Twin Flame: Extinguished

If you’ve been following me for a bit now, you’ve probably heard me talk about Rudy. It’s complicated. Rudy was someone I had a very long history with, but the stars were never aligned in our favor. He

lost his battle to addiction, and now we’ll never have that chance again. I need to talk about it. I need to tell the story of Jess and Rudy so that the whole world knows what a beautiful soul he was inside and out. For my own processing, and for the purpose of solidifying my memories to the interwebs, this blog is going to be all about the 20 year, beautiful disaster that never quite happened.

I was fourteen when I met him. My next door neighbor was friends with his mom, and Rudy was friends with the neighbor kid, Eric. My neighbor, Jean, ran a daycare out of her home that Rudy and his two siblings attended daily. My parents worked all day so during the summers, I was usually next door playing with all the kids that Jean was babysitting. Once I met Rudy, I was there every single day without fail. I was attracted to him the minute I saw him. He was the quintessential bad boy and I just couldn’t get enough of him. His big, brown eyes melted my little teen heart the minute I looked into them. He was sweet, and he was funny. I spent the summer falling in love with him. The next school year, we all went into our freshman year of high school while Rudy stayed back and repeated the eighth grade. Ever since that split, we had lost contact until after school when we were nineteen.

One of my favorite memories of Rudy happened in 2001. A local guy was having a huge party with multiple live bands. I wasn’t friends with the people having the party, but my friends wanted to go. I had no idea I would see Rudy there. Thank God I did, because when the cops were called, and half the party left, while the other half piled into the bedrooms and stood quietly, my friends decided to ditch me. I was one of the sardines piled into the bedroom. This was just as cell phones were gaining popularity, mind you, so not everyone had a phone. I had no idea how I was going to get home. Enter Rudy. When he learned that my awful friends had abandoned me, he watched over me for the remainder of the evening. He made sure that no one touched my drink. He made sure I was always comfortable, and he made sure we both got back to his apartment safely. When we got there, he gave me a t-shirt to sleep in, and he tucked me in. For the entire night, he cuddled me. Every time I woke up, his arm was around me. Not once did he try to make a move on me. He just held me. The next morning, he made sure one of his roommates could drive me home, kissed my forehead, and went off to work. I wouldn’t see him again until 2016. But that night will remain forever in my memory.

Rudy fought addiction for his entire adult life. Eventually, it would take his life. But not before he made an impact. In 2016, Rudy and I stumbled across each other on Bumble. I was ecstatic. The first thing I did was call my old neighbor Jean, and tell her that I had a date with Rudy! (Everyone knew I was in love with him. Everyone). That first date remains to this day, the best first date I have ever been on. It will probably go down as such.

We went to a dingey, well-known coffee bar called Common Grounds. It was perfect. Rudy was sober at this time. I had not yet succumbed to the fact that I was an alcoholic, but I certainly didn’t mind foregoing the bar scene to protect Rudy’s sobriety. So, Common Grounds it was. We sat for three hours and just talked. We caught up. We reminisced. We talked about passions, dreams, ideas…everything.

I’ll never forget, one of the things he said to me was “Did it ever occur to you that I had feelings for you, too?”

To which I replied, “No. No, that absolutely did not occur to me because you knew… everyone knew I had feelings for you, and all you had to do was literally say something”. He just looked at me with a, “well, shit” kind of a look. It was adorable.

Just when I thought I couldn’t smile any more, he took me to Barnes & Noble. He walked around showing me his favorite writers. We spent our time showing each other poems that set our souls on fire. If I wasn’t in love before, I definitely was at this point. Finally, someone who could meet me on an intellectual level. Someone who had a love for expression, and found deep meaning within.

We ended the evening with a sweet, soft kiss. It was perfect. Literal perfection.

And then I didn’t hear from him again. I would later learn that he relapsed shortly after our date and didn’t want to drag me into that hell. At the time, though, I was confused and questioning everything. He wasn’t returning my phone calls, texts, or messengers. I really thought I had done something wrong.

In 2019 Rudy reached back out to me. By this time, I was sober myself and practicing Alcoholics Anonymous. Rudy was not. I spent hours upon hours of my day begging him to come back to AA. Often, I would randomly text him just to make sure he was alive. A lot of the times I got responses like “barely” or “unfortunately. Until one day I had to stop asking because I was too afraid of not getting a response back.

But then in 2020 I got the best text message ever! Rudy was sober again! My heart filled with gratitude. By this time I was engaged, and faithful. But Rudy would always have a special place in my heart, so I made space for him. We checked in with each other’s recovery about once a month. He was always very respectful of my relationship and kept everything platonic. He never flirted. He was never inappropriate. That is a big deal to me. Almost none of the men in my life could go without making some kind of inappropriate comment, even when I was engaged. Rudy was different.

One day, for reasons that are far too complex to mention here, I wasn’t engaged anymore. Rudy was one of the first people I texted (the first was my sponsor). Within two weeks of the breakup, I had my own apartment. Rudy came over to help me hang pictures. He took me to the hardware store to get some things I was definitely going to need and didn’t have. I wanted so badly to be ready to date him. He wanted that too… but we both knew I just wasn’t. There was a lot of trauma to overcome. Unfortunately, I ended up taking that out on Rudy. He said one chauvinistic thing and suddenly he was blocked. For the first time in the entire time I had known him, he said something I didn’t like, and my initial instinct was to cut him out of my life completely… because trauma.

We weren’t speaking when a mutual friend sent me the news. Rudy had relapsed, and overdosed. I couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t be real. He wasn’t allowed to be gone. We never had our chance! It wasn’t fair. Plus, he was sober the last time I had spoken to him! I was in complete shock. Eventually, I came to terms with it, but I was angry at him for a while.

For some time, I did regret my actions of cutting him off over such a small comment… but when I look back on it, it was what I needed at the time. And my understanding is that Rudy now understands why it happened, and has forgiven me. He has an altar in my living room. I talk to him regularly. I know when he visits because my balcony lights mysteriously turn from solid to flickering. He also hides my things occasionally.

Rudy will forever be the one that got away.