Death of a Twenty Year Old

This is likely the only piece of non-fiction I will ever produce.

How do I feel?

          This morning, I woke up before the sun did and drove down a narrow backroad I never wished to familiarize myself with before this day. It coaxed me through the most rural expansions of my state, taught me how to mind the mountains and the hills and the cornfields until I was hours from home and an even more daunting distance from everyone I knew. I still don’t know where I am at this moment. The fibers of my being demand constant certainty, but god, the unfamiliar view is spectacular. 

         The road widened, as roads always do. And in these nameless towns it was miraculous, though I don’t believe in miracles, to see bowing conifers and overgrown gardens and half-constructed buildings and intersections where I had to wait on a green light to appear although there was no one on the opposite side of the road to stop me from moving forward. And it was miraculous to see all these people, people with hard faces going to work and people standing guard as they wait to drop their kids off at school and people sitting outside on tiny black chairs sipping coffee with a forgotten acquaintance and not one of them realizing how incredible it is that despite what is happening inside me, the world outside continues on. This is how the universe chooses to operate. It gives itself a choice and us, none. The individual realities inside these people as they mix with the great big world reality and collide with my own lead me to think life is designed to mimic the aftermath of a funeral, all the time. 

         This morning, I spent most of the drive crying and facing, for the first time, that my best friend was dead, dissipated, never going to sit beside me in the car and laugh at the stupid cashier we just pranked again, reliving his body attached to ventilators and monitors and monsters that beeped and he no longer possessing the ability to understand what he destroyed or hear the last sound of my own voice over the awful, unnecessary screaming of everyone else. I never got to say goodbye because I never discovered how to. My life had to continue on after his was abandoned. Neat and simple. And I think I cry now, months later, because I had to be silently strong the whole time and well after; to not reveal any emotion outside my own skin because I had to bear everyone else’s. I say I did all this for everyone else, to be their rock to grasp in a rapid of chaos and be the single hand to hold their trembling dozens…but maybe I did it for myself, so I could be unfeeling and thoughtless like he was in those final seconds before fatality became reality. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, contemplation did. Messy. Now, I wish I had had a hand to hold that wasn’t meant for someone else to squeeze. Everyone around me screamed and sobbed; I was quiet. Until I met an unfamiliar road.

         This morning, I finally cried. I finally screamed. I finally put my hands into the fire and didn’t move them until they were too charred for another to ever hold. 

         My best friend is rotting somewhere beneath the goddamn dirt on this earth that I decide to walk on and drive across every day. And it’s nearly impossible, nearly, to live with the fact that I can make the decision to continue fighting and he cannot anymore. Maybe that decision was never his or maybe he never wanted it. Some days, the decision I give myself to fight is all I need and some days, it is the parasite devouring me from the inside out. I guess that’s the human condition. Disturbed. They say it takes an ocean not to fall apart; perhaps I am the whole sea and he was just a drop, all this time. When I cried this morning, I don’t think it was for him. I think it was for me. And I think that’s okay.

-	I wasn’t familiarizing myself with a new road, I was familiarizing myself with a new reality. Now I am finding my way back home.