June 10, 2021 • 40 mins
Some of the people who knew Alex best look back on how he changed their lives—and then give Chris the push he needs.
Note: This series discusses topics that may be triggering to some listeners, including depression and suicide. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text 741741 to speak to somebody immediately.
Created, written, hosted, and executive produced by Chris Stedman
Co-executive produced by Beth Anne Macaluso
Story edited by Aaron Edwards
Sound design by Dylan Fagan
Music by Aaron Wong Kaufman, with additional music by Ben Seretan
Episode 2 theme performed by Ben Seretan
To listen to “Music Inspired by Unread” go to unread.bandcamp.com
For photos, videos, memes, and other visuals referenced in this episode, follow us on Instagram and Twitter @unreadpod.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, before this episode begins, I just want to make
sure you know that this series gets into some things
that might be triggering to some listeners, specifically depression and suicide.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
please seek assistance from a mental health professional, or visit
the National Institute of Mental Health website at n I
(00:20):
m H dot ni H dot g o V for resources.
If you're currently in crisis, you can call one eight
hundred to seven three talk that's eight two five five,
or text the word hello to seven for one seven
for one to speak to someone immediately. Thank you for listening,
(00:47):
and I guess why that's me and Alex singing Britney
Spears as Womanizer. In two thousand nine, were on a
farm in Michigan, out of the city to clear our heads.
We had spent the weekend hiking, getting high, cooking, and
having a sit down meal. More than anything, there was
(01:09):
just a lot of laying around. In the exhausting years
I spent racing to earn a master's degree, that trip
stands out as a rare stretch of time where I
did almost nothing at all. One afternoon, Alex and I
wandered into a bedroom in the farmhouse, where we came
across an old pump organ of some sort. I laid
down on the bed while he took a seat at
the keys and started playing womanizer, or at least an
(01:31):
approximation of it. You you got to go in. After
Alex died, one of the friends who was on that
trip with us went looking for footage of this moment,
(01:52):
eventually finding it in her ex's Facebook archives. She sent
it to me and we reminisced about what a special
trip that was and how spending time with Alex had
changed us both. This episode, I want you to get
to know Alex a bit more and meet some of
the people who were transformed by his presence in their lives.
To know him is to know a bit of each
of us. What happens when you lose someone so close
(02:16):
to you that you can trace the ways they shaped
your life, your personality, and what are you supposed to
do when they leave behind a trail for you to follow.
I'm Chris Studman and this is unread episode two piece
of Me. Call them back all the little clean open
(02:47):
dread that Stills sent for you back. Yeah, Sandy, Eva,
I said, be scared, stared breaking. While singing Womanizer Alex
(03:31):
and I intentionally pitched our voices down as a contrast
to Britney's higher voice in the song and to match
the bizarre flat way he was playing the organ. But
lowering my voice comes naturally to me as a closeted
queer kid, I trained myself to speak deeper than I
naturally would. Growing up, I've been loud and talkative, but
(03:54):
when I realized that flamboyance might give away my queerness,
I went quiet. Suddenly, hyper attuned to how I was
being perceived at all times, I started pitching myself down
in voice and temperament. I began coming out as a teenager,
first to Internet strangers, then my mom, then friends. As
the circle widened, I let my guard down bit by bit,
(04:17):
bringing the parts of myself I had tucked away back
into the light. Still, the habit of hiding had become
so instinctual, so built into the fabric of who I was,
that I kept making myself smaller in ways I wasn't
always aware of, including my speech. Here. I am as
a teenager when I appeared in a documentary film about
a summer camp for lgbt Q teens. I'd gone through
(04:40):
puberty at this point, but you can hear the intentionally
layered bush nous of my tone. It seems to me
like some people are getting the wrong impression about me.
I mean, you know, people may notice that I act.
I don't know the word that some of them uses
goofy a lot, because you know, I like to have fun. Um,
(05:02):
and maybe it is acting stupid, but I do like
to be stupid down and then too. Um. Anyway, I
know I'm rambling, but my point is, Um, I think
some people have gotten the wrong impression of me, and
that does blug me a little bit because I don't
like people to think differently about me, because I can
be really serious at times and I know that, you know,
I just basically, I just want to be myself. So
(05:24):
hopefully that's coming across right. This defensive diet tribe is funny,
but I WinCE hearing it now. I grew up thinking
that presenting a polished version of myself would keep me safe. That's,
seeming smart or accomplished rather than irresponsible or carefree, was
key to survival. I was terrified that because I was
(05:47):
letting go and having fun at camp. People wouldn't see
me as serious or thoughtful, or of any value at all.
I can hear the fear in my voice in that documentary,
still low, even though I've been out of the closet
for years by that point, A fear of people seeing
my unrestrained self of being too much. We all self
(06:10):
monitor and compartmentalize. Every one of us edits curates, tucks
away certain parts of ourselves, and tries to show a
more controlled self image to the world, especially online. Still,
sometimes we perform a certain kind of self because we
want to, and other times we do it because we
feel we have to. For a lot of my life
(06:32):
it felt necessary to present a team er version of
myself to the world. I learned to hide, and hiding
became habit. But then I met Alex. How are a
little from on our little postre? How don't for us
to throw off its coat and to talk more? Because
(06:59):
Alex was hard to miss, six ft four, always in
a T shirt, hair never styled. He looked wild like Bigfoot.
If Bigfoot was sensitive, gay and love to quote Britney lyrics,
he could be just as elusive to He'd lose a
whole day in internet forms, and the next he'd be
off getting lost in a national park. He was restless
(07:20):
and impulsive. He once suggested we go on an impromptu
camping trip, and after driving for hours without being able
to find an open campsite anywhere, said we should just
go back to my place and watch Shakira she Wolf
music video on repeat instead. Another time, he set up
sleeping bags on the roof of his mom's house for
us because the temperature was perfect that night, and he
said he never slept at an angle before. When Alex
(07:45):
and I met on Okay Cupid, I was living on
the South side of Chicago working on a masters in religion,
and he was living with his mom and sister up
in Skokie, a suburb just northwest of the city. At first,
we kind of sort of dated, but romance quickly turned
to friendship. Then about a year after we met, I
was off to the East Coast chase a job at Harvard.
(08:05):
Within a couple of years, he left Chicago to following
his compass out west. Alex and I both moved around
a lot over our decade of friendship, though for different reasons.
I pretty much always moved for some new, better job. Well,
he would pick up and move whenever whim struck. Here's
a voicemail he left me in. Sorry I've been like
(08:26):
you know whatever. But first of all, I was a
new microphone now and no one ever returned phone calls
or ever names out so and lay little bitch now.
He wasn't flaky, but he was a restless spirit, forever
on the move. But wherever he was going, whether it
was a road trip to try some new roller coaster
or an impulsive amateur storm chase, it was always with
(08:49):
a deep sense of self intact tornado chasing in East
Colorado and a tornado just hit the ground fifteen miles away.
I'm excited. I'm a big boy, I'm a scientist, I'm
a meteorologies. In Alex, I found a person who was
singularly true to his nature, someone who, despite the world's
(09:12):
best attempts to make him feel like he was too intense,
seemed considerably less worried about how he was coming across
or proving his worthiness than I was. Alex didn't care
about all the ways I hid. He didn't love me
because of how busy I was, or because I seemed smart,
but because of who I was. The person he saw
(09:33):
behind the facade around Alex. I didn't have to pitch
my voice down unless I wanted to. For fun made
them Let's go back to the evening. I got Alex's
(09:55):
goodbye email in December Chris listen. He began, I am
writing to let you know that when you receive this
scheduled email, I will no longer be alive. He explained
that his depression had gotten so bad that he was
in too much pain and felt he needed to, as
he put it, opt out. Then he started talking about
(10:20):
our friendship. Words fail me these days, he said. All
I want to say is how much I love you
and cherish everything about you. I'm sorry I lost touch
with you. If only I could explain, it's just words, words, words,
too many words. I hope you understand you are one
(10:40):
of the best people I've ever known. I don't know
how else to say it. It's very get naked, I
got a plan or quicksand and yes, that last line
was Britney song titles. Again. I know, I'm so lucky
to have this email. When Alex died, I was plagued
by worry that I hadn't been supportive enough, but he
(11:03):
offered me the profound gift of putting into words what
I had meant to him. He did this for others too.
From what I've been able to gather, Alex sent out
at least a dozen emails to friends and family, and
also left a note saying there were many others he
couldn't summon the ability to write notes too, but who
he wanted to know. We're loved to. Each of us
(11:27):
who did get an email got a piece of what
felt like a disjointed story tailored to our connection with him.
It was like Alex's last act was to disperse little
fragments of himself across the world, and we could only
piece together the full story by finding one another. First,
an email thread began with all of us who got notes,
(11:48):
where we swapped stories about Alex. Then a smaller crew
started a group chat, almost by accident, initially to coordinate
around planning a meet up in California and share some
updates on Alex's memorial in Chicago, where his mom lives.
Before long, the six of us in this group chat,
we're talking so often that we gave ourselves a name
Team Thor Daniels, a pseudonym Alex sometimes used online. I
(12:11):
want to offer some of their pieces of Alex's story
with you, the ways he helped them find their voice too.
There's Bath. She was on the phone with a friend
when she got her email. I was like, I think
my friend just killed himself. And he's like, what, oh
my god, Okay, do you need to go or can
(12:33):
I help you? I was like, I think I just
need to go. So I'm in my backyard here in
front of my garage and I just respond right away
like Alex, wait, call me. I want you to stay.
And I said I love you and I always will.
I just said thank you for bringing you. Um, he
(12:53):
made my life better. Alex once introduced me in Bath
over Twitter because we were his two blue check friends. Well,
my check is questionable. Beth is legit famous and for
good reason. Like Alex, she's thoughtful, empathetic, but perhaps above
all else, a comedic genius. A couple of months after
(13:15):
Alex died, Beth came to my city to film a
comedy special for HBO Max. It's called Girl Daddy. You
should definitely watch it. And I'm also not on birth
control because sometimes birth control is like I know you're hungry,
but what if you cried. She dedicated the special to Alex,
whose free spirited nous influenced so much of her approach
(13:37):
to humor. He really was he was sort of already
out of this world before he left this world. And
that sounds maybe cheesy, but in death people can be
made to seem like greater than they are. But really
I think it's just more looking back and analyzing how
great he really was. Like he really just was, I mean,
(14:00):
someone I still would like to be more like. And
I wish I absorbed more about while he was here.
But when you were around him, you got to act
that way, you know, or feel a little bit of it.
Um just the fully not afraid to be yourself. I
just I mean, it sounds silly to say I envy it,
but yeah. There's James, who, like me, also met Alex
(14:25):
on a dating app, and the photo that he had
was him like outside with like kind of a douchey
smile in a backwards hat, but there's also like a
cat on his shoulder, and I was like, okay. I
remember clicking on his Instagram account and like seeing a
lot of shots of him like just outdoors, and like
it seemed very like kind of posed and very like
(14:47):
mask for mask, but then like interspersed with that would
be like bizarre images of Britney spears and just like
all this random stuff thrown in, which I mean at
the time was like I think that's kind of what
made me intrigue to like talk to him, because he wasn't.
It's like some dude, I knew nothing of James before
Alex died, but I get why Alex messaged him. He's cute, funny,
(15:08):
so sweet and supportive. As I started looking for Alice,
James became one of my biggest cheerleaders, and like Alex,
he always did it in a teasing way that kept
me from taking any of it too seriously. I think
Alex did for him too. There's so many people that
he connected with online that don't have any relationship to
(15:28):
each other. Like, no, I'm really glad you mentioned that, because, like, yeah,
in the months after Alex died, I was like randomly
tracking down people who he knew, because like I was
just trying to like be useful somehow. You know, it
is useful. It was more selfish than anything. No, I
(15:49):
don't think it's selfish. I mean the image of it.
You feel like that name of like Charlie and always
studying in Philadelphia, like with in the office, like surrounded
by like putting strings in between one of my favorite
names ever. And that's a picture you making this podcast.
I'm not even joking. It is truly an image that
has come into my head multiple times. Just pianic gig
(16:10):
and sweating and like seeing things. Yeah, that's definitely you've
got me nailed there. Next, there's Due, who lives in Croatia.
Do It is funny in a way that no description
could do justice. He's unhinged, so witty, and I know
he'd want me to say he's extremely cute too. Well, technically,
what he really want me to say is that he's
(16:31):
cuter than James. Is James doing this? Yeah, I'm going
to interview him in a couple of weeks. Okay, just
please make sure that if I have admitted that he
gets like a second. In the days after Alex died,
do It was the first person to make me laugh.
He sent me some memes about Alex's death that were
unbelievably dark but also exactly Alex's humor. In one, he
(16:56):
took an old picture of me and Alex. I'm sitting
on Alex's shoulders as we stand outside the gates of
Lollapalooza in Chicago, trying to watch Santegal performed from across
the street because we couldn't afford tickets. And he duplicated
it in the duplicate image, do it erased Alex, so
I'm just floating in the air. Then he put this
new image side by side with the original above them.
(17:18):
He wrote the caption ten year Challenge, a phrase that
was making the rounds online at the time, where people
would put an old and current picture side by side
to show how they had changed over the last decade.
Like I said, dark, when I saw do as meme,
I laughed, cried and cried from laughing. Do it reminds
me so much of Alex that it can actually be
(17:38):
a little jarring. One time they even got suspended from
the Britney fan forum where they met because the moderators
thought they were the same person with two accounts. To me,
it was a huge compliment because I'm like, gosh, because
he's hilarious. So if somebody thinks some Alex, you know,
I mean, that's I mean, that's the thing you sometimes
the way that you remind me of Alex is almost
(17:59):
sort of eerie. It's like, you know, you guys just
obviously had a very special connection. Yeah, it was. It
was really based on being more bit sarcastic and but
overall loving. He was so loving to everyone, and I'm
like the same way. But if you really don't know me,
you might think of me and sound like this six
ft two hung guy that doesn't really interact well but
(18:23):
not quite. I'm a dancer for guys like Duet got
his email from Alex early in Croatia time. I think
I read it in six am in the morning, and
I haven't got any emails from Alex. I think that
last year, and because I was sending him emails and
(18:43):
I thought, oh my god, he finally responded, I was
just horrified. I don't know, I was really really bad.
Joey very hard once said beautifully, I don't know who
passed away, but she said, it's always said to ban
comedian dies and um because Alexi was such a high
energy person. I think he filled every room. He showed
(19:05):
up and when you lost that person, it's like silence.
You just loved with silence. At the beginning of our friendship,
Alex showed me his signature loud, high pitched dog bark.
Almost anyone who's met him has probably heard it. Beth
remembers him doing it all the time when they met
as co workers at a bengel shop the same year
Alex and I met too. We would just be working together,
(19:29):
he would, you know, either like moan makes a sort
of corny moan, or like you know, we'd bark at
each other. Yeah. I found this old video of Alex
teaching me how to do that bark. Yeah. It sounded
so real. It sounds like there was a dog in
the bagel shop. Here's him trying to teach me. I
(19:51):
try the bark, but I'm not quite getting it. My
barks are hesitant and too low, like the way I
had trained myself to speak. I'm embarrassed, looking down, averting
my eyes as I try. So. Alex steps back in
to show me how to do it. He encourages me
(20:13):
and I try again, but I'm still not getting it,
and I start laughing uncomfortably. The thing about the bark
is that it's higher than I want to go. It
feels so counterintuitive, so opposed to what I had told
myself was safe. To do. It's high wild, but Alex
(20:38):
doesn't chastise or shame me. He simply shows me again
how it's done. Growing closer to Alex felt like an active,
deep programming of all the bullshit I had internalized years
of shame of what I should or shouldn't do, what
did or didn't make me worthy of love. But he
(21:01):
didn't do it by telling me how to be or
what to do. He just showed the way and let
me walk by his side. This is friendship at its
best and most pure. I think when you find someone
who loves you as you are, who tells you it's
okay to let down your fronts, someone with whom you
can both be yourself and become something more than you
(21:23):
were before, who can help you find your voice and
expand it. But after Alex died, it was like I
lost part of my voice. I think this is partly
why as I looked over his email again and again,
I couldn't stop wondering about Alice, about this detail in
Alex's email that I didn't understand, wondering what exactly he
(21:48):
was trying to show me here. But am I Like
some of the commenters on Brittany's Instagram, looking for meaning
and the smallest thing so far we've heard from re.
Out of the five people who became my inner circle
after Alex died, there are two more, and they know
Alex's interiority better than just about anyone. They're also the
(22:10):
people who, because I began fixating on Alice, actually encouraged
me to try to find her. There's Show She Alex's sister.
In the weeks after Alex's death, we texted basically all
day every day to coordinate details about his cremation and memorial,
but also just you know, to deal. But Show She
(22:31):
wasn't just texting me. She was working overtime to make
sure all the people in Alex's life knew what had
happened and to connect us to one another. Her determination
in those days in the face of immense loss was
unreal to me. I can't imagine getting through those first
few days without that. I mean, I feel so grateful
that you let me in. I'm so grateful that you
(22:55):
you were you, you were so available and how full
and understanding and respectful. Show. She and my paths first
crossed in two thousand nine, when she and Alex were
living at their mom's place, but she didn't really remember
that when she found me online after Alex's death. I
(23:16):
mean we hadn't really even spoken before. Well, you said
that we met a couple of times when I was
like super stoked. We like passed like ships in the
night in the hallway of your house. Yeah, I mean
my brother and his like friend hanging around exactly. Yeah
was too cool. You were, for the record, very cool.
(23:41):
A lot has changed Show. She is kind, sharp, and
unapologetically herself, perhaps more so than anyone else I've ever
met besides Alex. I aspire to one day be even
half as much myself as Show she is. She's as
one of a kind as Alex was. Their childhood wasn't
always easy. Alex and Show She grew up in tight
(24:03):
quarters with limited resources, and their big personalities could clash,
But maybe in part because of that, there was total
honesty in their relationship. They were never afraid to tell
each other the truth, to fight, and to make up
whenever the time was right. The last time that I
spoke with my brother was through text messages, and I
(24:27):
got mad at him for not responding to me. I didn't. Yeah,
I got mad at him. Um, I mean I called
him selfish and rude for not responding to me and
at least letting me know that he was okay, and
he blew up at me in his text message back
(24:48):
to me and then blocked me, and um, that was
the last time that we talked. When he did this,
she decided to honor the boundary Alex had put up,
knowing they'd find their way back to one another. You know,
I wonder if because I was always keeping tabs on him, Um,
I was always kind of asking where he was, what
(25:10):
he was doing, like, just check in with me, if
that was partially the reason why he wanted to disk
totally disconnect from me. And because it's not that I
forgot about him, I just let him disappear because I
felt that's what he needed to do. I mean, I
don't think that the argument that my brother and I
(25:32):
had was enough to really warrant a block, because you
guys had had arguments before, Like you guys, but oh
my god, he's my brother, because my little brother were
eighteen months apart, like we fought, they thought, because they
loved each other so much after everything they'd gone through,
Alex knew he could share even his darkness, his anger
(25:56):
and intemperance with showshe and still be loved because they
saw and accepted each other for who they really were,
for better and for worse. He was a unique, eccentric original.
He was empathetic, he was gentle, he was kind, he
(26:17):
was trustworthy, loyal, I'm super fun I think Alex was
probably the most authentic person that anyone has ever come across.
Definitely me, I can say that for sure. And finally,
Lexi Alex's best friend. Anyone who knew Alex knew Lexi
(26:40):
was everything to him. Honestly, I was pretty intimidated before
we talked for the first time because I knew that
Alex had such a high opinion of her. Once you
meet her, it's obvious why. She's brilliant, hilarious and unbelievably
talented artist and also so generous. When my dog Tuna,
very suddly and unexpectedly died half a year after Alex did,
(27:03):
Lexi sent me a hat with Tuna's face on it,
which she had embroidered by hand. Her creativity reminds me
so much of Alex's. When Lexi showed she and I
worked together to plan Alex's memorial. Lexi was in charge
of everything creative. She made a Roman Michelle's high school
reunion inspired post it board for guests to write tributes,
(27:23):
a nod to Alex's favorite movie, and it was her
genius and appropriately dark idea to put Alex's ashes in
Britney spears fragrance bottles so that each of us could
have a piece of him. Lexie and Show She had
already been looking for Alex the day his scheduled emails
went out after a rental place called show She about
a car that Alex hadn't returned. Lexi was out shopping
(27:47):
for her job as a costume designer when she got
a call back from a sheriff in Wyoming, where Alex
had been living in the final months of his life,
and learned they were looking for him to Very shortly
after that, I received my email and I was at
a fucking Macy's in the valley and I opened my
(28:08):
email and I just fucking lose it. I'm like, it
was the worst moment of my life. I still can't
go back to that mall, like truly, and I just
like kept reading it and just it was sobbing, and
just yeah, it was like horrible, totally horrible. One thing
(28:30):
in particular about Lexi's email from Alex stood out to her.
I think it really resonates with me, the part in
his note where he um, it's like one of the
first sentence is just saying that he's so sorry, but
also that he's like really not and that he was
like sorry that he was doing this to me and
(28:53):
to all of us, but at the same time he
really wasn't the fact that he could say that Alexei,
I'm not sorry and know that she would understand as
a testament to how close they were with her, as
with Alex there's no bullshit, But like with me, that
wasn't always the case for Lexi. She and I talked
(29:14):
a lot about how hanging out with Alex was sort
of like going down the rabbit hole into wonderland, both
an escape from the constraints of your reality and something
that changed you. They met at summer camp when she
was fourteen. He was the rabbit and she was a
teenager in Nebraska living with strict parents who expected a
lot from her. His invitation was a simple one. Whatever
(29:35):
you feel deep down inside, whatever version of yourself that
you're hiding or suppressing, be that It was like the
freest I had ever felt in my entire life. Up
until that point, I had never fully felt myself ever,
because I always just felt like I didn't fit in
like anywhere. Everybody was so fucking conventional, and like no
(29:58):
one did anything ever to like shake it up. And
then Alex came a lot. He really like shook up
my whole world. After their magical summer at Camp one
that changed Lexi forever, it was time to part ways.
They kept in touch online and he'd visit her a lot,
(30:18):
but that initial parting was hard. It was the last
day of camp and we had to say goodbye and
like I didn't know if I was ever going to
see him again, and like he was like getting on
the van and I was just like sobbing. I had
never felt like that strong of an emotion before. It
was like truly love. He really was my first love
(30:42):
in a very non sexual way, even though I did
see his dick and bubble more times than I can count,
same same, even though we only went out for like
I don't know or something. Yeah, you probably saw more
after you weren't dating than you did when you were
(31:04):
way more. Alex helped all of us become more ourselves,
but we were united in something else too. We each
struggled to reach him in the final year of his life.
At first, it didn't feel strange. Alex would vanish sometimes
(31:25):
needing space for himself, and he was also just always
on the move. I know, I couldn't keep track. There
was an allusiveness to him, and there was definitely a
side of him that I just would never see, you know,
or didn't know about. But part of why we all
stayed friends with him over the years, even as he disappeared,
is because we understood and we could be the same
(31:48):
way ourselves too. For many of us, communication with him
was almost always touch and go, hot and cold on
both ends. We would then become basic on the phone,
and then again mounts nothing. Still, as this elusiveness stretched
on much longer than usual, we all began to worry
and got scared. But he didn't respond for like ten
(32:11):
months and again. The whole time. You know your life
is happening. You know, life goes on, but it was
always like in the back of my head, like where
the fuck is he? Some of us wondered if we'd
done something to upset him. I really thought if I
maybe did something. Maybe I don't know what I did.
I had the same worry. It's probably the main reason why,
(32:33):
besides my business, I didn't try as hard to track
him down as I now wish I had. On some level,
I think I was scared I had unknowingly hurt or
offended him. So, like show She, I decided to respect
his boundary. And because Team Thor Daniels wasn't a thing
at the time, none of us realized it was something
the other people in his life were experiencing too, so
(32:57):
we tried to reassure ourselves that this was just Alex
being Alex. He pretty bluntly said to me, like, I know,
like I drop off the radar every once in a while,
but I want you to know that, like, it's nothing personal.
It's kind of just me. I have a lot of
stuff going on and it's never about you. In hindsight,
it's clear that was true in his last year too.
He wasn't mad at us. He was spending that year
(33:19):
preparing for his final disappearance. Some of the things he did,
whether it was disappearing from social media from time to
time or disappearing from his friendships from time to time
were things that he needed to do leading up to
his final disappearance and death for himself, and I think
(33:39):
he also did it for others too. I think it
was like practice in a way. The Internet kept him
connected to us over the years as he followed his whims,
but it also allowed him to keep his relationships separate
enough that none of us really knew one another, and
it allowed him to log off and disappear from our
(33:59):
lives when he sided he was going to end his own.
His elusiveness and the role the Internet played in it
makes me wonder if maybe Alice understood him in a
way that none of the rest of us did, because
she could be so elusive too, because she, like Alex,
was a digital creature prone to disappearing. Shortly after Alex died,
(34:20):
I told Lexi about the Strange files. At the end
of my email. I made a joke about trying to
find Alice for a podcast, and it was Lexie who
first said, you really should. Instead of playing along with
my tossed off comment, Lexi simply told me honestly to
go for it, and I knew that if she said it,
she meant it. I think that, like there's a reason
(34:43):
why he left you those files, and like, I don't
know if I can exactly like pinpoint what it is,
but I mean, it would be fucking cool if we
could find out. It's definitely the kind of thing that
like with me and my personality that like I just
can't let go of. And maybe that was part of
it too. Maybe he knew it would like torture you forever,
(35:05):
So maybe he knew that, like you would start a
podcast about it, and was like hoping this would happen.
After Alex's death, the six of us in the Thor
Daniels group talked all the time, at first helping each
other through it and then becoming friends in our own right,
(35:26):
meeting you and Lexi and the Thorde Daniels group do
a bath, James, you know, and all of Alex's friends.
I mean, I consider you all my best friends. I
would not have interacted with you guys, how do you
not died? And that's just that's just so crazy to
think about. Most often we talked in an ongoing Instagram
(35:50):
d M chat, but we also sometimes got together over
zoom to mark occasions like Alex's birthday or the anniversary
of his death. But there's one conversation I want to
highlight one that gave me what I needed to pursue
my search for Alice, who, in so many ways was
beginning to feel like she was hovering over my conversations
with them if we were some kind of newly formed
(36:10):
Scooby Doo gang. She was the mystery before us, one
I couldn't solve on my own, so I brought it
to the group. I'm curious if any of you, like,
did Alex ever talk to any of you about Alice.
He mentioned it to me. I think probably while the
conversations he was having with her were happening, and I,
(36:33):
I mean, I didn't dismiss it, but I was skeptical.
We were on this sense side and there was this
girl and we would go to Tiny Chedd and she
she Sunday because she would do like signature Britney things,
so they kind of gave her credibility. And she never
(36:54):
claimed to be She would say that she wasn't Brittany
as you said, like there's lot of impersonators and stuff,
but it did not sound to me like someone doing
an impersonation, like even Biggs. It was really spot on.
I'm not thinking it was Brittany, but it really did
sound like if you ever mentioned it, I would have like,
(37:16):
like I never just like right not believed everything or
anything that Alex said. But I don't know. I feel
like the like period of time in which he was
chatting or talking to her was like very short. I
feel like it happened in that moment in time, and
like he talked to me about it like maybe a
couple of times, and I like sort of dismissed it,
and then we never really talked about it much further
(37:39):
because like, for whatever reason, you're just like Yoka, it's
Britney's weirds, right. But while most of them were skeptical
about Alice, while Alex was alive, they began to have
the same inkling of intrigue that I had when I
found the files in my email. At first, it's like
a small seed of an idea. Play sit and soil,
(38:00):
water it a little, and just let it grow. Admitting
my curiosity to the thor Daniel's crew, a collection of
people who were all changed by Alex and his free spiritedness,
was like planning my Alice seed in the richest soil.
As we talked, I could feel my questions multiplying. After
a while, the thrill of believing in something outlandish was
(38:23):
like reconnecting with Alex's essence. As do I put it, fantasy.
You know, it's like why not believe? Talking to them
about Alice was like going back down the rabbit hole.
I could stop overthinking it and just give in in
the same way I could when Alex was around. None
of us knew if there was anything to Alice, but
(38:43):
we all agreed that it would be more fun to
give in than to try and stop our curiosities from
taking root. That was just sort of like part of
the fun of being his friend. As his friend, you
sort of like submit to that fantasy with him, and
he just sort of go along for the ride. Skepticism
maybe one of my strengths, but I can also wield
(39:04):
it against myself like a weapon, one that dampens any
curiosity that seems too colorful or absurd. One of the
greatest gifts Alex gave me was teaching me how to
stop questioning myself so much, to stop overthinking and hiding
to bark like no one was listening. So I'm going
(39:25):
for it. I'm submitting to the fantasy. If I ever
said her name, Yeah, would. I'm gonna look for Alice
(39:52):
next time. On Unread, people are very passionate over this.
That was one thing I foiled. There are a lot
of posts or someone just asks who has banana Alice,
and it's pretty hilarious to see. There are so many
passionate responses saying it's not Brittany, this was from so
(40:14):
long ago. It's just someone pretending who cares Leave it alone.
Hey, before this episode begins, I just want to make
sure you know that this series gets into some things
that might be triggering to some listeners, specifically depression and suicide.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts,
please seek assistance from a mental health professional, or visit
the National Institute of Mental Health website at n I
(00:20):
m H dot ni H dot g o V for resources.
If you're currently in crisis, you can call one eight
hundred to seven three talk that's eight two five five,
or text the word hello to seven for one seven
for one to speak to someone immediately. Thank you for listening,
(00:47):
and I guess why that's me and Alex singing Britney
Spears as Womanizer. In two thousand nine, were on a
farm in Michigan, out of the city to clear our heads.
We had spent the weekend hiking, getting high, cooking, and
having a sit down meal. More than anything, there was
(01:09):
just a lot of laying around. In the exhausting years
I spent racing to earn a master's degree, that trip
stands out as a rare stretch of time where I
did almost nothing at all. One afternoon, Alex and I
wandered into a bedroom in the farmhouse, where we came
across an old pump organ of some sort. I laid
down on the bed while he took a seat at
the keys and started playing womanizer, or at least an
(01:31):
approximation of it. You you got to go in. After
Alex died, one of the friends who was on that
trip with us went looking for footage of this moment,
(01:52):
eventually finding it in her ex's Facebook archives. She sent
it to me and we reminisced about what a special
trip that was and how spending time with Alex had
changed us both. This episode, I want you to get
to know Alex a bit more and meet some of
the people who were transformed by his presence in their lives.
To know him is to know a bit of each
of us. What happens when you lose someone so close
(02:16):
to you that you can trace the ways they shaped
your life, your personality, and what are you supposed to
do when they leave behind a trail for you to follow.
I'm Chris Studman and this is unread episode two piece
of Me. Call them back all the little clean open
(02:47):
dread that Stills sent for you back. Yeah, Sandy, Eva,
I said, be scared, stared breaking. While singing Womanizer Alex
(03:31):
and I intentionally pitched our voices down as a contrast
to Britney's higher voice in the song and to match
the bizarre flat way he was playing the organ. But
lowering my voice comes naturally to me as a closeted
queer kid, I trained myself to speak deeper than I
naturally would. Growing up, I've been loud and talkative, but
(03:54):
when I realized that flamboyance might give away my queerness,
I went quiet. Suddenly, hyper attuned to how I was
being perceived at all times, I started pitching myself down
in voice and temperament. I began coming out as a teenager,
first to Internet strangers, then my mom, then friends. As
the circle widened, I let my guard down bit by bit,
(04:17):
bringing the parts of myself I had tucked away back
into the light. Still, the habit of hiding had become
so instinctual, so built into the fabric of who I was,
that I kept making myself smaller in ways I wasn't
always aware of, including my speech. Here. I am as
a teenager when I appeared in a documentary film about
a summer camp for lgbt Q teens. I'd gone through
(04:40):
puberty at this point, but you can hear the intentionally
layered bush nous of my tone. It seems to me
like some people are getting the wrong impression about me.
I mean, you know, people may notice that I act.
I don't know the word that some of them uses
goofy a lot, because you know, I like to have fun. Um,
(05:02):
and maybe it is acting stupid, but I do like
to be stupid down and then too. Um. Anyway, I
know I'm rambling, but my point is, Um, I think
some people have gotten the wrong impression of me, and
that does blug me a little bit because I don't
like people to think differently about me, because I can
be really serious at times and I know that, you know,
I just basically, I just want to be myself. So
(05:24):
hopefully that's coming across right. This defensive diet tribe is funny,
but I WinCE hearing it now. I grew up thinking
that presenting a polished version of myself would keep me safe. That's,
seeming smart or accomplished rather than irresponsible or carefree, was
key to survival. I was terrified that because I was
(05:47):
letting go and having fun at camp. People wouldn't see
me as serious or thoughtful, or of any value at all.
I can hear the fear in my voice in that documentary,
still low, even though I've been out of the closet
for years by that point, A fear of people seeing
my unrestrained self of being too much. We all self
(06:10):
monitor and compartmentalize. Every one of us edits curates, tucks
away certain parts of ourselves, and tries to show a
more controlled self image to the world, especially online. Still,
sometimes we perform a certain kind of self because we
want to, and other times we do it because we
feel we have to. For a lot of my life
(06:32):
it felt necessary to present a team er version of
myself to the world. I learned to hide, and hiding
became habit. But then I met Alex. How are a
little from on our little postre? How don't for us
to throw off its coat and to talk more? Because
(06:59):
Alex was hard to miss, six ft four, always in
a T shirt, hair never styled. He looked wild like Bigfoot.
If Bigfoot was sensitive, gay and love to quote Britney lyrics,
he could be just as elusive to He'd lose a
whole day in internet forms, and the next he'd be
off getting lost in a national park. He was restless
(07:20):
and impulsive. He once suggested we go on an impromptu
camping trip, and after driving for hours without being able
to find an open campsite anywhere, said we should just
go back to my place and watch Shakira she Wolf
music video on repeat instead. Another time, he set up
sleeping bags on the roof of his mom's house for
us because the temperature was perfect that night, and he
said he never slept at an angle before. When Alex
(07:45):
and I met on Okay Cupid, I was living on
the South side of Chicago working on a masters in religion,
and he was living with his mom and sister up
in Skokie, a suburb just northwest of the city. At first,
we kind of sort of dated, but romance quickly turned
to friendship. Then about a year after we met, I
was off to the East Coast chase a job at Harvard.
(08:05):
Within a couple of years, he left Chicago to following
his compass out west. Alex and I both moved around
a lot over our decade of friendship, though for different reasons.
I pretty much always moved for some new, better job. Well,
he would pick up and move whenever whim struck. Here's
a voicemail he left me in. Sorry I've been like
(08:26):
you know whatever. But first of all, I was a
new microphone now and no one ever returned phone calls
or ever names out so and lay little bitch now.
He wasn't flaky, but he was a restless spirit, forever
on the move. But wherever he was going, whether it
was a road trip to try some new roller coaster
or an impulsive amateur storm chase, it was always with
(08:49):
a deep sense of self intact tornado chasing in East
Colorado and a tornado just hit the ground fifteen miles away.
I'm excited. I'm a big boy, I'm a scientist, I'm
a meteorologies. In Alex, I found a person who was
singularly true to his nature, someone who, despite the world's
(09:12):
best attempts to make him feel like he was too intense,
seemed considerably less worried about how he was coming across
or proving his worthiness than I was. Alex didn't care
about all the ways I hid. He didn't love me
because of how busy I was, or because I seemed smart,
but because of who I was. The person he saw
(09:33):
behind the facade around Alex. I didn't have to pitch
my voice down unless I wanted to. For fun made
them Let's go back to the evening. I got Alex's
(09:55):
goodbye email in December Chris listen. He began, I am
writing to let you know that when you receive this
scheduled email, I will no longer be alive. He explained
that his depression had gotten so bad that he was
in too much pain and felt he needed to, as
he put it, opt out. Then he started talking about
(10:20):
our friendship. Words fail me these days, he said. All
I want to say is how much I love you
and cherish everything about you. I'm sorry I lost touch
with you. If only I could explain, it's just words, words, words,
too many words. I hope you understand you are one
(10:40):
of the best people I've ever known. I don't know
how else to say it. It's very get naked, I
got a plan or quicksand and yes, that last line
was Britney song titles. Again. I know, I'm so lucky
to have this email. When Alex died, I was plagued
by worry that I hadn't been supportive enough, but he
(11:03):
offered me the profound gift of putting into words what
I had meant to him. He did this for others too.
From what I've been able to gather, Alex sent out
at least a dozen emails to friends and family, and
also left a note saying there were many others he
couldn't summon the ability to write notes too, but who
he wanted to know. We're loved to. Each of us
(11:27):
who did get an email got a piece of what
felt like a disjointed story tailored to our connection with him.
It was like Alex's last act was to disperse little
fragments of himself across the world, and we could only
piece together the full story by finding one another. First,
an email thread began with all of us who got notes,
(11:48):
where we swapped stories about Alex. Then a smaller crew
started a group chat, almost by accident, initially to coordinate
around planning a meet up in California and share some
updates on Alex's memorial in Chicago, where his mom lives.
Before long, the six of us in this group chat,
we're talking so often that we gave ourselves a name
Team Thor Daniels, a pseudonym Alex sometimes used online. I
(12:11):
want to offer some of their pieces of Alex's story
with you, the ways he helped them find their voice too.
There's Bath. She was on the phone with a friend
when she got her email. I was like, I think
my friend just killed himself. And he's like, what, oh
my god, Okay, do you need to go or can
(12:33):
I help you? I was like, I think I just
need to go. So I'm in my backyard here in
front of my garage and I just respond right away
like Alex, wait, call me. I want you to stay.
And I said I love you and I always will.
I just said thank you for bringing you. Um, he
(12:53):
made my life better. Alex once introduced me in Bath
over Twitter because we were his two blue check friends. Well,
my check is questionable. Beth is legit famous and for
good reason. Like Alex, she's thoughtful, empathetic, but perhaps above
all else, a comedic genius. A couple of months after
(13:15):
Alex died, Beth came to my city to film a
comedy special for HBO Max. It's called Girl Daddy. You
should definitely watch it. And I'm also not on birth
control because sometimes birth control is like I know you're hungry,
but what if you cried. She dedicated the special to Alex,
whose free spirited nous influenced so much of her approach
(13:37):
to humor. He really was he was sort of already
out of this world before he left this world. And
that sounds maybe cheesy, but in death people can be
made to seem like greater than they are. But really
I think it's just more looking back and analyzing how
great he really was. Like he really just was, I mean,
(14:00):
someone I still would like to be more like. And
I wish I absorbed more about while he was here.
But when you were around him, you got to act
that way, you know, or feel a little bit of it.
Um just the fully not afraid to be yourself. I
just I mean, it sounds silly to say I envy it,
but yeah. There's James, who, like me, also met Alex
(14:25):
on a dating app, and the photo that he had
was him like outside with like kind of a douchey
smile in a backwards hat, but there's also like a
cat on his shoulder, and I was like, okay. I
remember clicking on his Instagram account and like seeing a
lot of shots of him like just outdoors, and like
it seemed very like kind of posed and very like
(14:47):
mask for mask, but then like interspersed with that would
be like bizarre images of Britney spears and just like
all this random stuff thrown in, which I mean at
the time was like I think that's kind of what
made me intrigue to like talk to him, because he wasn't.
It's like some dude, I knew nothing of James before
Alex died, but I get why Alex messaged him. He's cute, funny,
(15:08):
so sweet and supportive. As I started looking for Alice,
James became one of my biggest cheerleaders, and like Alex,
he always did it in a teasing way that kept
me from taking any of it too seriously. I think
Alex did for him too. There's so many people that
he connected with online that don't have any relationship to
(15:28):
each other. Like, no, I'm really glad you mentioned that, because, like, yeah,
in the months after Alex died, I was like randomly
tracking down people who he knew, because like I was
just trying to like be useful somehow. You know, it
is useful. It was more selfish than anything. No, I
(15:49):
don't think it's selfish. I mean the image of it.
You feel like that name of like Charlie and always
studying in Philadelphia, like with in the office, like surrounded
by like putting strings in between one of my favorite
names ever. And that's a picture you making this podcast.
I'm not even joking. It is truly an image that
has come into my head multiple times. Just pianic gig
(16:10):
and sweating and like seeing things. Yeah, that's definitely you've
got me nailed there. Next, there's Due, who lives in Croatia.
Do It is funny in a way that no description
could do justice. He's unhinged, so witty, and I know
he'd want me to say he's extremely cute too. Well, technically,
what he really want me to say is that he's
(16:31):
cuter than James. Is James doing this? Yeah, I'm going
to interview him in a couple of weeks. Okay, just
please make sure that if I have admitted that he
gets like a second. In the days after Alex died,
do It was the first person to make me laugh.
He sent me some memes about Alex's death that were
unbelievably dark but also exactly Alex's humor. In one, he
(16:56):
took an old picture of me and Alex. I'm sitting
on Alex's shoulders as we stand outside the gates of
Lollapalooza in Chicago, trying to watch Santegal performed from across
the street because we couldn't afford tickets. And he duplicated
it in the duplicate image, do it erased Alex, so
I'm just floating in the air. Then he put this
new image side by side with the original above them.
(17:18):
He wrote the caption ten year Challenge, a phrase that
was making the rounds online at the time, where people
would put an old and current picture side by side
to show how they had changed over the last decade.
Like I said, dark, when I saw do as meme,
I laughed, cried and cried from laughing. Do it reminds
me so much of Alex that it can actually be
(17:38):
a little jarring. One time they even got suspended from
the Britney fan forum where they met because the moderators
thought they were the same person with two accounts. To me,
it was a huge compliment because I'm like, gosh, because
he's hilarious. So if somebody thinks some Alex, you know,
I mean, that's I mean, that's the thing you sometimes
the way that you remind me of Alex is almost
(17:59):
sort of eerie. It's like, you know, you guys just
obviously had a very special connection. Yeah, it was. It
was really based on being more bit sarcastic and but
overall loving. He was so loving to everyone, and I'm
like the same way. But if you really don't know me,
you might think of me and sound like this six
ft two hung guy that doesn't really interact well but
(18:23):
not quite. I'm a dancer for guys like Duet got
his email from Alex early in Croatia time. I think
I read it in six am in the morning, and
I haven't got any emails from Alex. I think that
last year, and because I was sending him emails and
(18:43):
I thought, oh my god, he finally responded, I was
just horrified. I don't know, I was really really bad.
Joey very hard once said beautifully, I don't know who
passed away, but she said, it's always said to ban
comedian dies and um because Alexi was such a high
energy person. I think he filled every room. He showed
(19:05):
up and when you lost that person, it's like silence.
You just loved with silence. At the beginning of our friendship,
Alex showed me his signature loud, high pitched dog bark.
Almost anyone who's met him has probably heard it. Beth
remembers him doing it all the time when they met
as co workers at a bengel shop the same year
Alex and I met too. We would just be working together,
(19:29):
he would, you know, either like moan makes a sort
of corny moan, or like you know, we'd bark at
each other. Yeah. I found this old video of Alex
teaching me how to do that bark. Yeah. It sounded
so real. It sounds like there was a dog in
the bagel shop. Here's him trying to teach me. I
(19:51):
try the bark, but I'm not quite getting it. My
barks are hesitant and too low, like the way I
had trained myself to speak. I'm embarrassed, looking down, averting
my eyes as I try. So. Alex steps back in
to show me how to do it. He encourages me
(20:13):
and I try again, but I'm still not getting it,
and I start laughing uncomfortably. The thing about the bark
is that it's higher than I want to go. It
feels so counterintuitive, so opposed to what I had told
myself was safe. To do. It's high wild, but Alex
(20:38):
doesn't chastise or shame me. He simply shows me again
how it's done. Growing closer to Alex felt like an active,
deep programming of all the bullshit I had internalized years
of shame of what I should or shouldn't do, what
did or didn't make me worthy of love. But he
(21:01):
didn't do it by telling me how to be or
what to do. He just showed the way and let
me walk by his side. This is friendship at its
best and most pure. I think when you find someone
who loves you as you are, who tells you it's
okay to let down your fronts, someone with whom you
can both be yourself and become something more than you
(21:23):
were before, who can help you find your voice and
expand it. But after Alex died, it was like I
lost part of my voice. I think this is partly
why as I looked over his email again and again,
I couldn't stop wondering about Alice, about this detail in
Alex's email that I didn't understand, wondering what exactly he
(21:48):
was trying to show me here. But am I Like
some of the commenters on Brittany's Instagram, looking for meaning
and the smallest thing so far we've heard from re.
Out of the five people who became my inner circle
after Alex died, there are two more, and they know
Alex's interiority better than just about anyone. They're also the
(22:10):
people who, because I began fixating on Alice, actually encouraged
me to try to find her. There's Show She Alex's sister.
In the weeks after Alex's death, we texted basically all
day every day to coordinate details about his cremation and memorial,
but also just you know, to deal. But Show She
(22:31):
wasn't just texting me. She was working overtime to make
sure all the people in Alex's life knew what had
happened and to connect us to one another. Her determination
in those days in the face of immense loss was
unreal to me. I can't imagine getting through those first
few days without that. I mean, I feel so grateful
that you let me in. I'm so grateful that you
(22:55):
you were you, you were so available and how full
and understanding and respectful. Show. She and my paths first
crossed in two thousand nine, when she and Alex were
living at their mom's place, but she didn't really remember
that when she found me online after Alex's death. I
(23:16):
mean we hadn't really even spoken before. Well, you said
that we met a couple of times when I was
like super stoked. We like passed like ships in the
night in the hallway of your house. Yeah, I mean
my brother and his like friend hanging around exactly. Yeah
was too cool. You were, for the record, very cool.
(23:41):
A lot has changed Show. She is kind, sharp, and
unapologetically herself, perhaps more so than anyone else I've ever
met besides Alex. I aspire to one day be even
half as much myself as Show she is. She's as
one of a kind as Alex was. Their childhood wasn't
always easy. Alex and Show She grew up in tight
(24:03):
quarters with limited resources, and their big personalities could clash,
But maybe in part because of that, there was total
honesty in their relationship. They were never afraid to tell
each other the truth, to fight, and to make up
whenever the time was right. The last time that I
spoke with my brother was through text messages, and I
(24:27):
got mad at him for not responding to me. I didn't. Yeah,
I got mad at him. Um, I mean I called
him selfish and rude for not responding to me and
at least letting me know that he was okay, and
he blew up at me in his text message back
(24:48):
to me and then blocked me, and um, that was
the last time that we talked. When he did this,
she decided to honor the boundary Alex had put up,
knowing they'd find their way back to one another. You know,
I wonder if because I was always keeping tabs on him, Um,
I was always kind of asking where he was, what
(25:10):
he was doing, like, just check in with me, if
that was partially the reason why he wanted to disk
totally disconnect from me. And because it's not that I
forgot about him, I just let him disappear because I
felt that's what he needed to do. I mean, I
don't think that the argument that my brother and I
(25:32):
had was enough to really warrant a block, because you
guys had had arguments before, Like you guys, but oh
my god, he's my brother, because my little brother were
eighteen months apart, like we fought, they thought, because they
loved each other so much after everything they'd gone through,
Alex knew he could share even his darkness, his anger
(25:56):
and intemperance with showshe and still be loved because they
saw and accepted each other for who they really were,
for better and for worse. He was a unique, eccentric original.
He was empathetic, he was gentle, he was kind, he
(26:17):
was trustworthy, loyal, I'm super fun I think Alex was
probably the most authentic person that anyone has ever come across.
Definitely me, I can say that for sure. And finally,
Lexi Alex's best friend. Anyone who knew Alex knew Lexi
(26:40):
was everything to him. Honestly, I was pretty intimidated before
we talked for the first time because I knew that
Alex had such a high opinion of her. Once you
meet her, it's obvious why. She's brilliant, hilarious and unbelievably
talented artist and also so generous. When my dog Tuna,
very suddly and unexpectedly died half a year after Alex did,
(27:03):
Lexi sent me a hat with Tuna's face on it,
which she had embroidered by hand. Her creativity reminds me
so much of Alex's. When Lexi showed she and I
worked together to plan Alex's memorial. Lexi was in charge
of everything creative. She made a Roman Michelle's high school
reunion inspired post it board for guests to write tributes,
(27:23):
a nod to Alex's favorite movie, and it was her
genius and appropriately dark idea to put Alex's ashes in
Britney spears fragrance bottles so that each of us could
have a piece of him. Lexie and Show She had
already been looking for Alex the day his scheduled emails
went out after a rental place called show She about
a car that Alex hadn't returned. Lexi was out shopping
(27:47):
for her job as a costume designer when she got
a call back from a sheriff in Wyoming, where Alex
had been living in the final months of his life,
and learned they were looking for him to Very shortly
after that, I received my email and I was at
a fucking Macy's in the valley and I opened my
(28:08):
email and I just fucking lose it. I'm like, it
was the worst moment of my life. I still can't
go back to that mall, like truly, and I just
like kept reading it and just it was sobbing, and
just yeah, it was like horrible, totally horrible. One thing
(28:30):
in particular about Lexi's email from Alex stood out to her.
I think it really resonates with me, the part in
his note where he um, it's like one of the
first sentence is just saying that he's so sorry, but
also that he's like really not and that he was
like sorry that he was doing this to me and
(28:53):
to all of us, but at the same time he
really wasn't the fact that he could say that Alexei,
I'm not sorry and know that she would understand as
a testament to how close they were with her, as
with Alex there's no bullshit, But like with me, that
wasn't always the case for Lexi. She and I talked
(29:14):
a lot about how hanging out with Alex was sort
of like going down the rabbit hole into wonderland, both
an escape from the constraints of your reality and something
that changed you. They met at summer camp when she
was fourteen. He was the rabbit and she was a
teenager in Nebraska living with strict parents who expected a
lot from her. His invitation was a simple one. Whatever
(29:35):
you feel deep down inside, whatever version of yourself that
you're hiding or suppressing, be that It was like the
freest I had ever felt in my entire life. Up
until that point, I had never fully felt myself ever,
because I always just felt like I didn't fit in
like anywhere. Everybody was so fucking conventional, and like no
(29:58):
one did anything ever to like shake it up. And
then Alex came a lot. He really like shook up
my whole world. After their magical summer at Camp one
that changed Lexi forever, it was time to part ways.
They kept in touch online and he'd visit her a lot,
(30:18):
but that initial parting was hard. It was the last
day of camp and we had to say goodbye and
like I didn't know if I was ever going to
see him again, and like he was like getting on
the van and I was just like sobbing. I had
never felt like that strong of an emotion before. It
was like truly love. He really was my first love
(30:42):
in a very non sexual way, even though I did
see his dick and bubble more times than I can count,
same same, even though we only went out for like
I don't know or something. Yeah, you probably saw more
after you weren't dating than you did when you were
(31:04):
way more. Alex helped all of us become more ourselves,
but we were united in something else too. We each
struggled to reach him in the final year of his life.
At first, it didn't feel strange. Alex would vanish sometimes
(31:25):
needing space for himself, and he was also just always
on the move. I know, I couldn't keep track. There
was an allusiveness to him, and there was definitely a
side of him that I just would never see, you know,
or didn't know about. But part of why we all
stayed friends with him over the years, even as he disappeared,
is because we understood and we could be the same
(31:48):
way ourselves too. For many of us, communication with him
was almost always touch and go, hot and cold on
both ends. We would then become basic on the phone,
and then again mounts nothing. Still, as this elusiveness stretched
on much longer than usual, we all began to worry
and got scared. But he didn't respond for like ten
(32:11):
months and again. The whole time. You know your life
is happening. You know, life goes on, but it was
always like in the back of my head, like where
the fuck is he? Some of us wondered if we'd
done something to upset him. I really thought if I
maybe did something. Maybe I don't know what I did.
I had the same worry. It's probably the main reason why,
(32:33):
besides my business, I didn't try as hard to track
him down as I now wish I had. On some level,
I think I was scared I had unknowingly hurt or
offended him. So, like show She, I decided to respect
his boundary. And because Team Thor Daniels wasn't a thing
at the time, none of us realized it was something
the other people in his life were experiencing too, so
(32:57):
we tried to reassure ourselves that this was just Alex
being Alex. He pretty bluntly said to me, like, I know,
like I drop off the radar every once in a while,
but I want you to know that, like, it's nothing personal.
It's kind of just me. I have a lot of
stuff going on and it's never about you. In hindsight,
it's clear that was true in his last year too.
He wasn't mad at us. He was spending that year
(33:19):
preparing for his final disappearance. Some of the things he did,
whether it was disappearing from social media from time to
time or disappearing from his friendships from time to time
were things that he needed to do leading up to
his final disappearance and death for himself, and I think
(33:39):
he also did it for others too. I think it
was like practice in a way. The Internet kept him
connected to us over the years as he followed his whims,
but it also allowed him to keep his relationships separate
enough that none of us really knew one another, and
it allowed him to log off and disappear from our
(33:59):
lives when he sided he was going to end his own.
His elusiveness and the role the Internet played in it
makes me wonder if maybe Alice understood him in a
way that none of the rest of us did, because
she could be so elusive too, because she, like Alex,
was a digital creature prone to disappearing. Shortly after Alex died,
(34:20):
I told Lexi about the Strange files. At the end
of my email. I made a joke about trying to
find Alice for a podcast, and it was Lexie who
first said, you really should. Instead of playing along with
my tossed off comment, Lexi simply told me honestly to
go for it, and I knew that if she said it,
she meant it. I think that, like there's a reason
(34:43):
why he left you those files, and like, I don't
know if I can exactly like pinpoint what it is,
but I mean, it would be fucking cool if we
could find out. It's definitely the kind of thing that
like with me and my personality that like I just
can't let go of. And maybe that was part of
it too. Maybe he knew it would like torture you forever,
(35:05):
So maybe he knew that, like you would start a
podcast about it, and was like hoping this would happen.
After Alex's death, the six of us in the Thor
Daniels group talked all the time, at first helping each
other through it and then becoming friends in our own right,
(35:26):
meeting you and Lexi and the Thorde Daniels group do
a bath, James, you know, and all of Alex's friends.
I mean, I consider you all my best friends. I
would not have interacted with you guys, how do you
not died? And that's just that's just so crazy to
think about. Most often we talked in an ongoing Instagram
(35:50):
d M chat, but we also sometimes got together over
zoom to mark occasions like Alex's birthday or the anniversary
of his death. But there's one conversation I want to
highlight one that gave me what I needed to pursue
my search for Alice, who, in so many ways was
beginning to feel like she was hovering over my conversations
with them if we were some kind of newly formed
(36:10):
Scooby Doo gang. She was the mystery before us, one
I couldn't solve on my own, so I brought it
to the group. I'm curious if any of you, like,
did Alex ever talk to any of you about Alice.
He mentioned it to me. I think probably while the
conversations he was having with her were happening, and I,
(36:33):
I mean, I didn't dismiss it, but I was skeptical.
We were on this sense side and there was this
girl and we would go to Tiny Chedd and she
she Sunday because she would do like signature Britney things,
so they kind of gave her credibility. And she never
(36:54):
claimed to be She would say that she wasn't Brittany
as you said, like there's lot of impersonators and stuff,
but it did not sound to me like someone doing
an impersonation, like even Biggs. It was really spot on.
I'm not thinking it was Brittany, but it really did
sound like if you ever mentioned it, I would have like,
(37:16):
like I never just like right not believed everything or
anything that Alex said. But I don't know. I feel
like the like period of time in which he was
chatting or talking to her was like very short. I
feel like it happened in that moment in time, and
like he talked to me about it like maybe a
couple of times, and I like sort of dismissed it,
and then we never really talked about it much further
(37:39):
because like, for whatever reason, you're just like Yoka, it's
Britney's weirds, right. But while most of them were skeptical
about Alice, while Alex was alive, they began to have
the same inkling of intrigue that I had when I
found the files in my email. At first, it's like
a small seed of an idea. Play sit and soil,
(38:00):
water it a little, and just let it grow. Admitting
my curiosity to the thor Daniel's crew, a collection of
people who were all changed by Alex and his free spiritedness,
was like planning my Alice seed in the richest soil.
As we talked, I could feel my questions multiplying. After
a while, the thrill of believing in something outlandish was
(38:23):
like reconnecting with Alex's essence. As do I put it, fantasy.
You know, it's like why not believe? Talking to them
about Alice was like going back down the rabbit hole.
I could stop overthinking it and just give in in
the same way I could when Alex was around. None
of us knew if there was anything to Alice, but
(38:43):
we all agreed that it would be more fun to
give in than to try and stop our curiosities from
taking root. That was just sort of like part of
the fun of being his friend. As his friend, you
sort of like submit to that fantasy with him, and
he just sort of go along for the ride. Skepticism
maybe one of my strengths, but I can also wield
(39:04):
it against myself like a weapon, one that dampens any
curiosity that seems too colorful or absurd. One of the
greatest gifts Alex gave me was teaching me how to
stop questioning myself so much, to stop overthinking and hiding
to bark like no one was listening. So I'm going
(39:25):
for it. I'm submitting to the fantasy. If I ever
said her name, Yeah, would. I'm gonna look for Alice
(39:52):
next time. On Unread, people are very passionate over this.
That was one thing I foiled. There are a lot
of posts or someone just asks who has banana Alice,
and it's pretty hilarious to see. There are so many
passionate responses saying it's not Brittany, this was from so
(40:14):
long ago. It's just someone pretending who cares Leave it alone.
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