When you meet someone, you don't really consider what might happen or who they'll be to you in twenty years, if you'll remember them on sight or ever know they continue to exist, living their lives.
There's a danger in this.
When we see people on the street, in a classroom, at a protest, we don't know who they are. And then you talk. And then you do know, at least partially. You know if you would ever want to talk to them again, and you may be either thrilled or disappointed when you realize you'll see them everyday at the same time or never again.
But when you see someone every day, you're talking to them, helping them and doing work with them, and somehow you're forming that bond between two people, that golden string that ties everyone together. It's a tangled thread, twisted around strands from other peoples' lives, forming knots to fix the breaks that may occur when someone leaves you.
When that girl you've been sharing classes with for three years commits suicide, that thread that bound you to her--the one that carries all of your happy and sad memories, the painful and the bright and the funny and the strange--frays, breaks, separates, cut by the scissors of the Fates, scissors weilded by a girl your own age, who has more power than anyone else in that moment.
And suddenly, you regret ever becoming friends. You regret all the times you teased each other in chemistry for being the worst procrastinators in the history of that school. You regret hearing stories of each others' lives, the tear-jerking and laughter-inducing. You regret getting help on your calculus, regret letting her say anything when analyzing a book, regret arguing over gay rights and health care and politics with her.
But most of all, you regret the things you don't know. You regret only ever reading a few of her poems, especially because they're shockingly pretty. You regret not knowing enough about her life at home, though you've heard some of the horror stories. You regret not knowing... you regret not knowing that she was suicidal to begin with.
You start to wish you'd known, so you could have done something, anything, to help. You feel guilty, guilty as hell even though it's not in any way your fault. You should have known. You should have seen something was wrong. But how could you have? When she was so determined to hide it from you, how could you have known?
There's no way.
One day, she's alive and well, laughing and arguing in your first class of the day. The next she's gone, and you figure she's sick again, as always, and will come back to class in a week with a sheepish smile and a 'Hey, everyone. What'd I miss?"
You don't find out until the morning after what everyone else knew the night before. Someone tells you as soon as you step out of your car, because you're far too cheerful to be aware of the situation, and the shock sets in, bone deep and cold and terrifying, paralyzing. It takes you ten minutes to realize you should be crying, five minutes to remember you're supposed to be breathing, three minutes to frame a coherent question without stuttering.
And when you walk into that classroom, see her empty seat, everything finally sets in, and you're more than surprised to realize that, more than anything else, you're angrier than you have ever been in your entire life.
How dare she put everyone through this, again, not two months after the loss of another classmate? How dare she leave this classroom without her input on the novel we all read and loved on Monday? What the hell drove her to this?
You spend an entire hour crying loudly, falling apart in front of classmates, and you don't even give a damn. Let them see, let them feel the same way you do. They do, you know they do, even if they can't show it. But you feel guilty again, because some are trying to help you, moving around the classroom to sit next to you, lend you the tissue box, hold your hand between theirs: Nobody should have to help you, because it should be your job to comfort, your shoulder to lean on. You're the strong one, the empathetic one, the compassionate one. You're not the one to fall apart when others are in need of help. This makes you angrier.
The school hires grief counselors for the second time in as many months. They're worse than the first round. They say the entire class is diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. They say you're going through shock, and that's the reason you've gone numb after four hours of knowing, two classes of seeing her empty seat staring you in the face, seeing the tear tracks down your classmates' faces.
The counselor they send into your first class the next day fumbles, tells everyone, "You may have known Marissa or Dillon..." You think? She sat right behind me, you bitch. Do your research before you try to help us next time. And stop using the white board, it'll stain and Qutob hates it.
You're angry, still, by the third day, but it's less fiery, less of a burning feeling in your chest. You feel hollow instead, as if the cavity between the bones of your rib cage is suddenly filled with a heavy nothingness, as if you're full of emptiness. You close your eyes, but your hands reach out to touch others, to grab onto their sleeves and hips and fingers, holding them close to you though your head urges you to let them go now: to forget, to leave them before they leave you, to cut the strings on purpose instead of having them snap surprisingly to leave the threads hanging, broken and frayed, when you least expect it.
Despite it all, you grow closer to others, use them to pull yourself out of the murky waters of depression, at least by a few inches.
And then, you write. Or you try. And fail. And quit.
The words stop flowing, the world stops spinning, you stop caring. Screw it all, you say. Important deadlines and papers? Not important. Classwork? Who cares. Making new friends? Not a chance.
You wallow and hope nobody else notices. They don't: they are wading through the swamp of life just as slowly as you are, trapped under dirty water and bloody banks with you. No one can help, because we are all submerged and there is no one on shore with a vine waiting to pull us out.
Until, finally, the image in your mind grows to be too much, the last few seconds of her life on repeat in your dreams, both waking and sleeping, even a month later. As you open your computer again, you open your words, and they flow onto the page willingly, only to slow two months later as you near the end, that crucial scene.
But, on a deadline, you finish, turn it in, post it.
Three days later, the floodgates open again. You can feel, you can cry, you can blame.
And you know that the first conversation you ever had with her has affected your life forever. When you first saw her, you had no idea things would end like this, or progress in such a way. But they have, and you are, utterly, impossibly, inexorably, changed.
The strings weave back together in a pattern not nearly as fine as before. It's obvious they've been cut and hastily repaired. But they go on, as your life must, because you refuse to follow the same path. You don't weild the scissors of the Fates, you refuse to control the strands of others' lives. No. You will go on, writing and remembering, until you draw in your last rattling breath, and your strings all snap at once, allowing you to fall, at long last, finally, toward the nest of thread spread underneath to catch you, the tangled threads of those you have lost serving their final purpose.
~ hyacinth
Music Rec: "Set Fire to the Third Bar" by Snow Patrol
Written: March 15, 2010;
Date of Change: December 1, 2009
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