In Memorium

This summer, one of my best friends killed himself. It has broken me like nothing else, ever. I've tried to write about this many times, but I can't do it. I can't bring myself to face the truth of it, and translate that truth into words.

...

This summer, one of my closest friends killed himself. He destroyed all his ID, left his identity behind, traveled to Arizona, and hung himself in a hotel room. He was dead for a month in the morgue before they even determined his name.

...

I thought I felt him tap me on the shoulder the other day. My lost friend, my missing friend, my dead friend. My friend who still haunts me from the wasteland of technology; his number in my phone, his Facebook page, his last email. Goddamn flotsam, everywhere I turn another ghost. Nothing I can erase, but I only have to see it out of the corner of my eye, if I turn fast enough.

...

Fuck. Fuck it.

This is how I feel most days, when I let myself think too much. I try to fill my days with work, TV, books, the internet; the endless distraction of static and noise.

But.

It's always there, a shadow dragging at my heels, a black dog howling in the night.

...

He's a bastard. He chose this way out. There is nothing glorious about suicide. I used to think there was.

I once spent hours on MSN reading his increasingly incoherent messages, waiting for the pills to work, waiting for him to die, hating myself because I hoped he would die. And now the guilt has me. A stinking sea-bird draped around my neck.

I am so tired of being angry all the time. I am tired of feeling guilty. It may be my fault, or it may not. I wasn't there at the end, that's what matters. Oh, I've been told not to feel like this, as if I have a choice. I've been told that it doesn't matter whether I was there or not, but it does. I abandoned a friend – it's what I always do, when it gets too hard – I left him behind, and I kept walking and walking, and the sound of his steps became fainter and fainter, until there was nothing behind me but the shadow dragging at my heels, and the dogs howling.

...

It was early this summer when my friend killed himself. He had been suicidal for many years, although I suspect that I was the only one among us who knew the true extent of his unhappiness. He knew I understood; I've felt the slavering jaws of the black dogs around my neck enough times to recognize the teeth marks. He told me about his pain, the details of which I will never share. I know which secrets to keep.

He was not always a good person. In fact, he spent many years being a terrible person, a selfish person. He spent the seven years I knew him trying to become a good person, although he failed many times at this. When you are out of practice, it is so much harder to be good. I know this. Virtue is a habit.

He suffered through insufferable pain. He thought he was being punished with a disease that should have killed him, but kept him alive long enough to hurt him, seemingly without end. I wasn't there for most of the painful months, but I was there after. He called me his 'guardian angel'. What a terrible burden, what a thing to say.

...

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp'd no more --
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
...

The saddest words ever written. He wasn't much for poetry. Tennyson probably wouldn't mean much to him. I don't think I really understood those lines – 'like a guilty thing I creep' – until now.
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When does it end? Because I feel it every day, everywhere I go, I feel the loss and the guilt, and I am so fucking angry. Time, they say. It takes time. If only I had world enough, and time, but I don't. My time is finite, and I could easily let the minutes and days and years slide by, feeling this way.
...

I always won at Trivial Pursuit, regardless of what he said or chose to believe.

...

Words, words, words. Break, break, break.

...

When my friend killed himself he took me with him. Or perhaps just a part of me, but something vital. Is it selfish to say that he took suicide away from me as well? It used to be such a comfort, the idea that I could one day crawl into the bath with a razor blade and a bottle of pills, kill the pain when it finally hurt enough. Strange comfort, I suppose.

I am so selfish. I thought I could kill myself without consequences. I am so fucking selfish, even to write these words. 'He took my death away from me'. So what? You don't get to choose your own death.

Not once did I think about what my death would do to others. Now I know, and I'm angry that such a terrible option has been taken away from me?

I am so selfish, even to write these words. This is not about me. This is about.

...

My friend, who killed himself. How is not important, why is not important, when is not important. He simply did, and that is all.

His shadow finally dragged him down, and the dogs were upon him, snapping their awful jaws, and that is all.

I am selfish, and he was selfish, and that is all.

And like a guilty thing I creep, and that is it, and this is all.