This is all I can think of doing. I just got off the phone from my best friend telling me our close friend has just killed herself this morning.
How do you say that? It just sounds so strange. It reverberates in so many ways and my obsessive-compulsive brain kicks in to re-inforce any of those horrible shadow-impulses that make you afraid of thinking things that are so horrible, so diametrically-opposed to your very thoughts that it is fear that confirms those thoughts' existance.
I am as if walking in a haze. The haze is momentarily comforting in its obscuring of clarity, like cotton-wool wrapping the razor-jaws of life/death reality- the kind that smashes your head open if you don't believe it enough...
Every few moments I fall, weightfully through the same thought-processes.
1.Initial, intellectual appropriate sadness at the actual facts. The response is limited and contained. There is no emotional elaboration. It is what it is.
Simple.
Finite.
2.Next, my emotional brain kicks in and a cluttered conglomeration of elements fly at my face. The rest is digestion of this.
3.I feel guilt. So much guilt. She tried to contact me so recently to spend time with her, but I didn't find the time. Momentarily, I think of a friend to call and inform and the thought occurs that "will I be the first to tell her the news?" and the my whole self kicks in and screams at me "how dare you?!!!" and I realise that the gossip angle means nothing to me and it's just some sick obsessive compulsive impulse kicking in, but even in intellectual comprehension, another wave hits me. There's no intellectualising away emotional gut-reflexes and the more you try, the more they'll be re-inforced with a diamond-titanium head.
4. Anger. At a system which didn't understand her, like a machine which processes a constant procession of souls, like petals in an unrelenting cogworks.
At the futility of so much talent and fire-cracker-bright personality disposed of.
Ceased like the after-echo of a final exclaimation on a vast, empty, blinding stage.
5.Disbelief. When I heard the news, the words, "committed suicide" sounded apt, following other behaviour, but as soon as I heard it in my memory's infantile initial perception, it sounded real, but my mind instantly thought- "it's not final. We can resucitate her now we know." It sounds like such a mutated dream, we can undo it in the supposedly re-assuring light of day. But, after 3 minutes the brain dies -and the rest soon after that. How can regret, panic, remorse, guilt, compassion change the cold-concrete-block reality of it all?
Answer: it can't.
6.Understanding. It feels right. So many details suggest it was so well-considered by her...and so understandable. If she was ninety and in real physical pain, her death would be considered sad, but a just relief to so much pain. Why is this so different? There must be some kind of mercy in the universe. She didn't deserve what she suffered.
7.Panic. If this is the right reality, I fear all that is to come. Waves of realisation hit again and again, passing momentarily into hazy amnesia, bearing only an intense, untagged body of emotion until comprehension again forms the recognisable figure of reality and my soul reels again under the shock.
8.Sadness. Already I miss her and I think of the realisation I had that she was like a sister, at least in background.
She was so talented, so eloquent, beautiful, kind, generous. Her need for 100% perfection was hanging always over her head, yet while she was closer than most to that 100, every point less made it impossible for her to continue as a self-decided blemish upon the possibility of 100%.
Why- for fuck's sake? What did it matter how well she elocuted, whom she impressed, what scores she attained, her CV, her impressing of the right people. Now she's a corpse, who the fuck cares how perfectly she spoke?!!!
It's this fucked-up WASPY mentality of impressing all, whilst staying neatly dressed and emotionally threadless.
WHY?
I must say, my response is partly selfish, here- but how do you separate emotions, thoughts, impulses to neat, organised categories?
I am personally spooked because my friend was the person who most resembles myself in personality and background. She was the only person I know of who went to my school I was still in contact with. She was affected so similarly, but it manifested differently as far as cold, psychological labels go, but it came out much the same; desperate to please all, yet really trusting few or none, highly achieving potential, yet so constantly defeating the outcome by protecting herself from the sheer velocity of feeling with the bitterness of toxins. A beer, a pen and paper are the most immediate and undemanding allies. We hide in the dark room of being us while outside in the searing examination-light of day, those we try to please bang loudly and accusingly on the front-doors of expectations.
Why? For fuck's sake, why?
So many times in sadness, I have pondered upon the thought of "I feel so unloved and misunderstood- if this bus hit me now, what meaning would they derive from my objects I was carrying? Would everyone who had wronged me feel put in their places? Would all of my potential be recognised post-mortem? Would my name make it to lights regardless in the wake?
Wake- the backwash of a life lived and ended which has left those associated with the need to anhibriate, commiserate, whatever.
This is the first friend of mine who has died. this is the first person of my age close to me, the first suicide, the first senseless, passionate, unresolved death in my life. My cousin died last year. I saw the damage, I felt sad, but I had never felt anything in common, apart from last name, but this is new and I still don't know how it feels to me. It's all too immediate and abstract to organise into neat, understandable piles of emotion.
I just don't know.
I just don't know.
All I have left are salty tears, bitter words and guilt at any satisfaction apt expression may serve.
I wish I could just hug her.
It's such a full-stop.
