. I said bye to my pals and when I turned to say by to Bowie last, I wished I savored that interaction more. Usually, we would walk home together, but he planned on walking over to a girl’s house, about 10 minutes away from our friend’s house, then Uber home later. We shook hands goodbye in our teenager styled way, and we went on our separate paths.

Walking home, I checked my phone to see a text from Bowie, inviting me over to the girl’s house as she had a friend who wanted to “hangout with me.” Excited, I walked in the opposite direction to the girl’s house with pep in my step. Something felt weird when I was a few minutes away from the house though, when an ambulance raced by me in the same direction I was walking. I got to an intersection a few minutes later, one of the busiest ones in our town, and a sharp pain struck my stomach when I saw the ambulance in the middle of the intersection, next to several police cars, and a brown Honda Accord with blood splattered on the front. I immediately sprinted to the scene, thinking the worst but hoping for the opposite. I called Bowie, to no avail. Panic struck and I called him again while on the outskirts of the scene, and then I saw a cracked phone on the floor buzzing, reading my name.

Bowie was pronounced dead upon impact, and the drunk driver who hit him was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for drunk driving and vehicular manslaughter.

I fell into a depressed state after that. My best friend. Gone. The town was in shambles. My parents and his alike were distraught. This was unthinkable. You can’t really fathom something like this happening in your life until it does.

I was about to drop out of college and do school from home, but my parents and a thought convinced me otherwise; the thought being that Bowie would not want me to do so. The move-in was awful without him. Every day since the accident has been terrible, but it has been getting better. I’ve started to heal. I know he’s gone and never coming back, and I must live my life understanding that. Nothing I can do will bring him back, but I can honor him. So, I have lived to honor my late friend, Bowie. I play sports almost daily now, I get with girls when I can, and I try to make memories half as good as I had with him, and most importantly, I have that picture we took at the lake house hanging on my dorm wall.

Now, I sit here in my bed in my less vibrant dorm, with my random roommate, ready to go on with the rest of my life, with the memory of my best pal on me always, listening to Ziggy Stardust. This is for you Bowie, cheers.