20210410

When I was twenty-six I found out the guy who sat behind me in senior year of high school died. I had known him for almost nine years when I heard the news, and I could not believe it no matter how many times our friends posted about it.

We met on that first day, and I did not think much of him—he seemed proud and strong and willing to take someone in a fight. He was not the kind of person I thought to go out of my way for, not someone I would actively associate with. But in the humdrum of senior year, through the math classes and the tedium, I found in him a friend.

There were four of us sitting in the front corner by the door of the classroom—we eventually got to calling each other brother. That kind of acknowledgement was a big deal for someone like me, a queer kid struggling with labeling things. I liked being called brother, and I found comfort in calling them brothers.

It felt to me like we were practically invincible in that corner of the classroom. We could banter audibly in the middle of a lesson, and our teachers would leave us alone because the four of us could keep up with the class activities anyway. When our homeroom adviser tried to change the seating arrangement and break us up, bad things would happen until we were restored to our little corner.

The four of us did not actually have much in common with each other, and outside of the classroom we only sometimes hung out. It seems strange to me now that our relationships with each other relied a lot on mutual antagonism—the sort full of sarcasm and faux disdain for the very things that mattered to us. That was our normal. Brothers would mess with each other, fully aware of the sort of love and affection that goes into bickering.

At some point by the middle of the school year the four of us found out that we had common interest in a series called Community—a situational comedy show about a bunch of misfit community college students learning anything but Spanish in their study group. It turns out we could relate to the characters—the absurd situations they find themselves in, the constant bantering, even some personality traits.

We would tease each other about how similar we were to some characters; part of our banter would be calling each other the names of the characters we were supposedly mimicking in those situations. By the time we actually got into college, though, I stopped keeping up with the show; I no longer had free time. We went to the same university, but we never had courses in common, and we ran in different circles, similar to how things were in high school. Whenever we would cross paths, though, we would chat a little, and he would still call me brother. He would say, I miss you, we should hang out sometime.

The last memory I have of us from senior year was at his house; he invited people over to celebrate his birthday. I remember feeling out of place because most of his friends were from popular groups; I might have been the only out queer kid there. I floated around his house, trying to small-talk my way through the night, when something I said seemed to disturb one of the basketball players nearby who started to interrogate me about me being queer.

It felt like I was being cornered, and I was feeling uncomfortable, and he must have been nearby because I remember him coming in close and telling the basketball player to go away. As soon as the basketball player was out of earshot he turned to me and asked if I was okay—and I was in the moment that he asked. He told me to enjoy myself and to talk to him if ever I needed anything that night. I still remember the expression of his face when he walked away from me after that—like a frown that transitioned into a smile with a wink.

That was the safest I ever felt at a party full of straight people. It felt like my friend was willing to fight for me, even defend my honor against the judgment of his other friends. He was a good guy—an ally—who liked me for me and genuinely wanted me there as a friend to celebrate his birthday among his other friends. I was never able to tell him how much that moment meant to me—but I think he knew. Whenever we would chat, we would pick up where we left off—as if nothing between us had changed even though our situations had.

I also remember the moment when my classmate in a certification course mentioned his death; it felt like the room had darkened. I had a sinking feeling in my gut, and I tricked myself into not thinking about it until his best friend announced his death in one of her posts. I lost that month to repression until I saw an online feature on Community, and so I started streaming it, from the top.

I really hoped the show would last six seasons and a movie so that I could pretend my friend was still alive for as long as I was watching. Grief was still new to me, and when my grandfather died the summer before senior year of high school, I was indoctrinated into celebrating life instead of mourning death—so it was with Community; I would feel bad about the sad moments but look forward to the happy ones. It was a comedy—celebration was inevitable. I did not anticipate that the finale would affect me so much—I was on the verge of tears for what felt like a week. Every little success, every stumbling block felt like it would push me over the edge. Pain, sorrow, joy—they all felt the same somehow.

I think I was trying to celebrate his life by reminding myself of him and the happiness of our friendship—by watching Community. What I did not anticipate was the feeling of emptiness, of loss, when I reached the finale. I wanted to be selfish—I still want to be selfish because his death is still affecting me. It feels selfish to think of his death—or his life—in relation to me, to think that his death is my loss. It feels unfair to him—to his memory. Selfish and unfair—yet I make his death about me, and he can no longer say anything to me.

His death is not about me—I have to be fair—but his death is still affecting me. I can be selfish about what I remember. I can be selfish about how I feel. His death is not about me, but the effect of his life on mine is. I can dwell on that.

20201125

I was eleven when I first felt the urge to die. I think it was in the middle of math class when I was suddenly overwhelmed by a deep grief I did not yet have the words to describe. The word help was foremost in my mind, and I could not pinpoint the exact circumstance I needed help with, much less a reasonable way to resolve it. So I took the pen on my desk, unscrewed the plastic casing, popped the tip, and drank as much of the ink as I could in a fevered frenzy.

It was a solid few seconds of silence before my seatmate yelled to the entire class that I had ink all over me—I suppose they did not have the right words either—and our teacher, with their stern voice, sent me to the comfort room to wash up. The two-minute walk to the comfort room was anything but comfortable—lonely, confusing, and ultimately felt like an hour of walking in some semblance of shame as I kept my head down and dragged my feet past more doors, more classrooms, more people.

The comfort room was dim and empty. I huddled over the sink farthest from the door and tapped water to first wash my hands. The ink was stubborn, and no amount of scrubbing could remove the bluish pigment from the ridges of my skin. I looked into the mirror at my face, and what I had done was not too obvious—the only ink on my face was a dribble of dark blue on my bottom lip. I tried smiling, but my crooked teeth were stained; I stuck my tongue out at myself and saw the swathe of violet on my tongue. I remember the faint metallic taste; I would remember it again at the age of nineteen when, for lab class, I precipitated ferricyanide on filter paper and admired the brilliant blue of it.

I took out my handkerchief in a futile attempt at cleaning my desk as soon as I got back to the classroom. I picked up the remains of the ballpen and stared at the raised letters I had only then noticed—non-toxic. I avoided making eye contact with anyone—my classmates kept throwing me questions before our teacher shushed them and told me to report to our prefect. I think I remember hearing a softening in their voice, until it was on the verge of cracking.

I got up and unceremoniously disposed of what was left of the weapon. Our prefect was right outside, ready to escort me to the discipline office, but I remember on our way being intercepted by our guidance counselor. We made a turn toward the guidance office instead, and I was instructed to take a seat inside while the adults had some words outside for a moment.

It felt like a long moment on the couch. I twiddled my thumbs and glanced at the motivational posters and locked cabinets, the faint scent of an unidentifiable flower diluting the taste of washed out metal still lingering in my mouth. The confusion I had been carrying since the comfort room had given way to some sort of remorse, maybe regret, maybe a heavy type of relief that I did not die a pathetic death.

I do not remember much of that month. I must have been under stress or something. I do remember not wanting to talk about the incident, which seemed to suit everyone else fine, as nobody ever brought it up again. I did notice that some adults were a little more careful with their words around me for some undisclosed reason.

Maybe I got used to not using words toward the end of that year, and normal going into the next year was, for me, just not speaking all that much. I remember leaning into writing more, measuring and playing with the words for thoughts I was thinking. I had multiple notebooks, each dedicated to a different facet of my life, as if imposing categories on my thoughts was in itself imbibing order—making sense of experiences. Each notebook had a different format from the others—one was for drawing imaginary characters, another for taking down notes for journalism ideas, and yet another one was to be passed between me and close friends for correspondence.

A pattern emerged over the years: I would feel most vulnerable and lose words around the months of April and November. My journals are sparse with entries—some journals I even discontinued around these months. I could not muster the willpower to find the words anymore when the search itself takes so much out of me. These days I have been stuttering, and drawing blanks because even seemingly small things could feel overwhelming.

I used to recover by some external force—usually a person—but these days have been particularly challenging because beyond losing words, I feel as though I am losing connection with people who had previously mattered to me. Over the years of losing words, it feels like I have accrued a debt of gratitude for the people who have helped me find them again. The longer I lived, the more indebted I become to staying alive for these people.

Then, as if acting on another mandate, they stop helping me find the words. Sometimes, if I am so lucky to hear the end of it, I am left with just jumbles of sounds echoing what they used to mean to me. I am left with a debt I cannot repay because I can no longer return words to someone who has left me alone with them. No matter how much I try to string words together to emulate their words for me, I can only hear them in an echo chamber of my own shoddy design.

Maybe all that remains of me are words other people have found for me. Maybe I continue to survive despite losing words because of the feeling that the words still are not enough to pay the debt forward. For now my tongue atrophies from disuse, and I forget what my own voice sounds like.

20190327

As a teenager, I had difficulty picturing where I would be or what I would be doing past the age of twenty-four. It seemed, at the time, that I could live only up to that age and then just disappear. I think maybe I lived through my early twenties in a state of constant dread. Of what, precisely? I was never so sure.

The dread used to enshroud my sense of time, keeping me from planning for the future, and preventing me from enjoying the present by forcing reruns of greyscale memories. It used to consume me so completely that on particularly bad days, I could not even speak of the day after. I remember feeling as though I did not have a future, that living past twenty-four would be impossible.

My experience of time itself was so distorted that the moments of dread would pass by so agonizingly slowly such that my notion of yesterday had felt, at some point, like weeks ago. Whenever I found myself idle, the dread would weigh on me and prevent me from moving on with my thoughts. I remember considering about a thousand different ways to die, some of them self-induced, and I also remember feeling so helpless that nothing would happen.

Thinking about death and dying is still a quirk I seem to have, but back then I just could not shake it. Every other sensory stimulus was a potential cause of death, if I only harnessed them, but I rarely did. Maybe I was suicidal, but I remember only ever having attempted thrice, and survived. Most of the time it was a passive battle against continuing to live; I would seek out situations in which I would find myself vulnerable.

The idea was simple: the dread and morbid thoughts only happened when I was thinking, so I would actively avoid thinking, sometimes doing precisely what I would not have done had I thought about it properly. If I could just not think, then maybe I could not dread.

But twenty-four was a strange age. I was weaned off of the antidepressants I had been taking for at least two years prior, and I had to learn to live with the sense of dread without the chemical crutch. Maybe it was never about the antidepressants; maybe it was about how I thought about dying. Twenty-four was an age I was anticipating for many reasons, but while I was, I could not see a way out of it.

Twenty-four was a black hole, and I am not sure how I got through it. I remember making plans for when I would finally die; I remember telling people how much I love them; I remember enjoying myself despite the sense of impending doom hanging just above the crown of my head. I remember almost melting down over the the stupidest of things: getting upset over quality of service; leaking frustration over lost objects; or even just experiencing the beauty of the world.

Twenty-four was a state of precarious thinking. Think too little, and I would endanger myself; think too much, and I would paralyze myself with dread. It was also a state of precarious feeling. Feel too bad, and I would want things to end; feel too good, and I would want to end on a high note.

Maybe it was the navigating precariously between seemingly opposing states that I survived that year. Or maybe it was because those seemingly opposing states prevented me from dying.

I remember that in those moments I was on the verge of melting down, I could not help the morbid thoughts. Thoughts of the various ways I could actively kill myself were thwarted by the loss of motivation to do anything but dwell on the negative thoughts. But it stopped there: I could remember the content of the thoughts, and nominally what I felt with those thoughts, but there was nothing to push me into despair. It was dread, and it was powerful, but it was not powerful enough to push me to act on suicidal thoughts.

On the other hand there were also moments that I would find myself elated. Maybe I always found meaning in the arts; maybe I would be reading too much into my own idea of beauty. But in those moments, I would be devastated by beauty, and the thoughts of dying would come: the various ways in which I could just die in that moment, feeling the most at-peace with the world for a long time. If there were a line between experiencing bliss and dying of euphoria, I could have walked it in those moments.

Without any other factors to kill me in those moments, the dread would pull me back slowly from the line, and I would be devastated by how I had not, in that moment of splendor, died. The lines of despair and euphoria have a narrow space between them that, for the most part of twenty-four, I was navigating. Maybe I survived because as soon as I approached either line, I would trip a shut-down mechanism: losing motivation to take my own life, dread slapping me in the face whenever I felt too good.

Maybe it was a good thing that each day of twenty-four was strange; maybe on a normal day I would have enough motivation and planning to kill myself. I remember planning for my death, identifying important people in my life and drafting letters for them to find should I have died in my sleep. I remember working, not because I was motivated by life, but because I was excited at the prospect of dying. Something about knowing there is a deadline really put things into perspective for me. I just did not anticipate that the deadline was flexible.

The dread is still around though. It still takes some getting used to, but there is a sweet spot between fearing death and being excited for it that I think I can use to my advantage. Maybe not fear, nor excitement for death: maybe I have been so fixated on death that I forget about living. Maybe there is a way to live with the fact of death—neither to fear nor be excited by it, but to respect it.

Right now, though, I want neither to die nor live as though I were dying. I get these moments more often these days: moments in which I can just be.

20190129

When it comes to my emotional state, my mind has come to rationalize the semblance of a pattern of it. There are certain things I have come to expect: the general cheeriness, the intermittent despair, and maybe an outburst or two in a regular day. The pattern in the long-term includes a meltdown every few months. At this point, I may be a few months overdue for the next one.

Lately, the smallest things can turn my mood—a really good bowl of noodles to lift my spirits, or a really flat cuppa tea to dampen what would have otherwise been a fairly pleasant afternoon. And then, the irritability: for the most part, I can take pause and consider things from a more rational stance, but I still wonder about my temperance. If my composure can be affected by the most unintentional of triggers, then how can I expect myself to be in the mood for anything productive?

What makes me feel worse is when people who matter notice, and then they bring it up, and we have to talk about it. Because friends talk about pain and hurt and ruin. My intention is not to put on a strong face for them so much as to remind them that there are still good things, and I would much rather talk about the good things than dwell on the negatives, because chances are the negatives lead to a spiral of negativity—a positive feedback loop of heavy feelings that inhibit joy.

(I have developed a few new habits. Whenever someone says something to me that makes me feel moral outrage, I incite them to take action against my life. It is a marginal improvement upon the previous impulse to take action against my own life. I now fumble with the tigers’ eyes I have been given, taking comfort in the vibrations going into my ears and onto my skin. The under-the-breath profanities come and go as they please.)

Sometimes the image of skin-piercing projectiles comes to mind. There is a threshold for how deep a bullet can go before the trauma surgeon has to cut from the other side of the entry wound. Sometimes it feels like that: triggers and bullets through my emotional epidermis and lodged somewhere in the joyous meat behind a punctured feel-bone. The catch is that I am my own trauma surgeon, and the only way to fish the bullet out is to cut a way through.

Maybe I actually hate metaphors, or maybe this one works because I imagine that bullets hurt and negative thoughts hurt, and maybe there is an emotional body, but maybe not analogous to the physical one. I imagine this body to be constituted of positive energy. Maybe in form it is not like the physical body, but maybe in characteristics it can be. Bones grow back stronger than they were originally; maybe positive emotions grow back stronger than they were before because of negativity.

This is a forced metaphor. I cannot attest to its veracity outside hypothetical scenarios based on my own experience. I did not subject this metaphor to any academic rigor from any disciplines or fields of study. Maybe it is my own metaphor, applicable only to me. Maybe I am masochistic, seeking justification for the necessity of negativity.

The thing is though, I am ambivalent to pain, metaphorical or otherwise. Pain comes regardless of how much I avoid it, and I have stopped avoiding pain for a while now. The challenge for me becomes how I cope with it, and I am a mess of a person. My tendency is that there is a certain threshold of negativity in which I can no longer hold back. Small inconveniences on their own should not affect my mood, but a barrage of them in a short period set me off.

On the flipside, there are some big negatives that have come my way, and maybe my emotional self gives up, because those times, I feel as though I go on autopilot. My physical body does the living for the rest of me; I become a thing that reacts out of instinct and without emotion. It gets tiring though; I have to crash at some point.

Almost every day now, I encounter something that makes me tear up—usually because I become overwhelmed with positive thoughts. Almost every day now, I have to remind myself that maybe the time has not come yet; no matter how much leeway I give myself to cry, I find myself in a deep state of satisfaction. It is not yet time, I think, to despair.

Yet the despair is there: somewhere just out of sight. Maybe it knows I have grown used to it; maybe it lies in wait, knowing fully that I will be vulnerable eventually. Or maybe I still have a bunch of bullets in my emotional corpse. Emotions are difficult; sometimes I wish not to have been allowed them in the first place. I could have been cold; I could have been level-headed.

But again: temperance. I find that it helps when I take a step back from visceral reactions to negative stimuli. It helps to pretend to be objective, taking into consideration different interpretations of an event, knowing fully that I will probably go along with the one thought that is most convenient, most comfortable. I cannot afford the discomfort—not now.

(My tigers’ eyes glimmer; I need to stay calm. The tap-tapping of the keyboard has slowed. Have I been rambling all this time? My emotions are mute, but nod their concurrence. Sometimes I cannot stand metaphors.)

Maybe after I have had myself a good cry will I be willing to be discomforted again. I am a few months overdue. I wonder how long this will last—it feels like I stand on a ledge somewhere, looking up, with the void peering into my mind from my peripheral vision. My dreams for med school are dead, but maybe I can still be a trauma surgeon for myself.