Tales from the DXM

He had his whole life ahead of him. Now he’s gone. God, I miss him.

I don’t even like calling him “gone.” That word—gone—makes it sound like he just went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Like it’s casual, like there’s an implication that he might just wander in one day, hum a little tune, and sit down beside me. But gone, in reality, is permanent. Gone doesn’t come back. Gone is cruel in a way that’s almost funny if it weren’t so devastating. And yet, everyone uses it, as if the letters themselves could cushion the blow. They can’t. The point is, it hurts. It gnaws. It makes you stare at the floor or the ceiling or your own hands and wonder why there are still chairs in the room if there’s nobody to sit in them.

Anyway, I found his diary—or journal, whatever he would’ve called it—about two weeks after the funeral. It wasn’t hidden. I didn’t have to pick locks, I didn’t have to search for some secret compartment or crawl under the bed like a character in a horror movie. It was just there. That stupid red notebook. Under his mattress. A completely ordinary place for extraordinary things, I guess. I wasn’t even looking for it. I was just lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling like some kind of lunatic, thinking about all the ways he could’ve left and not left at the same time. Then I felt it—something hard under me. A book. The thing he never wanted anyone to read. And yet, here it was, almost like he was daring me to pick it up.

The notebook looked cheap. You’d think after someone dies, the objects that remain would have this aura of sanctity. A halo of importance. Something you would almost be afraid to touch. But no. The pages were those thin, grocery-list kind of sheets, and in the margins, he’d drawn little doodles. Sometimes smiley faces, sometimes shapes that made no sense at all. Scribbles that looked like he started a pattern and then forgot what he was doing halfway through. That was him. Half serious about everything, even his own feelings. Even grief, even joy, even the fleeting ecstasy of thinking he might understand the universe before the universe understood him.

I flipped the first page. It wasn’t “Dear Diary.” It wasn’t “Today was awful” or “I think I might be losing it.” No, it was just one word. One huge word written in block letters, underlined three times. DXM. I laughed quietly to myself. Only he would start a diary with the code name for cough syrup. Not a polite introduction, not a melodramatic preface. Just DXM, as if the entire world could be summed up in those three letters. He told me once, not with pride exactly, more like a statement of fact, that it stood for “the last ticket to magic.” Like it wasn’t just a drug, like it was a portal. I never really understood what he meant until I held the notebook in my hands, until I read through page after page, until his voice was more inside my head than my own.

The first real page after that one was chaotic. Words spilled over margins, arrows looping back to previous thoughts, doodles interrupting sentences. You could feel him leaping from topic to topic like a hummingbird, impossible to pin down. I tried reading aloud, and it felt like speaking into a hurricane. Each sentence pulled me in, left me dizzy, left me wanting more. I started hearing him in my head—the tone, the pauses, the sighs. The notebook became a living thing, a companion that didn’t breathe but somehow filled the air around me.

I remember the first night I really tried to read it properly. I lay on his bed, knees bent, notebook balanced on my thighs, lamp casting a dim circle of light. Outside, the city hummed, indifferent. I could smell his room still—smoke, spearmint gum, the faint must of old clothes. It felt wrong, almost sacrilegious, to breathe in his memory this way, but I couldn’t stop. I wanted him here. I wanted the vibration of his thoughts to echo inside me, to tell me what I’d missed.

I read about the things he loved. About the birds he watched, the jokes he overheard, the way the wind felt on certain mornings. Then he wrote about the universe, in these bursts of furious intensity, questions cascading over questions like water over rocks. Why are we here? What does it mean to erase yourself? What if the answers are in the noise? I sat there, notebook trembling in my hands, feeling the weight of someone else’s mind pressing against mine. I felt small. I felt everything. I felt him.

He’d been dabbling in ego-death ideas. “Erase yourself to find the real self,” he’d said, laughing in that way that made you unsure if it was a joke or a warning. I used to roll my eyes at him. Now, reading his words, I feel a chill. That laugh, that absurd confidence in chaos, fills the room. I can almost see him pacing, muttering, scribbling, trying to pin the world to a page that never wanted to be tamed.

Somewhere in the middle of that first long entry, he writes about a conversation he had with himself—or maybe with the universe. He questions the point of memory, of existence, of the people who pass through your life and leave holes behind. He jokes too, little sketches of stick figures, doodles that break the tension with laughter. And I can’t tell whether he was sad or joyous—or both at once. It feels like staring at a kaleidoscope while someone whispers secrets you’re only partly allowed to hear.

Hours passed. I stayed on that bed, notebook balanced on my legs, legs cramped, fingers numb, eyes stinging. I whispered responses. I argued silently. I asked questions I knew he couldn’t answer. I felt guilty. I felt alive. I felt the ache of absence. He wasn’t gone yet, not completely. Not when I was willing to dive in like this, not when these words kept him tethered to the room.

I realized that grief isn’t linear. It doesn’t have a start or an end. It’s punctuation marks in the wrong places, pauses that stretch too long, echoes that never stop. And this notebook—this ridiculous, cheap, red notebook—is a vessel for all of it. Chaos, joy, despair, absurdity, brilliance. I want to keep reading. I need to. I can’t let him slip entirely into the space between my memories and nothingness.

The part that kills me is he never talked about wanting to die. Not once. We used to joke about messed-up stuff all the time—death, ghosts, people who jump off bridges—but it was just that, jokes. Dark humor, the kind that makes you laugh and then feel a hollow ache in your chest, like your ribcage is trying to cough something up. I thought it was just a phase. I thought maybe he liked flirting with danger the way other people flirt with fashion, like it was something performative. But then I sit here reading his notebook, tracing his words with my finger, and I wonder. Did he know something I didn’t? Was he testing me? Was he testing himself? Or was it all just the randomness of a mind that couldn’t stop itself from thinking too much, seeing too deeply, asking too many questions for one human to answer?

He’d been into all that ego-death stuff last year. Said he wanted to “erase himself to find the real self.” I told him it sounded like the title of a self-help book written by someone on acid. He just laughed. That laugh. The one that was too big for his face, too sharp for his lungs. I can see it now, like it’s been sitting in the room the whole time waiting for me to notice. He said it seriously too, not like a joke.

“Don’t confuse this with recklessness,” he told me once. “It’s art. It’s discovery.”

I remember the way he leaned back when he said it, like he’d just delivered some kind of profound lecture to a room full of bored college students. His arms were folded behind his head and his chair tilted back on two legs, which always made me nervous because he had this uncanny ability to nearly fall without actually falling. He looked so damn pleased with himself, too. Like he’d cracked some code nobody else could see.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him that art and discovery don’t usually involve risking your own life, but the words got stuck somewhere between my throat and my brain. Because there was something about the way he said things—calm, deliberate, almost playful—that made you hesitate. Like maybe he had already thought ten steps ahead of you and knew exactly how you’d respond.

And the worst part is I believed him. Not completely. Not the way he believed himself. But enough that I didn’t push. Enough that I let the moment slide by like it was just another strange conversation in a long list of strange conversations.

I keep replaying those conversations now, the way you replay a song when you realize you might’ve missed the best lyric the first time around. Except these aren’t songs. They’re memories. And every time I replay one, I notice something new. A pause where he looked out the window too long. A half-smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. A sentence that felt like it had another sentence hiding behind it.

At the funeral, I didn’t cry. That’s the strange part. Everyone else did. His mom cried so hard it sounded like the air was leaving the room with her. His dad looked like a statue someone had forgotten to carve a face into. People kept hugging each other and whispering things like “I’m so sorry,” which is one of those phrases that doesn’t actually mean anything but people say it anyway because silence feels rude.

I just stood there.

There was the casket, closed. Perfectly polished wood, reflecting the lights from the ceiling like it had something important to say but couldn’t quite manage the words. And yet it didn’t feel like him in there at all. It felt like a prop. Like someone had placed it there because funerals require a casket the way weddings require cake.

Maybe it was never him. Maybe it was just a shell, and he had slipped away somewhere else entirely. That thought kept drifting through my head the whole time. I imagined him walking through the chapel doors halfway through the service, smirking like he’d just pulled off the most elaborate prank of his life.

“Gotcha,” he’d say.

He would’ve loved that. Watching everyone’s faces twist between shock and anger and relief. He always liked seeing people’s reactions. Not in a cruel way exactly—more like he was fascinated by the mechanics of emotion.

But of course he didn’t walk through the doors. The doors stayed closed. The air stayed heavy. And eventually people started leaving in that quiet, awkward way people leave funerals, like they’re afraid the dead might overhear them talking about dinner plans.

Sitting here with the notebook now, I can still smell him on it. Smoke and spearmint gum and the faint musk of clothes that have been worn a little too long but still feel like home. It’s ridiculous how powerful smells are. One second you’re sitting in a quiet room and the next second you’re back in some memory you didn’t even realize you had.

I keep thinking I shouldn’t read it. Shouldn’t touch it. Shouldn’t breathe it in like it’s some sort of drug. His mom asked for all his personal stuff. Said she needed it for “closure.”

Closure.

That word makes my skin crawl. It sounds like something you do to a suitcase before putting it in the trunk of a car. Snap it shut. Lock it up. Drive away.

But grief isn’t like that. Not with someone like him.

Once you lose someone like that, you don’t want closure. You want a key. A key to the last thoughts he had before he left. The words he would’ve spoken if he’d had time. The confessions that never reached anyone’s ears.

I thought reading the notebook would bring peace.

It didn’t.

It ripped everything open. It made me ache in corners of my body I didn’t even know existed. Places inside me that only show themselves when memory and grief collide in the worst possible way.

I thought I could handle it. Thought I was ready.

I wasn’t.

I still aren’t.

But I keep reading. Because what else is there to do? Stare at walls? Pretend he never existed? Pretend he’s just… gone?

No.

That’s too cruel. Too easy.

The notebook is something tangible, even if it isn’t him. Something I can hold while I try to piece together the shape of his mind. The chaos of it. The brilliance of it. The fear and wonder and obsession and delight all tangled together in handwriting that sometimes looks like it’s about to sprint off the page.

And maybe, in some strange way, it’s what he wanted. Someone to witness it. Someone to try—however imperfectly—to understand.

He wrote in bursts. One page might be a perfect paragraph, sentences flowing like water over rocks, and the next might be a jumble of half-words, arrows, and sketches. Grocery lists next to philosophical questions. Stick figures beside quotes from books he never finished.

A smiley face here. A giant question mark there.

You can practically see his brain jumping around while you read it. The way his thoughts leap from one subject to another without warning. The way he can’t sit still long enough for a single idea to land before the next one barges in.

Sometimes I imagine him writing it. Pacing his room. Tapping the pencil against his teeth. Laughing suddenly at something that only exists inside his head.

Then scribbling it down before it disappears.

There’s one page where he draws a little bird in the corner. It’s not a very good drawing, honestly. Looks more like a potato with wings. But next to it he writes:

The bird outside my window knows something I don’t.

That’s it. That’s the whole entry.

And somehow it feels like the most honest thing he ever wrote.

By the third night, I realized something strange was happening to me.

I wasn’t just reading the notebook anymore. I was starting to follow it.

Not in a literal way. I wasn’t out buying cough syrup or anything insane like that. But the way he described things—the questions he asked, the way his mind jumped from one idea to another—it started changing how I looked at things.

I’d be walking to the store and suddenly wonder what he would’ve written about the way the streetlights hummed. Or how the pavement looked different depending on whether you stared at it directly or from the corner of your eye. It was like his curiosity had infected me somehow.

That’s the dangerous thing about people like him.

They make the world feel bigger.

And once that happens, you can’t really go back to the smaller version.

The next entries in the notebook were harder to read. Not because the handwriting was worse—although it definitely was—but because the tone had shifted.

He sounded… closer to something.

Like a scientist getting near the end of an experiment.

There were entire paragraphs about dosage calculations. Not written clinically, though. Written the way he talked—half joking, half fascinated.

*Everybody online argues about plateaus like it’s a video game,* he wrote.

*Level one, level two, level three.*

Then underneath it:

*But nobody talks about what happens when the map disappears.*

He’d drawn another diagram beside that. A little staircase with arrows going up each step. The last step didn’t have a label.

Instead he’d written:

*???*

Classic him.

Always more interested in the mystery than the answer.

A few pages later he described one of his earlier trips. The words were scattered, sentences broken up with arrows and stars in the margins.

*Music doesn’t sound like music anymore,* he wrote.

*It feels like architecture.*

I stared at that sentence for a long time.

Because somehow I understood what he meant, even though I’d never experienced anything like it.

He kept going.

*Your body turns into a suggestion.*

*You don’t move. The room moves around you.*

There were doodles everywhere—spirals, floating shapes, stick figures lying sideways as if gravity had stopped working.

And then there was one line that made my stomach twist.

*Fear only lasts about ten minutes.*

That was it.

No explanation.

Just that sentence sitting there on the page.

I kept wondering what he meant by it. Ten minutes of fear during the trip? Ten minutes before something changed?

The notebook didn’t say.

What it did say—over and over again—was how fascinated he was with the idea of losing the “self.”

He didn’t describe it like dying.

He described it like… dissolving.

*Imagine the voice in your head shutting up for once,* he wrote.

*Imagine the part of you that’s always narrating everything just disappearing.*

Then, on the next line:

*What would be left?*

I closed the notebook for a while after that.

Because suddenly the room felt too quiet.

It’s weird how silence can feel loud when you’re thinking too much.

I walked to the kitchen, got a glass of water, came back, and opened the notebook again. I couldn’t stop myself. It felt like stopping halfway through a conversation with him.

The last few pages were different.

Not chaotic.

Not excited.

Focused.

Like he’d reached the part of the story he cared about most.

The final long entry started with a single sentence.

*Tonight I’m going to see what’s outside the hallway.*

My chest tightened when I read that.

Because suddenly the earlier entries felt like a buildup. Like the beginning chapters of a book where you don’t realize you’re being led somewhere until you’re already there.

He wrote about preparing the room. Turning off the lights. Putting on music. Lying down so he wouldn’t try to walk around.

It sounded almost ritualistic.

*Set and setting,* he wrote.

*Everyone says that matters.*

Then he added:

*Let’s find out.*

That line made me shiver.

Because I could practically see him writing it. That little crooked grin he had when he was about to try something reckless but interesting.

The entry kept going for a while after that. Thoughts about identity, consciousness, the way humans cling to the idea that they’re separate from everything else.

Typical him.

Big questions, bigger curiosity.

But near the bottom of the page, the handwriting started drifting again. Words leaning sideways, sentences getting shorter.

The very last thing he wrote before the page ended was:

*If the hallway disappears…*

Then nothing.

The rest of the page was blank.

I flipped it over immediately, thinking maybe the rest continued on the next page.

It didn’t.

Just an empty sheet.

I sat there staring at it for a long time.

Because that was it.

That was the last thing he wrote before the night everything happened.

No dramatic farewell.

No explanation.

Just a half-finished thought.

*If the hallway disappears…*

I don’t know how long I sat there after that.

The notebook was still open on my lap. The lamp light made the page look almost yellow.

For a second I had the strangest feeling that if I stared long enough, the rest of the sentence might appear. Like invisible ink slowly revealing itself.

But nothing happened.

The page stayed blank.

Eventually I closed the notebook.

Not because I wanted to.

Because I suddenly understood something that made my chest feel hollow.

The rest of the story wasn’t in the notebook.

It was whatever happened after he put the pen down.

And that was the part nobody could write.