You're Not Even Mine to Miss [Fall Out Boy - Wattys 2014]

➽ Track Fifteen (London's POV).

Track Fifteen (London’s POV): I’m gonna find someone someday who might actually treat me well.

(April 8th, 2006)

We were backstage during one of Fall Out Boy’s gigs. Patrick and I were seated together while waiting for the opening act to finish and for their band’s performance to start. Pete and I had just gotten together for barely a week. I knew Pete so much after being close friends with him for months, but I never had the courage to ask him regarding the ‘incident’ I had overhead that Patrick was discussing with Andy and Joe the other day. Patrick already mentioned to me about it before, but I didn’t know much about it. Since we were finally together with Pete, I wanted to know more about him, especially the secrets that he was keeping from me.

I guessed that no one else knew Pete as much as Patrick did. They were like brothers already. And since Patrick and I were doing absolutely nothing backstage, I figured that it might be the perfect chance to ask him about Pete – especially because the other three were busy minding their own businesses.

“Patrick,” I tapped the shoulder of my best friend, who was listening to music (I figured that he was listening to his usual ‘calming playlist’ again) through his earphones. He took one earphone off and looked at me with both eyebrows raised in question. “Can I ask you something?”

He held out one hand to signal me to wait as he stopped the music from playing and took the other earphone off his ear. Patrick then focussed back to me, smiling. “What is it?” he asked me.

I hesitated, licking my dry lips with a swipe of my tongue. “Can you tell me what exactly happened to Pete when he tried to, um, commit suicide?”

My best friend’s eyes widened a fraction, surprised. He seemed as if he wasn’t expecting me to ask him such thing, and I also shocked myself because the question just popped out from my mind all of a sudden and my mouth was faster to move than my brain. “Why did you suddenly ask?” He was studying me curiously.

I shrugged, because I wasn’t really sure why. “I just want to know, I guess.”

It was his turn to hesitate, looking at my eyes as if he was trying to read what was inside my head. Patrick sighed in exasperation—I wasn’t sure though—and pushed his eyeglasses up his nose. “It was a very hard time for Pete,” he started, looking at the earphones that he was fiddling with his fingers. “His ex-girlfriend broke up with him, and he took it too seriously. Pete told me that he was crying, like, a whole lot, while he tried to calm himself down, but he just couldn’t. He even punched the bathroom mirror. He took the pills because they make him feel at ease. But he had taken in too much.”

“Was that his first time to attempt suicide?”

He shook his head. “Not really, but so far, that was the worst,” Patrick replied, twirling the earphone cord around his index finger. “I’m pretty sure that you already know that Pete’s got mental problems.” He glanced at me. Maybe he wanted to see a change in my reaction, but there wasn’t any change at all. I looked at him seriously, listening to his story attentively. “Pete has a bipolar disorder, which is probably why he gets depressed too easily. He even tried to cut his wrists after having a fight with the same girl we’re talking about.”

“Just because of a girl, he tried to kill himself?” I asked sceptically. I couldn’t seem to imagine a tough-looking guy like Pete turned pretty messed-up after falling in love with a girl. It wasn’t like him at all.

“No, she wasn’t just some girl he met at a bar or in an alleyway somewhere,” Patrick explained, still fumbling with the earphones in his hands. “They went out together for a really long while. He really loved her. A bit too much, I guess. He used to keep on talking about her.”