The Prodigal Son, My Best Friend, Lost.
July 11, 2025
CW: Drug Use, Mental Health, Emotional
I am watching my friend melt.
Not like the witch in The Wizard of Oz—not fast, not theatrical. This is slower. Measured. Like an ice cube on a warm spring sidewalk. There’s no stopping it.
It started, as so many things in life do, with a mistake. A drug taken from a stranger—laced. The doctors think it was PCP, but the specifics don’t matter anymore. Whatever it was, it saw his brain, found the cracks, and started eating. Hungry. Within a week, we were visiting him in the hospital. Within a month, he was on medication. But by then, the sun had already begun its work. The ice had started to crack.
There’s a moment from that time I’ll never forget (forgive the tangent, but it matters). In 2009, The Prodigy and Pendulum headlined a show at the Congress Theater in Chicago. Invaders Must Die had just dropped, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of night. I can still feel the bass pounding against my chest.
Halfway through The Prodigy’s performance of Firestarter, I genuinely thought my ribs might give out—but the adrenaline, the sweat, the sheer force of sound, kept us going. It kept me going.
Two months later, we were in a hospital room in Rockford. He sat rocking in a chair while the doctor told his mother he’d been drugged at a party. The hardest part wasn’t the helplessness. It was the guilt. Guilt that we hadn’t gone with him. If we had, maybe he wouldn’t have used. None of us ever had before that night. It was his first time, and it ruined something deep inside him.
I think about that a lot now. I use. I enjoy THC, and sometimes psychedelics—carefully, safely. But that hospital visit…that one stayed with me. Not because of what the doctor said, but because of his hands. He barely spoke, but his fingers tapped out a rhythm on the bed. Over and over. Then Deven leaned in close and whispered just four words: “Run with the Wolves.” I knew it instantly. He was drumming the beat from his favorite song at that concert. Somewhere in there, he was still fighting to be heard.
For a long time, I punished myself over that. Therapy helped, but the guilt doesn’t just vanish. Fifteen years have passed, and that ice cube is still out there on the sidewalk—smaller, cracked, barely holding shape. I can see my friend. I can even hear him when he speaks. But the words? They aren’t his anymore. It’s like something else speaks through him. Shadows. They whisper strange, cosmic things, and they won’t let him sleep. It’s like they’re torturing a prisoner in his own mind.
I am still watching my friend
melt.
His older brother and I talk often—it’s one of the few ways I still feel connected to him. Sometimes he messages me directly, but it’s never really a conversation. Just fragmented phrases. Cryptic updates about kids he doesn’t have or bizarre concerns about peanut butter and oil levels. And honestly? Sometimes it feels like we lost him back in 2009.
He once told me it feels like his brother died a long time ago.
He is watching his brother melt.
We are watching our brother melt.
On the album Invaders Must Die, most of the early songs on the album are heavy. Songs like “Omen” or “Thunder” feel like war songs, calls to action with fast beats and grungy vocals. Then, 3/5 of the way through the record a ray of light shines through those clouds and parts that gruesome field, and we get the track “Stand Up.” This song always felt out of place when I was a teen, it is upbeat with swells that feel like they belong in a Chemical Brothers banger. I keep waiting for that, “Stand Up” moment with him. That moment when something falls into place, that ice gets picked up and thrown back in the freezer to heal, when he becomes HIMSELF again.
That, though, is wishful thinking. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to see him again.
I know this isn’t Magic related, and it is likely a huge bummer on your day, but if you read this: thank you. Thank you for taking the time to hear about my friend. He means a lot to me. He introduced me to so much that I hold so precious now, he let me stay at his house when I left home and had nowhere to go. I truly don’t know where I’d be right now without him.
His name is Kyle.
And I live in a world where I have to watch him disappear.
The Ravnican Reading Nook 
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