Derek's Blog

It has been over a year since I lost someone very special to me. Lately I have found myself thinking about it a lot. I would like to tell you about the person who inspired my song “Don’t Let it Die This Way.”

It pretty much started five years ago back when I was a senior in High School. I had come to a point in my teenage life that I felt very alone and isolated. I felt like I had no one to really talk to about the things that troubled me from deep inside. Things I couldn’t even bring myself to talk about with my best friends. Like many depressed and lonely teenagers, I turned to the internet. Something that is very risky, but at the time, it was a risk I was more than willing to make. MySpace was just becoming popular and I had just created my own account. At the time I was fresh out of the closet, but not fully. I had come out at home and to my friends. I used MySpace as a tool to help me find others my age that were like myself, gay.

After searching I came across someone who lived in the UK who shared a similar love for music and interests. I approached him first. I introduced myself online. His name was Michael (Mikey). We got along very well and I looked forward to coming to school every morning to read the new message he had sent. In the beginning we’d often talk about the stuff that interested us. I would talk about music and he’d talk about his love for football (soccer). After a few months we decided to start emailing each other. By that point we had started sharing more and more personal parts of our lives. He turned into the one person I could talk to about the things I couldn’t even talk about with my own friends.

He helped me during a rough time when I decided to leave home because of personal, family issues. He gave me support and very good advice. It was because of him that I began to feel loved again and I could feel life coming back to me.

Then as the summer of 2006 approached Mikey came down with an illness and had to go to the hospital. It turned out that he had heart problems. It caused him to lose the one thing he loved most, football. His doctor said he should not play anymore until they were able to fix what was wrong. It was at that point that I really began writing music with a passion. I would write song after song for him, to help brighten his day. I felt helpless in so many ways being so far away, with an ocean dividing us from each other. I would have given anything to have actually been there for him when his heart was breaking.

His heart break was causing me heart break and I started falling again because I relied on him so much. It was  then that I made a big mistake. I started seeing someone from home here in Eau Claire. I needed that feeling of being loved and to have the touch of love. Now I had broken Mikey’s heart as well. The relationship I had here didn’t last long. It was over pretty quickly, but I felt so horrible for what I had done to Mikey. It was from that hurt and pain that the song “Cannot Stay” was born. It was my apology to Mikey.

Cannot Stay:

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It took time, but I was able to mend the relationship. We started talking again like we always had. Talking about the things in our lives. Then he went to the hospital again for surgery. He came out of it fine.

Time went on and I grew a little older. I moved into my very first house/apartment with a few other college students. At this point I felt like communication was lacking once again. Then the guy from Eau Claire came into my life again, but only for a moment. The situation had made me so mad. I felt like I was being used by him and I didn’t want to hurt Mikey again so I ended things. In my anger from being used I wrote “I’ve Seen Better Days“.

Spring came and I moved out of the house/apartment and moved into an actuall full apartment with my friend Nicole. I even adopted two kittens and named them Nala and Gizmo.

Mikey and I continued to talk and we were even talking about living together one day when he would come to America for school. Everything seemed good util summer came. Mikey went in for what was supposed to be the last heart surgery. I remember the last email I sent, in fact I still have it. It was sent on my 20th birthday :

…anyways, i really hope you have a great day, like i said in my last email.  do you have to work today?  i hope not, that would be a bummer.

i love you so very much

from mikey xxxxxxxxxxxoooooooooooooooooooooxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

After that I never got another email from him ever again.

Time passed and I really began to worry. It was not like him to not respond for such a long period of time. I began to write. It was the early form of “Don’t Let it Die This Way” that I called “In the Dark” that was about my fears. “In the Dark” turned out to be the first half of “Dont’ Let it Die This Way.”

Then one day I came home from work and there was the email with the horrible news. I had lost my best friend, he was gone. At that moment I fell into such a horrible mourning and I couldn’t help myself. I cried for so long. I finally called my friend Nicole who had moved out. She came over and comforted me. Time took a horrible toll, but I started to come out of it.

The last half of the song “Don’t Let it Die This Way” was written after learning his fate. I felt like I was dealing with denial in the face of truth. I didn’t want him to be gone, but he was. Making it the most personal song I have ever written and it’s a song that means so much to me.

This is the song “Don’t Let it Die This Way”

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Thank you for reading and listening.