Metanoia by Alexandra Gilwit

Last summer my roommate went missing. George. We had talked on a Friday, but I didn’t notice that he was missing until that following Monday when he didn’t show up for work.

His boss sounded worried when he called me. George wasn’t the type to not show up for work. I dropped the phone and ran to his room but hesitated in front of the door. George always left his door open when he was gone, but this time the door was shut. He had to be home. I knocked but no one answered. An image of his dead body rotting under his sheets flashed through my mind as I reached for the handle.

His room was as it usually was, disheveled but cozy. A dirty plate lay on his bed with a brown crust of whatever he ate before he left.

When a person you care about goes missing you learn a lot about survival. In order to cope with the fear, your reasoning abilities fracture into two parts. One portion of your brain, the larger section, believes the person is okay and stranded somewhere, and will soon return with a crazy story to tell everyone. The other part of your brain knows that that person is dead. As the days go by, this smaller part of your brain slowly takes over. Nobody talks about this side of our brains during the ordeal. We either ignore it or fight it, believing that in some way, by admitting it, it will make it true, when the truth is it was always true. And then, when the worst is confirmed, we all scream out at once that we secretly knew all along, feeling simultaneously ashamed and cogent.

Seeing the plate on George’s bed calmed my nerves. He needed to come back to clean that plate, no dead person just leaves a dirty plate, they clean it up, they plan ahead.

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves. — Emil Cioran

George often forgot to knock when he’d come into my room. He was always looking down at his phone. He’d laugh because I would usually scream. “You should be used to me barging in by now.” He would then take my desk chair and clear off whatever I wore the night before and sit down, still looking at his phone the whole time. “What up, dude?” George loved the word “dude,” it was the only proper noun he ever used, other than my name, “Alexandra.” George called me “Alexandra” because I told him once that I wished more people would call me that but that it was too much of a commitment because it is such a long name. George is the only person that has ever consistently called me “Alexandra.”

On Tuesday I found the number of his ex-girlfriend. A few months before, George had introduced us, forcing our numbers into each other’s phone and promising that we would be best friends before the week was up.

Her name was Michelle, and we were still not best friends. The only reason I even remembered her name was because George obsessively talked about her, obviously not over the break up.

Michelle’s larger portion of her brain was in full working order, just as mine was. “We shouldn’t contact his family yet. I bet he just decided to go upstate to that party he was talking about last week. His phone probably died.” George’s phone always died when he left the house, probably because he spent most of his free time on it, scrolling through Tinder profiles or Instagram pictures, anything to keep his thoughts from sinking below the surface.

“But George wouldn’t just miss work.” I replied.

“Yeah, that’s weird. Let’s wait a day and then contact his sister.”

I started to worry that he wasn’t going to come back on Wednesday, when I was at the IKEA in Redhook.

Sometimes when George came into my room he would just sit quietly next to me as I drew. I didn’t mind because I knew that he was lonely and so was I. The truth is, I needed George, I needed him there playing on his phone in silence, every so often interrupting my drawing to show me a cute picture of a bunny or puppy he found on Instagram. George was always the most consistent thing in my life.

Wednesday was the day I talked to George’s sister. Her voice sounded strong but sad.

Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown. — Emil Cioran.

Right about then life felt a lot like the IKEA that I was stuck in, large and empty.

When George was home he was in my room, when he wasn’t home he kept his door open, creating the impression that he was always around. He only closed his door on the days when I wasn’t around or when I couldn’t hang out. Those days he would slip deep into his self and reemerge a little further away.

The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity…Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore. — Emil Cioran

George’s sister asked me to go up to Woodstock, where George was last seen, to put up MISSING fliers. I drove up with Michelle on Thursday. I had a stack of the fliers, about 50 copies, a roll of tape I found in one of the boxes that I never unpacked when I moved in two years before, and a pair of scissors that I stole from my parents’ house years ago because I was too lazy to buy my own.

George and I used to watch bad movies until late into the night and talk over them. No one else could stand to watch with us. One night I dozed off on the couch and George leaned over and whispered, “Alexandra,” and I woke up but I didn’t open my eyes because I knew that George wanted to kiss me.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away. — Emil Cioran

Earlier that night, I told George about my neighbor, Merrick, who killed himself when he was 18. “He was like a brother to me, we grew up together.”

George listened and let me lay on his lap as he pet my hair.

“It destroyed his family. His mom used to stumble over to our house wasted and cry on our floor. He told me he wanted to kill himself before he did it, but I didn’t take him seriously enough.”

“I’m sorry, Alexandra.”

I have always hated when people say “I’m sorry” to misfortune, like somehow you owned this tragedy and it was irreversibly a part of your own being. Merrick killing himself had nothing to do with me, but for a long time I had convinced myself that I could have stopped it.

“Just promise me that you’ll never kill yourself.” I got up from his lap and looked at him when I said this, to show how serious I was. I was on the verge of tears and he could hear it in my voice.

At the time I didn’t know why I did that, George hadn’t seemed sad to me back then. Our days together up until that night were light and playful. I know now that what I said was pure instinct, that people can reveal a lot about themselves without ever speaking a word, and that we are all intuitive enough to see it, although we might not be conscious of it.

“I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.” This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection. — Emil Cioran

Woodstock was beautiful, a place that opposed the void I felt surging through my insides. We passed out fliers with George’s face, and watched his eyes follow us through the windows of most of the town’s storefronts. By midday, we couldn’t bring ourselves to hand out another flier. That is when I knew for sure that George was dead, although I was still unable to say it out loud.

Michelle and I left the crosswalk and walked down to a creek to watch a family play in the water. The last peaceful day of a confusing summer.

I remember feeling the sun warm my skin, and watching it dance across the water over the family. I remember believing for a moment that I was the one that was dead all along, and this was my heaven and my salvation, a place that could offer me respite from the tiring and perennial pain of reality. I remember not wanting to get up from the boulder I was sitting on, knowing that as soon as I left this spot, time would reveal something horrible.

Emil Cioran got Alzheimer’s in the last years of his life. He went from a man that knew his mind, to a man lost inside himself, often forgetting words or places, and wandering around in vacant confusion.

I am told that George was never the same after college, when he took acid almost every day until he finally dropped out of school. The drug had made him less present in the world.

There were many times when George and I would be talking and he would just stop and look over my shoulder for a second and then come back and say, “Wait, what were we talking about?” It never seemed like he was completely invested in reality, like there was something much better hiding just beyond the façade of this dimension.

It was during this time that he took to conspiracy theories, watching and reading everything he could get his hands on. He believed that every mass killing in the world was a government cover up, that every official in a position of power was responsible for death. He couldn’t believe that the world was just chaotic, that people were just killed for no reason, that tragedy could just be tragedy.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory. — Emil Cioran

The month before he went missing we started to get into fights. I’d say something like, “You have to be more aware of other people’s feelings.”

And he would reply, “I don’t know why I hang out with you, dude, you always make me feel terrible.” And then he would walk out of my room and hover outside my door for a few minutes, and then come back in and say, “I just need you to make me feel better!”

I started to get annoyed that he never seemed to be able to be alone, as he sucked away my own alone time whenever he was around.

On the Friday before he went missing George was sad. His sadness clung to his body the way wet clothes cling to skin. He came to me for guidance and I remember feeling tired.

Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego…Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world? — Emil Cioran

On those rare occasions when George wouldn’t come to me and I’d have to go to his room, he would appear from behind his door with vacant eyes, as if the invisible string tying his body to his soul had loosened and was floating somewhere, far away.

When a person that you care about goes missing, your mind stagnates between states of tragedy and stasis. You never quite allow yourself to give in to either state, and thus live in a sort of in-between, where the now is blurred and distorted, and nothing truly feels present.

During the week that George went missing I felt so many things. I even laughed a lot. I never cried. I felt scared. I felt okay. Sometimes I didn’t even think about George at all, just about the mindless goings-on of my day-to-day life. It was as if George was never gone as long as he was missing, a sort of perverse version of Schrodinger’s cat.

By Thursday night, I started to wonder if George would ever be found, if I would always imagine him walking through cornfields somewhere upstate, confused and lost, but alive. Michelle had consulted a psychic, and the psychic told her that he had received some sort of head trauma and was lost.

Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe? — Emil Cioran

On Friday, first thing in the morning, a trucker who had seen our flier called George’s sister to tell her that he had dropped George off 5 miles from the Wassaic train station on Sunday.

Back then, on that couch, I had wanted to kiss George, but I couldn’t. I was trapped in the real world where kissing your roommate was a bad idea. I remember those early days when George didn’t visit me, wondering where he was, who he was with. I remember missing him, wishing he would come by, just so that I had somebody there, breathing next to me, keeping me here.

George’s sister came over and we put his laundry into a trash bag so that she could give his scent to the search dogs. George’s family asked me if I wanted to go upstate with them to continue the search but I didn’t. It felt like an intrusion. I just wanted to cower in my room and pretend that George was going to come back.

George’s sister found his body that afternoon, about two miles in from where he was dropped off by the truck driver.

From what I am told, the road that George walked down was a lonely place, once a main route out of town, now just another abandoned stream of cement with quiet farmlands on the left and an endless border of trees and bushes to the right.

A month later a stranger at a bar would tell me about a haunted cabin he lived in in Tennessee, how the place felt heavy and lonely, and how it scared away every friend that came to visit. He would tell me about the time he felt a strange impulse to look up at the trees and saw hanging bodies, looked away, then looked back and they were gone. Afterward, I would become convinced that the road that the truck driver dropped George off on was similarly haunted, that there was a history of death, remembered only by the landscape. I would assure myself that the power of human misery was so much that it could leave an indefinite mark on an otherwise innocent stretch of land, that it could suck a person into it, sort of like a spider web.

Cioran once admited that the source of his world view was severe insomnia. “I lost my sleep and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison. I went out of the house at about midnight or later and roamed through the alleys. And there were only a few lunatics and me, all alone in the entire city, in which absolute silence reigned.”

I’ve spent a lot of time obsessing over the place where George was found. I imagine that the road was cursed with silence, letting the weight of infinity rest along its tired cement. I picture him walking down it with a dead phone and no one to talk to. Looking for answers in the trees, and interpreting their silence as a sign. Right before he died, he stopped and listened and could hear nothing other than the movement of a bird in a bush nearby and the sound of his own footsteps on dry leaves baking in the heat. I have never visited that road but in my mind the entire landscape looks like a distant island surrounded by a black void, in a style reminiscent of Rembrandt.

Sometimes I think about that road so much that I have to force myself to stop, something similar to kicking myself awake, so that I don’t get sucked into it, like George had.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions. — Emil Cioran

George spent every dime he ever made. He was incapable of saving money or planning ahead. I kind of loved this about him, although he wasn’t always mentally present, he was still able to live life like there was only the present.

His sister told me that she knew he was dead before Michelle and I had contacted her. She told me that she found his body because when she was walking down that road she felt a strange impulse to look into the bushes about two miles in. When she pulled back the brush a dozen birds flew up from the canopy, sensing the tension that was about to be released.

“Where do you get those superior airs of yours?” “I’ve managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?” — Emil Cioran

By the state of his decay, the coroner was able to mark the time of death at Sunday morning, at about 8 a.m. George hung himself with his belt on the branch of a tree, two miles from where the truck driver had dropped him off. It had taken George two miles worth of being alone to decide to end his life.

Many months later his sister told me that she could tell he had made a last minute decision because he was still wearing his backpack. She told me that if he had thought it out he would’ve taken off his bag. I agreed because I thought about the dirty plate he had left on his bed.

I asked her why her parents insisted on seeing his body before the ambulance took him to the morgue and she told me that they needed to. “If we hadn’t seen his body we couldn’t ever have been completely sure that he was dead. We would’ve kept looking for him.” George’s family was more practical than George.

“The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.” — Emil Cioran

In the book, A Short History of Decay, Cioran talks about suicide in a chapter called, “The Rope.” He writes, “For you were born to hang yourself, like all those who disdain an answer to their doubts or an escape to their despair.” When I first read that, I experienced a strange glimpse of understanding about George’s decision. I understood then what is hard to write about now. George was always going to hang himself. It was his destiny, or history, or however you want to call it. George was always going to die, every single day. He just chose Sunday morning.

On Friday night, George’s sister called me to tell me the news. Her voice was still strong but it broke when she said, “They think it was suicide.” My memory of that phone call is silent, like the intensity of the moment completely sucked out the sound of my screaming and crying. I had thought that finding him would come as a relief, but the truth is that a large part of me wanted George to just always be missing. Only then could I go on lying to myself that he was still alive somewhere, lost but safe. Only then could I still expect to see his face every time someone burst through my bedroom door.

When a person you care about goes missing, all you want to do is ramble on about that person. Say everything you liked and didn’t like about them, just to keep them whole, there, breathing next to you.

The hardest parts of this story are the layers and layers of things I can’t tell you, the stuff that keeps me up at night. Of all the other things I can’t tell anyone, but want to.

Alexandra is writer and filmmaker based out of Brooklyn. She has been published in several publications including Typehouse Literary Magazine, Everyday Genius, Slink Chunk Press, and The Writing Disorder. You can see what she’s working on by visiting her website agilwit.com.