A Glance Back At What, At One Point, Was A Newly Grieving Me.
In my senior year of my undergraduate career, one of my best friends killed herself and it is the most traumatizing event to date that I have ever experienced. Coming up on the first anniversary of her death, I have chosen to look back at a piece of writing I’d created just after her death and then abandoned. In rereading what I wrote, I — being in a much better emotional state- have a hard time not judging myself for having been such an emotional wreck. A large part of me believes that I may have been acting dramatic while there is a smaller, but much louder, part of me that is constantly reminding me of that overhwhelming panic and pain all at once in small bursts at inconvenient times like at the grocery, or while working on a client, or driving in pouring rain when I need to be able to see. After the anniversary has come and gone, there’ll be a time to clear my head and write about the feelings one year later. In the mean time, this is what a recently bereaved, intensely grieving, 21 year old me had to say (please be kind to her)…
“There is a light that only I see, that only I feel around me. It is a blinding light, a reminder of my own constructed reality. My vision is dichotomized between the two lights of my world. Through one, there is the apparent truth, the “real” world; through the other is my own person truth, my inherent reality. I cannot hope for you to see through this lens because it, by nature, would not be true to you. Blindness is coming to the surface, though I’m not sure through which eye it will arise. I ask that you not try to visualize my truth, but to dissect it so that among the pieces, you may find your truth. My apparent truth is this: I am a woman on the verge of graduating college, I am 21, and I am alive. My inherent truth is this: I am a woman on the verge of graduating college, I am 21, and the world as I am coming to see it, is not real.
On January 9, 2015, my best friend died. It was not unexpected, it was not sudden- if anything it was postponed- and it was of an illness not perceived as real. She killed herself. I think she killed herself, you see, because she became blind of her apparent reality. A blinding caused by the asphyxiation of this reality by her own inherent reality. An inherent reality that no matter how thoroughly I, and my group of friends, could not understand because we’d attempted, without fruition, to resuscitate the sight of her apparent reality.
I miss her every day. There is this sense of despair the moment I wake up where I am immediately inclined to go back to sleep and never wake up again because the apparent reality just stops feeling worth living. There is little to alleviate the frustration with the lack of control in my life. There is little patience within me to gather the strength to go through each day without feeling like I should just run in front of a moving vehicle going so fast you can hardly see it. I imagine that I’ll just disappear on impact; I’ll just appear in a world that makes sense. There is heavy grievance in my heart every day that grows with every day I live without her in my life. The people I love don’t seem to satisfy the need for company. Inaudible voices are understood somewhere within my core, reminding me of this solitude. They express the truth that I will never shake this feeling, that there is no hope for recovery. I am often scared, that I will run down this road, urging myself never to return. One day, this will make sense- I tell myself. I am lying.
It is selfish, the thoughts that consume my mind. There is a family I belong to that would be disserviced should I act on my own desires to be gone. Friends who will mourn the loss, not as zealously as with Jana, but mourning nonetheless.
However, I understand that I will never be loved nearly as much as she had been loved. I will never be as pleasant or understanding as she. She was an idol of perfection to which I can, without a second thought, never match. She was an fallen angel; one who had never denied her jump from the heavens to let her demons consume her. She fought, she tried. I never had to try, I am a competitor fighting against my own demons just to prove I could. I am always burying them, it never ends. The deeper that are hidden, the harder they strive to survive and resurface constantly threatening to reveal themselves to the people I had convinced effortlessly that they don’t exist.
There is something to be said about the process of falling in love and that is that it is always under the least convenient circumstances. Oftentimes, it goes undetected until you’ve gone past the point of any conceivable return. There is the epiphanic moment where the object with which you’ve fallen in love shines in its perceived glory. That moment comes with an all consuming energy; fear, excitement, hesitance, anxiety, euphoria coalesce into an electric sensation that runs over every space of your existence.
She’s managed to take with her the one thing I’ve consistently worked on for the past three years. There is no peace of mind for me. Every single day has proven to be an emotional struggle. She is in my sleep, and in my day dreams. I hear her laugh louder than I can hear myself crying. I still don’t understand why she didn’t love me enough. I don’t understand what more I could have done. I miss her so much. She took my happiness with her. I am looking for happiness in the people around me but it;s not the same. She has taken everything that I cannot replace with her. There are no people with whom I can share my pain or my anger. I just wish I could understand, and some days I wish I could just forget about her altogether.”