The Debt One Owes The Living

He did it. He left a post on his Facebook wall that proclaimed, "So long, sinners!" and then he did it. He took his own life. The text that brought me the news asked, "Did you know him?" I winced at the incorrect use of the past tense. In my own passive-aggressive way of correction I responded with, "I do, yes, " only to be told that the simple past had not been used in error. As a tense, the simple past is rather ironically named. Jejunely, if you will. It gives you a sense that whatever happened unfolded as empirically and simplistically as it could, the details are pared away and stuffed in the crevices that lie between the simple past and the present perfect.

"He did it." That was my opening sentence, wasn't it? What did it tell you? What did you see?

"He took his own life"- what did you see then? An image of a boy, in his early twenties, but not quite...alive.

It's a vile tense.

This is what I did that afternoon when I found out. I refused to deal with it. I cleaned my room and focussed on packing things away for my big move. It was the perfect task, all my faculties were busy being structuralist so there was no room to breathe and breakdown. My mouth tasted of lead.

I then began to wonder about him, as I lay in bed. He and I had much in common: both raised away from our ethnic homes, both "Born this Way" and occasionally wondering why, both in competitive programmes...whenever we spoke we spoke profoundly. He had an echinulate wit that both chided one and made one laugh at the situation and at oneself. He was good for me. He felt like home because he reminded me of it. We were similar, but he was better. I don't just say this for the sake of propriety. What use is propriety now? Propriety belongs to the living, to the dead one only owes truth, and this is it: he was better, ballsier, sassier, more alive, less concerned...more alive.

My comparison of us is an ugly exercise that reeks of self-concern. Yes, we came from similar places and had tasted of similar experiences, but the truth is that I know nothing about what brought him to the precipice from which he decided to fly into the deep.

Weeping, tearing at my hair and proclaiming the loss of my best friend would be propriety and for the living. To the dead one owes only truth, and this is what it is: I know the face you wore behind that mask of sass, style and wit. I didn't see your weariness but I felt it. I did not know how weary you were. I did not know.

I am benumbed and my sentences are choppy. He is gone and it hasn't completely registered yet. Perhaps when the snow will fall on this Spitsbergen, my soul shall swoon too. Just like Joyce's confused, benumbed leading man. Maybe then I shall see you, fleshed out in fire, and "the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Bitch, Or 'Anaerobic Respiration: A Tragedy'

At first, I used to do it for fun. Because I could. Because I could afford the $20 and up lexical range. And those little quips just had the tiniest of stings, just piquant enough to spice up the conversational palate of my Spitsbergen in a slight shock of sophistication. As I said, it was fun. Recreational. Not occupational. You can't be a Bitch for a living; that would be the bitch of living.

It was never meant to be an occupational sort of thing. I didn't believe that accessing the darkness would be enabling it.

It all started, like all intersections with the carnivalesque and the grotesque do, at a prom. The romance was ill-advised but well-timed. For one, it confirmed that I wouldn't be going to the prom alone. There was no way I could not attend; I was on the executive board of the organisation who formulated and set up the event. I will admit right now that, aside from the purely clerical e-mail shuffle, I wasn't too involved with the planning process. Boycotting the event because of I was destitute, unloved of both graduate programmes and my fellow man, would be tacky. In my mind, I had already decided that I would channel the delightful Miss Woodhouse and be a gracious host. Maybe, once the guests found their niches, I would even allow myself a dance. But then, the ill-advised-well-timed romance happened. I say well-timed because I was still waiting on a string, still indulging in a rueful ritual of calling up the programmes I hadn't heard anything from and hanging up quickly when the pert and professional voices answered, "XXXX University! Biomedical Sciences!" The ritual attained new baleful lows as I would then, to the melancholy tunes of Stephen Sondheim's ballads, fix myself a cup of coffee, text my incredibly patient Dr. Transposon with something inane and depressing in its chipper emoticon'd tonality, answer my e-mail, reschedule with my therapist yet again, justify not going to economics and devise new modes of penance at Vespers in the gym.

Amidst all of these came a voice that teasingly called me handsome. This voice took the form of one who was born for the summer in terms of carriage, speech and the sun that shone in that voice when it sang of taking it "one day at a time". It was...amusing, I suppose. I amended make more time to text my new paramour, I even started going to econ. so that I could experience that prohibited thrill of surreptitious in-class texting.

Soon we were sipping coffee.

Soon we were going to the prom together.

Soon we were not texting.

Soon we were going to the prom together. As friends.

As we showed up to the prom, with my newly acquired friend taking elaborate pains to ignore me to the point of inviting an alternate date who, like an understudy, showed up in white as well, I realised the malaise that had begun to crust upon my crust. It cracked like something alive that had begun rotting for a living. This was bullshit. Propriety dictated that I pine and refuse all dances and amusement. The only problem? I didn't want to pine, I'd had a fucking trimester of pining! And, let me tell you, it may be all achingly beautiful and chiffon-swathed in Great Literature but in real life, it fucking sucks! Your dorm room is not a set of apartments in James's freaking Gardencourt where one can love, but without hope! Or masochistically enjoy the parallelism between one's fate and coffee cup with a hairline crack.

Dressed, ironically, in white, a coronet upon my head and, inexplicably, glitter on my chest. I began to reclaim...something by dancing with everyone and teasingly flirting with them too. The attention was wonderful!  I also took a vituperative moment to be verbally vicious to the understudy date. It turned out that he fit the role that my newly acquired friend had wanted to cast to the T. Evidently, no-one wants Ke$ha to play Ophelia.

As the evening began to wind down, and the slow dances began, I began to feel lamentable again. My friend and his date were inseparable, and I had no one to hold/be held by to the strains of a softly strummed guitar. As I entertained uncharitable thoughts, I searched around the room and grabbed a statuesque yet lonely being. We, without words, struck up a shallow bargain wherein we put up the "I can't believe I found you!" charade and I saved face.

Actually, I didn't. Janice knew exactly what was going on but she didn't say anything. I think, at some level, she understood what I was doing and why I was doing it, unpleasant as it was. Her silence was the equivalent of her holding my hair back as I voided my semi-digested frustrations. My newly acquired friend stiffly informed me that my behaviour was "unbecoming" and that I was "vain and shallow". There was nothing to justify, really. It had all worked out really well: I successfully managed to conceal "the face that [I] hid behind academic success" but my friend's eyes had been opened and none to soon! My vanity allows me to appreciate that, in a movie, the likes of me have been played by Rachel McAdams, Sarah Michelle Gellar and  Reese Witherspoon.

Hamlet was concerned about how I took the end of that affair and a subsequent affair too. And not just romances, but everything. I would say exactly what I was thinking and gone was the delicious piquancy of those comments, these were downright pungent. The kinds that cause hushed silences and eyes to water. I supplied my daily vitamins (a charming bottle with the legend 'Stress Formula' emblazoned across it) with acrimonious little tablets of cynicism.

It has been like that ever since. For Instant Bitch: wake him up. For Bitch-on-Wheels: just add coffee. For Raging Bitch: make it decaf!

I haven't been particularly nice to be around for the past few months, and the whispers had started to reach my ears. "Vain and shallow" is a popular one. "Eating disorder/ Borderline anorexic" scared me because I actually took it as a compliment at first. "Troubled" troubled me too, and "messed up" offended me greatly! But it was "Bitch" that seemed to...fit. It was in that one creaturely word that I saw myself as a yeast cell forced into a aphotic, apoxic place impelled to respire anaerobically. Self-destructively ooze out lactic acid and alcohol so as to stay alive, stay afloat.

I can write this now because I am in an infinitely better place and am slowly regaining my sanity and happiness, and also  because my therapist, Dick Diver V, upon the elucidation of my anaerobic respiration theory, trenchantly asked me this, "Did you really need the venom to survive or do you BELIEVE you do?"

"Have I been so vile all for nothing?"

Until the next time,
GossipGuy!