The People You’ll Meet

The city was full of characters, and I’ve met many but only a few ever grew into anything meaningful. About six months after I arrived in New York, I went to a loft party in Brooklyn with some co-workers from Saks and met a kooky, silly guy on the dance floor named Patrick. Right away we hit it off and became inseparable. Of the four years I lived in NYC, we were together for three of them and even after the relationship ended, we remained great friends.

The time had come, however, when I had enough of deciding if I were going to eat that week or pay rent and concluded I was going to move back to Florida. My best friend said, quite frankly, “No you’re not. You’re coming up here [to Massachusetts]. John will be down to pick you up.”

Shortly after I arrived in Massachusetts, communication with Patrick became more and more sparse and then ceased altogether. He was Bipolar and had a history of extreme behavior, so I reached out to a mutual friend who told me that two weeks prior he took his own life. I suspected that something had happened, but I was hoping it wasn’t that.

Image: Patrick in his Brooklyn apartment. Silver gelatin print, 2005