The letter I had prepared for this week had a different tone than this one. Prior, on Monday, I got stuck on a spiral of self deprecation, shame, guilt and pity. I felt heavy, and as if I deserved bad things. I meant to tackle it and find some sort of light in between, or simply exorcism everything out, as it normally goes here.
On Wednesday after I got home from work, I received the news that an artist I love was found dead in his home. There are countless speculations, and I’m sure closure will be the last thing any fan or even loved one might get. We know there was no note left. He was only 25 years old.
In one way or another, we turn to art for comfort. There's not a single doubt in me you too have turned to music, or literature, or painting, or dance, or something else. It's our way to connect to each other, to feel and become something greater than we are, then we were meant to be or feel.
The timing of his passing coincidentally fell with the ending of a 5, 6 years old friendship which I’ve referenced before here, and the heavy spiral. It was cruel, my fault, who left without saying anything thinking it’d hurt less, that it was obvious to both of us. I was cruel, not in the way people can be brutally honest, but in how I can’t help to try and make even the truth pretty, a flowery type of suffering. I texted her a long letter after his death, as I did once in the past, and in it I said I didn’t expect a reply. I don’t know if I meant that. I apologized, I thanked her. That’s the way it all ended, with silence. With me becoming nothing if not a poetic asshole, because I don’t know how else to be, because I can’t say things straight without wanting to make them lovelier.
All together, this combination feels like the death of my teenagehood, among many other things. I’ll turn 22 soon so I have been an adult for a while, yet not fully. It’s the whole deal of a child in their mother’s shoes. Half of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing. The other half, I’m convinced I might know. Will I ever know? His death makes me question everything.
It might be strange to some of you, how I can mourn the loss of someone that I never met. How one can grieve the loss of someone so singular in your life, to whose life you always stood at a distance. Astro were with me when I lost a friend and started to feel true joy again, hope. Astro were with me when I got the grades of my final high school exams, and realised it was all over. I cried, and I smiled, and I lost myself and found myself through them and with them. They are sweet, and silly, and a place I could be myself in. I met some of the best people in my life because of them, to whom I still talk to almost every day. I own them a lot.
His sudden departure is like an on and off switch. I’ll be alright, until I remember, and tears rush to my eyes every time. Words like burial, memorial, funeral, resting place, all feel strange and wrong. I think about his family, his friends, they were so many. I enter the nightmare every day, even if only for a short while. The irony of two ends meeting, of losing two great things in my life at the same time, has me feeling like this is the end of comfort, of safety and security. Of good things in this world, this world that is anything but fair and just and right.
And part of me feels as if I deserve it. It is not my intention, to make his death about how I feel, but I can’t quiet the voice that tells me this was my fate. I wonder if I don’t bring bad fortune to things, to people. I’m a sad person, I say it a lot. I wish I wasn’t this way. If someone was to hold my shoulders, look me in the eye and say i isn’t my fault, I think I’d cry, or sob, whatever happens first. I taint everything I touch with sadness, no matter how much love I try to give to make up for it. How can I be a good person when I’ve hurt so much, so many? When the sadness is always there?
What’s goodness? My friends tell me I’m kind, and funny, and that I don’t annoy them. I wonder when will I believe them. I think of how he always was kind, how his voice was always so gentle. One time, for a role in a series, he got classes to make his voice stronger, heavier, “manlier”, because his voice was so soft it’d often break and go up and down when he spoke. He loved unabashedly, while being a showy brat here and there. If he laughed too hard, he’d snort. Maybe that’s what goodness is all about. Is goodness always about sacrifice? Don’t good people take the fall for others? Don’t they hurt for you? Don’t they do anything and everything to not hurt anymore?
I think about how the new trainee at the office seemed shy, even rude, until she brought a chocolate for all of us on Friday, and talked to us about her life later that afternoon. How wrong are we about what we know? The nuance, the mutual existence of good and bad and everything in between can be ruthless. The anger, sadness, regret, resentment, jealousy, fear, confusion and happiness, they all exist, in this space between us, within us, and the strangest thing is that they don’t kill each other, not as I thought they would.
Sometimes I think of how to some I’ll always be a heartless bastard, and to others a kind person. I think about him, how one day if the universe allows, I’ll outgrow him, reach an age he’ll never meet. There is so much left unsaid, what am I supposed to fill this space with?
For a while all things will remind me of you — the collective you, you who is gone from this world and you who is gone because of me. I’ll let them. Time will feel as if it stops, and runs so much faster altogether. All songs will be about you, and all books will tell your, our stories.
I think his death was a forced goodbye to a lot of things I was reluctant to fully let go. My measliness, my fear, my need for somebody else to save me. Everything that has happened this week has made me shameless. I fear so much, I live so little. My mind naturally bends to the future, curves its spine and neck to peek, not fully standing here. How can it not when I fear the what ifs, when at the beginning of any corner there could be hurt standing with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other? I take a lot of deep breaths lately. If it is due to anxiety or something else entirely, I don’t know, but it's a way to hold time still, to let love sit in the palm of my hand. Before i jump, I breath. Before I answer, I breath. After I fear, I breath.
We go on loving. Loving other people, loving being ourselves, loving the things we always loved, loving what’s yet to come. It is very treacherous, the way things fall and twist and pull. I’ll think about the people I’ve hurt and the people I’ve loved, the vienn diagram where both coexist. For a good while there will be an urge to cry. When I’m alone, it’s a lot harder to bear, not just with mourning but with grieving it all. If nothing ever ended, would we still love what we love the way we do? Would we still be so afraid of taking risks, of saying the wrong thing, of hurting others?
I don’t know what tomorrow promises, but I’d like to try and stop guessing. I’ll dig the grave here and there, and second-guess almost everything, because that is the way my body thinks I’ll be safe. I’ll try not to run away at any DANGER sign. I want to try and stop doubting love so much. With all this death, I can feel change coming within my bones. I’m scared, as usual. I look up at the sky a lot more often. I got bangs for the first time and they look slightly awful. I make my bed each day only to tear it apart at night. Maybe this is what life and goodness are all about.
If you’ve made it this far, I’d like to tell you just a couple of extra things. Hug those you love a bit tighter than you need today, and tomorrow, and the day after. Send the text, or say the words, finish it with an ‘I love you’. Take time, your time, take distance if needed.
I love you. Thank you for sticking around.
this was beautiful, thank you for sharing it <33333