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."