Tales of My Cubawan, V: Sleeping on the Floor & Who Will Keep Me Safe?
Hi there! For those who don’t know, this is the continuing story of how I met and lost my adoptive son a few years ago.
Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.
Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻
Coming in late? Here are the previous installments of the story:
Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV
Welcome back to the true story of me and my adoptive son! So far, I’ve covered how we met, why it was profoundly meaningful to me, and some tales of our early days together. Today, I’m sharing some longer stories about our first few times hanging out together.
This was always my favorite of his songs
I went over to Otso and his roommate’s place fairly regularly in the early winter (before they moved), as I mentioned, to hang out and help out. I think I also mentioned that sometimes, he was a confusing fellow to spend time with, because he’d invite you over and then proceed to go into his room and ignore you.
Yeah, he could be really self-aware in some senses, but he could be equally unaware in others. It was bizarre somehow, that he didn’t clock that this was weird or confusing to his friends. I think he wanted companionship while he was doing his own thing, so the walls wouldn’t close in on him, but never really communicated that need clearly. So people, like myself, would come over expecting to… do something? Play video games? Watch TV/movies? Go for a walk? Something? But then he’d just go into his room and start fiddling around with some psytrance tracks.
Naturally, I did point this out to him, and once again, his surprise felt genuine. Apparently, in circles like his, calling people out for strange and bad behavior was just not a thing, so he didn’t get feedback on his actions a lot. Besides, half the time, if you pissed off a “friend,” they’d probably just retaliate by stealing something from you (or worse). This was what he knew. I was apparently showing him what “normal life” was like for people not in his situation, and he was very grateful for the stability and kindness.
One of the earliest times (maybe even the second time?) I went over to their place was, funnily enough, not to hang out with him. I was once upon a time quite dedicated to the rogue-lite video game, Spelunky, and his roommate had its sequel. I had been hesitant to try said sequel, because the first game was already bull honkey so I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to playing a new version. Otso’s roommate had invited me over to play it with him and try it out.
I hated it for exactly the reason I suspected I might: the first game was fucking hard, and they made it worse in the second one. I like a good challenge—I play Soulsborne games, after all—but this was fucking ridiculous. So I played, screaming at the TV, as the roommate laughed, and eventually, Otso crawled out of his burrow to sit with us and watch me lose my shit, when he eventually announced that we’d all been invited over to Kerava to meet with one of his friends for some drinks. So, we stopped playing Spelunky 2 and headed to Kerava.
This friend—whom I only met this once and IIRC his name was Joel—was one of the few people in Otso’s life who had a “normal,” if even well-paying day job and more money than he knew what to do with, so he often used it to shower affection on his friends. Case in point, he had recently given Otso a steel drum, which he was delighted about, since he liked making music and anything he could make fun sounds with was a joy for him to tinker with. But another of his friends also told me that Joel would make them uncomfortable with the gifts sometimes, because he was so genuinely generous and they could not reciprocate, especially when sometimes, unlike the steel drum, the gifts didn’t actually mean anything personal (like a fancy watch for someone who doesn’t wear watches).
Since I only ever met Joel once, I never found any issue with him. He seemed to like to drink, but that’s sort of a given in Finland, and from what I could tell, he wasn’t into drugs the way the rest of them were. In fact, I had liked him enough to have hoped to see him around more often, maybe for some TTRPGs, but I that never ended up happening, I think because he was a fairly busy guy. But he won me over right away, because at some point, I had to take the roommate home because he had work the next morning, and Otso told me that Joel had said, in my absence, “She seems like a really nice guy.” Otso wasn’t sure if I’d be okay with that description, but it made me laugh quite heartily, as I think he pegged my whole deal pretty succinctly in one phrase.
The A&R guy, whom I was still getting along with at that point, showed up, along with another random girlie (I swear I almost never saw the same one twice). She was clearly thirsting after my boy but when she clocked the mamabear, she decided this was not the night, and ended up leaving after a while. I confess to enjoying the way they were intimidated by the fact that I was not threatened by them in the slightest. They might have been able to alpha bitch one another when fighting over him, but I was too old for that shit in my 30s and just rolled my eyes. It also helped that I wasn’t trying to sleep with him.
We were joined by another friend, Roope, who was a sweet kid, pretty neurodivergent and shy, and I recall that he had shown up with a Rubix cube to fidget with, so every time he finished it and put it on the table, I’d fuck it up, and within a few seconds, it’d be back on the table. We did this for a while, not talking but just trading smiles, and I was thoroughly impressed by the mathematically proficient way that he could solve in in mere seconds.
We ended up back at Roope’s place. He and I could have probably been friends, since he seemed like a bit of a geek (hi, queen geek here) per the things in his flat. Eventually, I remember Otso laying down on this guy’s kitchen floor with a full intention of spending the night there, with no pillow or blanket or anything. He did that a lot. Remember when we watched Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny? We have a guest room, but he chose to sleep on the floor. I wonder if he felt comfortable there because he felt worthy of it? I dare not speculate, lest it make me sad.
What stood out to me from that moment is that he was snoozing and the A&R guy was sitting with me, and in a strangely sweet moment, he saw me protectively sitting over my cub and whispered to me, almost pleading, “Please don’t hurt him.” I’m sure I must have given him an “aww, honey,” look because he clearly didn’t know me and my capacity for love and dedication and loyalty.
But I also remember that moment hurting me internally, quite a lot, in a rather unique way.
You see, I just couldn’t stop from wondering… “Who’s going to stop him from hurting me?” I understood the desire to protect Otso, after all he’d been through. But I would have never done anything to hurt him, intentionally, and if I did, I’d have apologized and done whatever work necessary to make amends. I have never been a street kid or a drug addict, so I actually know how to be kind and decent to people.
But who or what was going to stop Otso, in all of his trauma, from hurting me? Who was going to keep him from getting in his head and torching our relationship because of some sort of trauma response? I had no one in my life back then who looked out for me, the way his friends looked out for him. I had no one to tell Otso, “Hey, Bear’s right about the most loyal and loving person in the world—don’t take advantage of her and don’t hurt her, please?” I wonder if it would have mattered if someone had, or if that would have just made him hate himself more in the end. Again, I dare not speculate.
And let’s be clear, this A&R guy was not a monster of a person, but he was also not a good person. He had all of the passwords to Otso’s Spotify and all of the other streaming platforms, and he never gave them to Otso, despite Otso repeatedly asking for them. He’d bum drugs off him and then vanish when he didn’t pay his debts. He was probably telling me to not hurt him because he knew everyone else in Otso’s life—himself included—were all hurting Otso in some way or another, and in his own fucked up way, he did love Otso, just not more than himself. Such is the way in drug circles—you’re always going to need to save your own ass first, even if it means destroying people you love. No wonder so many people in those situations pass away young.
Either way, Otso had someone who cared about him enough to teach him to be nonviolent and to ask other people to look after him and not to hurt him. I was… weirdly envious?
I did not have anyone looking out for me, not in that sense. But in the end, maybe we had that in common, because when shit hit the fan, none of them helped him heal our relationship—the relationship that actually meant something and helped his life get better. In fact, most of them helped him double down on bad decisions and turned him against me, despite that clearly making things worse. It was because of his “friends” that he didn’t get the help he needed. In the end, Joel was one of the few people I didn’t end up hating by 2023, simply because I never saw him again.
I have one other story about him sleeping on the floor, incidentally. Perhaps, after this one, he had learned that he deserved a bed. Or perhaps by then I had gotten him a new bed and he remembered that beds weren’t the worst thing ever. Either way, I had been out for a night of karaoke with some friends and had promised to give someone a ride home who lived somewhat near to Otso’s place. As I was dropping him off, I had messaged Otso saying, “Hey, I might be in your neighborhood in a bit, so let me know if you need a hug.” He replied surprisingly quickly, saying that he wasn’t at home but was actually up visiting a friend in Hyvinkää, but that a hug would, in fact, be nice and welcome.
I hadn’t been banking on him taking me up at the offer, especially because it was probably 1-2.00 in the morning already at that point. But because I adored him oh so very much, of course I pivoted and drove up to Hyvinkää (it’s not far from my home base), where I found him in a cute little slum that belonged to his friend Miksu, who was a fairly functional addict-student, but who was also, broadly, in considerably worse shape than Otso because he was also an alcoholic and had already lost some teeth to meth, but better in that his family was messed up but not, as I recall, abusive. It was weird, seeing how rough Otso was, and then seeing how he could have still been so much worse at the same time. And even then, these guys weren’t on heroin, so it could have still been so, so much worse. Scary, really, the spectrum of substance addiction.
Anyhoo, these three (the roommate was there too) absolute idiots were apparently trying to make a certain something out of a very large sack full of organic waste and a block of butter. And they were trying to do it in a pot that would maybe hold a liter of water. I was utterly mind-boggled at how completely stupid this was. Surely, surely they must know that they can’t make something in a vessel that can’t hold what they’re making.
…I guess not. And yes, I found his dummy moments extremely cute and endearing.
So, I helped them fix their idiocy and cleaned up Miksu’s kitchen at the same time, which had probably been cleaned all of never. At some point, they dropped a smoking pipe and we had to clean that up too. And yet, despite my presence in a drug slum—not something I had much experience with (also not zero experience)—I didn’t feel unsafe or uncomfortable. I was always quite certain that he would not let anything weird or bad happen to me.
Surprise surprise, by some point in the morning, Otso wanted to sleep on the kitchen floor. Once again, I had offered to bring him home to the guest room (the roommate was sleeping on the couch), but he really had a thing for sleeping on people’s floors, even if it meant he might be in glass shards. I get it, he was a weird kid. I’m in no position to judge though, let’s be fair. I’m almost 40 and I’m still a weird kid.
I think I went home to bed around 10.00 and woke up at noon because I needed to go to Tampere to do an interview with my favorite band, Ember Falls, about their upcoming second release. Good thing I wasn’t on camera then, because I was pretty dead. Afterwards, the guys and I went out for dinner, where I explained why I was so tired, and they listened with pleasant bemusement to my stories about adopting a 23-year-old drug addict and what it was like taking care of him. I remember being slumped, exhausted, on the table at Zarillo, with a big stupid grin on my face.
One of my favorite memories of Otso would eventually involve going back to Tampere, along with my friend Sipsi, to see Ember Falls’ album release show for “Ruins.” But that story will come a bit later.
Thanks again for hearing his story. I’ve got plenty more to tell.
Stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻
READ MORE: I also wrote a fair bit of fiction inspired by my cub. The Bear Forge was written about our meeting, its sequel, The Broken Anvil, is about our estrangement, and the finale, Everstrong, is a poshumous letter written from him to his mamabear.
Note: the latter two are only available to paid Substack subscribers.
I See You was inspired by a F(r)iction prompt, “unseen.” Elegy for a Lost Soul was written after he doubled-down on the path of destruction for the final time.
