Tales of My Cubawan, X: The Move (AKA My Biggest Mistake)
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 💞🐻
Welcome back or welcome if this is your first time reading! As above, this is the story of me and my late adoptive son. I’m uncertain about the future of this series—I need to take a break from sharing these deeply personal stories for a while—but there is one part of this story that I haven’t yet told that I think is important to include before I talk about how I accidentally got Otso to quit drugs. That is the story of him moving to a new apartment with his previous roommate and a drug dealer.
I’m gonna say this up front: I never, ever wanted to tell Otso what to do for any reason. He was 24, after all—a cub technically grown—and had to make his own life choices. If he wanted my advice, he’d get it, and I tried really hard not to push him anywhere he didn’t want to go. But there is one area wherein I should have probably at least opined a little bit…
He should not have moved in with a drug dealer.
Now wait a minute, you might be thinking. Wasn’t Otso a drug dealer?
Not really. I mean, he did it from time to time but it wasn’t his main source of income. When I met him, he was working at McDonald’s and his roommate was also employed… somewhere. He had a few jobs in our time together, but his trauma and struggles made it very tricky for him to be able to keep a job for long, even the one that was extremely flexible.
There just wasn’t a lot of support floating around in his circles. Most of his friends were in their own versions of survival mode, for better or for worse. They might put each other up now and then to stop one another from being homeless, but money’s always a contentious thing in drug circles. Loyalty, as such, is such a deeply skewed concept.
However, there was one person in his life that Otso was very loyal to, who perhaps did not deserve it. Let’s pretend his name was Jonne.
I said “was,” incidentally, because I heard from a reasonably reliable source that Jonne has also since passed away from an overdose. Unsurprisingly.
The reason Otso and Jonne were close was because they had both been royally fucked by one of Otso’s brothers. You may recall me mentioning in one of the first articles that one of Otso’s brothers had ruined his credit rating and left him in debt? Same brother. He and Jonne had been roommates at some point a few years prior and the brother owed Janne an amount of money that was in the four digits and put him through a great deal of stress to boot.
Jonne was, on the surface level, a decent sort. He was feminist and anti-racist and most of his modus operandi was, he claimed, in service of a sister who had been through a horrendous SA, and then had been treated even worse in her recovery.
Buuuuut… the flipside was that he sold heroin. To anyone. Regardless of age. And no matter how good of a person you are in some spheres, I think you lose pretty much all of your clout the moment you choose to sell heroin to… I mean, I was going to say teenagers, but let’s be honest, you’re a shithead if you let that stuff move around the world, period. You’ll never convince me that you’re a good person when that’s how you make your money. Don’t understand my feelings? Go watch Requiem for a Dream.
I never once said anything bad about Jonne (largely because my feelings for him were pity beyond anything else) out of politeness and respect for their relationship, but it was very curious how, towards the end, I was accused of saying quite a few things about him which, ironically, were actually things that Otso and his roommate had said to me about Jonne. Projecting much?
Anyhoo, there’s a bit of cause and effect here. Before me, Otso and his roommate were a bit of a unit, but once Otso found someone to take care of him, the roommate got lonely. Jonne was a deeply sad, lonely person, and he took advantage of the mutual loneliness of the roommate and they began to do everything together.
So, despite everything being stable and consistent in their then-present home, they decided that they wanted to move in with Jonne. “It’s more stable for the three of us,” they said, somehow thinking that yet another unstable person would make things better. Again, maybe I should have had more of a conversation about this with Otso… it’s just that I knew I wouldn’t change his mind.
Incidentally, this is also why—from what Otso told my friend Sipsi the last time I saw him—the roommate ended up a junkie in the end. I have no idea what became of him, nor do I care in the slightest.
But back to the move. I’ve moved around my fair share in my life. After high school I moved to Calgary to work for a summer, then to Fort St. John for a relationship, then back to my hometown, out to the Rockies, back to my hometown again, then to British Columbia, Calgary, Edmonton, Calgary again, and then to Finland. I’m a fairly old hat at moves by now.
I promised to help Otso and his roomie with the packing and cleaning, since I’ve worked in housekeeping a fair bit too. The former was easy—poor kid didn’t have a whole lot to his name, after all. The cleaning was different, but I knew how to get an apartment clean and ready for the next residents. It involves knowing all the places a landlord will look—like is there dust on the baseboards? I guarantee those boys never even clocked that their flat had baseboards, let alone cleaned them.
I promised to come do the final cleaning one afternoon with them, but I ended up showing up a few hours before Otso was awake. The roommate just decided that he didn’t need to participate since I was doing it of my own volition and Otso wasn’t helping. He could be kind of a lazy, selfish asshole sometimes. On that note, he also didn’t want to (and I believe never did) pay me back gas money for the car I borrowed to help them with the move, because… who fucking knows.
Anyways, Otso was delighted. And when it came to the actual moving day, it was my personal nightmare and one of the worst moves I’ve ever had. Everything felt rushed, last minute, unplanned, and chaotic. For Otso, he said it was without question the best and easiest move he ever had. This made me happy, because that meant all the stress I dealt with (including getting the car stuck on an icy slope next to a rock wall with no one to help me get it out except kind strangers) was worth it. He was so happy.
That evening, he made homemade burgers for him, me, and his friend who was helping. It was one of the best burgers I’ve ever eaten. At least, it was a top burger I’ve ever eaten but this one was made specifically with love, so perhaps that’s why my memory of it ranks it as peak.
We set up his room together. He got the room closest to the door because it had its own bathroom (remember the smell/cleanliness sensitivity?), which was honestly good for him on that front but bad because his room was the closest to the entrance, which meant his obnoxious roommates would later be constantly annoying him by making a lot of noise coming and going. Respect didn’t seem to flow very well in that household.
I digress, his room was too small for the double bed I had found him, so we packed up one of them. Since he was a music maker and producer, he had to have his desk set up just right for optimal acoustics, which was the trickiest part of it. Then, I proceeded to help him fill out his room with helpful things like storage boxes and a trash can and other necessary things.
Once everything was moved and set up, I remember getting very tense afterwards, not knowing my place and not knowing if I should still stick around. It was probably the stress of the whole event catching up with me. He could tell I was getting weird and worked up, and so he came to me and told me, very clearly and with no ambiguity, that he wanted me to stay and spend more time with him and help make his new place feel like home. So I did. He, his friend, and I snugged up on that bed I gave him and watched a movie (couldn’t remember which one) and fell asleep there together, thus fulfilling the promise that he would not have sex in that bed before sleeping in it with someone(s) he trusted.
Possibly my only picture of us at the new apartment
Interestingly, however, it didn’t take long for him to stop wanting me to come to his house. We called it him getting “the weirds” about it. Despite this place being not much more of a cesspool than his previous flat, after a month or maybe two, he began to get uncomfortable with the idea of me coming over there. Perhaps it was because Jonne was constantly selling drugs in their living room and junkies were shooting up in his bathroom. He did tend to keep me away from that sort of thing as much as he could, the darling. Part of it was also certainly the heinous level of not-cleanliness that angered and embarrassed him.
He became irate and annoyed with his roommates very quickly after the move, for their inability to follow house rules or clean up after themselves, or the aforementioned abuse of his room’s position by the exit. He felt like he couldn’t cook because they never did their dishes. Yet… every time I asked him if he’d like to move elsewhere, the answer was no. I could see it in his heart that the answer was yes, so I never knew exactly why he was so committed to staying there. Maybe it was the cat allergies keeping him from moving in with us. Maybe it was that he always tried to stick things out for a bit too long (I’d say he takes after me in that sense, but of course that’s a bit silly considering the length of our time together). Maybe he just didn’t want to admit that he’d made yet another mistake, and that his friends weren’t living up to their promises. So we spent most of our time in 2022 together either out and about or at my place.
Ultimately, when Otso eventually spoke to my friend in February 2023 when we encountered him at a rave, he told Sipsi that his flat was a paranoid hellscape of a drug den and that he hated being there. If only… if only I had discussed it with him more thoroughly. I thought he was the strongest person on earth to live in a drug den while having quit drugs, but in the end, the strength I perceived was, in part, a mask that he was wearing to keep me from worrying about him.
I wish he would have taken that mask off more and been a bit more honest, both to himself and to me. If he had, perhaps he’d still be around to this day.
Thanks again for hearing his story. 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.
