Five years after he was shot in the head by his best friend, PAUL ROUSSEAU writes a heartbreaking letter to the man who still haunts him

One month before he was due to graduate St Thomas University, Minnesota, Paul Rousseau was accidentally shot in the head by his roommate and best friend, Mark.

Miraculously, he survived the shooting, and waited - bleeding profusely and delirious - for two hours while Mark lied to college authorities and refused entreaties to call an ambulance, fearing the consequences to his own future.

The pair have not spoken since, even though Paul refused to press charges.

But in his new book Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir, he has written a heartbreaking letter to Mark for the first time, trying to make sense not just of what happened that night, but how a friendship that had meant so much to him could be so irrevocably shattered in one brief moment.

'Dear Mark,

'What the hell. That was weird, man,' he begins, going on to imagine what Mark might have been doing in his room that would cause the weapon to discharge accidentally - ripping through two walls before striking Paul's skull, leaving him permanently disabled.

'You were what? Preening? Alone in your room? Proving something? 

'Look how cool I am, so big and strong, breaking the rules. Gotta wipe down my piece, tuck it into bed. You never needed any of that. You were funny and loved and charming, and you drew everybody in.'

Over the course of their three-year friendship, Mark had acquired a total of five guns - legally, and with permits. Paul didn't mind. The pair were inseparable. 'We are best friends,' he writes. 'I love him.'

But that night in April 2017 was to change the course of both their lives.

'They'd been chatting and laughing on the couch, TV on, when Mark headed back to his room - Paul thought for a nap.

A few moments later, Mark bent down to pick something up off the floor - 'a scrap of paper, maybe, a dead battery, or guitar pick, I don't know. I don't hear it. I don't see it. But something comes at me through the wall.'

He describes the feeling as being 'tackled into a pool of cough syrup. Soaked in thick liquid while wearing layers of yarn'.

As he struggled to stand, Mark came rushing out of his room. 'I didn't know it was loaded!' he said, standing there, his limp hand holding the pistol.

Panicking, he played for time, telling Paul to shower, then laying him down in bed before disappearing - Paul later discovered he'd gone to stash his firearms in his car: the handgun he had just discharged, a small-caliber rifle, a second handgun, and an AR-15, 'along with enough ammo to outfit a small militia'.

Over the next two hours - as Paul drifted in and out of consciousness - the college's public safety officer arrived to check why the fire alarm was going off. The bullet had tripped it when it ripped through the wall.

Mark lied, saying he was smoking, then, under further questioning, that he'd burned something in the oven. When she spotted blood on the floor, he said it was the result of a 'really bad bloody nose'.

Later, Paul woke up and heard voices from the other room - Mark had summoned their friends Keith and Rachel, who were begging Mark to call an ambulance.

'I will, I will,' said Mark. 'Just wait. Give me another second…'

Paul now knows it took two hours for Mark to summon the paramedics. That night was the last time they spoke - though they have seen each other once since then, over a video call as he fought an insurance claim.

'I started hyperventilating, looking around all crazy, sitting on my hands, rocking back and forth, making little movements that a trapped animal might make. All that, and you weren't even physically in the room. Afterward, my lawyer, pissed off on my behalf, told the judge that I needed a fair warning next time you'd be around. A trigger warning, if you will.'

But he says he still sees his old friend in his dreams all the time.

'The dreams are nearly identical… whenever we get close this grainy diseased aura fills up the space around us, the air can sense the tension, the horror of what happened, though it's never explicitly mentioned. I don't think the universe wants us within spitting distance ever again. In these scenarios we would quite possibly bring about the apocalypse.'

He adds: 'I know you're sorry. We're past apologies. I forgave you the moment it happened.'

Since the shooting, Paul's days have been filled with painful surgeries, a drawn-out, 'dehumanizing' personal injury claim, a lot of therapy, and generally coming to terms with life with a traumatic brain injury.

Mark graduated college, after being briefly expelled, despite the school's zero tolerance campus weapons ban.

'It's hard not to speculate,' writes Paul. 'Possibly, Mark appealed the expulsion and won. He has money. He could have hired a lawyer to contest the University's decision. That happens all the time.'

And to Mark he writes: 'If every good memory I had of us was a lake, April 7 dumped into it a vat of toxic waste, training the whole body of water. Maybe a few things can be filtered out, but that lake is beyond redemption. Are you happy I didn't die?' 

Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir by Paul Rousseau is published by HarperCollins