I've been thinking about grief. Again. I'd worry that I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, except that's exactly what happens when someone you love dies. You break. You're left with what you had together. There's no chance to flip it over, record a few more, add to the canon. It's done. As is. Possibility and potential put to rest. No new memories to be made.
Just the same ones, over and over, until you're too tired to care. Or until you can't remember anymore. Both options, for the record, suck.
Grief is love left over. A receipt of time spent, proof we cared. Thanks, but I'll take the love.
No returns accepted.
Maybe that's greed. Denial, perhaps. Except it's been so many years and I believe I'm meant to be past that stage by now. Healing isn't linear. It's a rollercoaster, neatly diluted into steps for our processing pleasure.
Stage one: you demand to hear the words from his dad because you don't trust his brother and he could be making it up.
Stage two: you sit on the bed and it gets wetter and wetter because you just got out of the shower and a second ago you were shivering but now you're nothing.
Stage three: why is no one picking up the phone? You understand, of course, that everyone reacts differently but you could really do with a friend right now, one who isn't wine drunk for the fourth day in a row.
Stage four: you think bargaining's a load of bullshit because the grim reaper isn't going to hand him back but you're all too familiar with reading the last messages he sent to you and wondering if you should have called him.
Stage five: you write a beautiful eulogy and can't work out how someone so full of laughter fits in such a plain box and then when everyone else gets drunk and tells the pub owner 'our best fried died,' like that's a reasonable excuse for climbing the scaffolding, you go home and sleep and think stage three was a lot better than this.
Stage six: bullshit.
It's eight years later and I thought about messaging him. Not in the ouija board, beyond the grave way. I was messaging my friend - who used to be his but is now mine because grief is the sort of thing that grants you adoption powers - and thought, I better message him too while I'm at it, because I'm bad at replying and have probably left him unopened for a few weeks too.
Then eight years hit me and I didn't cry because I'm not sad, it's just... One of those moments. Oh. Yeah. Of course.
The needle slipped off the record a long time ago.
And I'm older than him now.
Once upon a time, I borrowed an ID so I could go out with him. Once upon a time, he was sent to the corner shop to buy everyone's booze.
And now we've got eight years and six feet on him. Funny that. How the tables turn when you're not looking.
What brought all this on, in a way, is the flurry of instagram posts that signalled my sixth form's reunion. "Where are you at 25?" they asked in the invitation. I had a few reasons not to go, the biggest one being the small factor that I'm now residing in Australia. Smaller ones like I'm no longer with my sixth form boyfriend and wouldn't that be a talking point. No one else in the dregs of my friendship group was going, in fact we'd all very judgementally scoffed at the idea of returning. But, thanks to the wonders of social media, I could very clearly see that the majority of our year group had elected to attend.
Smiling faces dressed in matching white (looking oddly bridal for a school reunion), posing down the corridors of adolescent performance greeted me on my feed. Catch ups in the pub afterwards, the old groups mingling across what used to be clearly demarcated clique lines. Friends for life! a girl captioned her slideshow of nostalgic visitation.
You can probably see where this is going.
One of the pictures I saw was taken in the silent part of the old, ornate library. I studied there a fair amount. Had my picture taken in the room once to go alongside my article in the school's magazine. The overwhelming memory I have of that room though is visiting it on A Level results day. It's where they put the memorial book.
Downstairs people were opening envelopes, hugging each other, crying at unexpected grades (they'd just changed a lot of subjects to linear examinations for the first time and it was a real gut punch to results) and thanking teachers. There was a general air of celebration. I could see them all through the library's single-pane windows. The kind that haven't been updated since the building was first opened and mean you have to wear a scarf inside even though outside the school boundaries, everyone else is benefitting from central heating.
On the table behind me was a picture of him, taken for the year book. Then the book, big and bound, already half full of scribbled condolences. We flicked through them slowly. Feeling entilted to read everyone else's words because we were actually his friends, the closest. I scorned a few of the sentiments from people who had definitely never said a kind word about him when he was alive. It's a strange kind of anger that one. Wanting to go out and shout fraud, rip their results out of their hands and kick them in the shin for good measure. How dare they, was all I could think.
Found a surprising amount of earnest recollections too. Ones that reminded me of how kind he'd been, how big his heart was. That when we hadn't been all causing chaos in the common room, he'd been himself with others I only thought of as peripheral.
Others who were now at the reunion, once again hugging and celebrating eachother outside while I watched through the much smaller, colder window of my phone screen.
I would say that, this many years on, I'm well adjusted. It took two years of therapy but I got here. At 25, I'm alive and happy. I don't think about him everyday anymore. If I do, it's no longer solely melancholy. Sometimes, a few weeks will go by and he'll crop up and I'll feel guilty for having forgotten. I frame it as moving on rather than dwelling on the guilt. It's what everyone always says the dead want. You can't fact check that though. If I were to die anytime soon, I'd definitely want there to be some pretty wild gestures of mourning. Then again, I can't choose a singular love language so that checks out. He was significantly more selfless.
The worst times are when you are forced to remember the end.
I used to love Peaky Blinders. Watched it obsessively and couldn't wait for the new season to come out. Season four opens with a few members of the Shelby family facing the death penalty. I never finished the show.
My dad leant over to me when we were watching The Dead Poets Society and gave me a whispered heads up that Neil was going to kill himself. I'd already figured it out (adoption rights and the uncanny ability to spot a suicide-bent character included!) but it was the first time my dad had ever shielded me from a film as an adult.
I was in the cinema to see JoJo Rabbit opening week. Cried along with everyone else when the green shoes appeared on screen. Caught myself thinking something I'd never thought before. Was he barefoot?
The bones in your feet are prominent. Wiggle your toes and you can see the skin flexing over them. I'll sit ildly when my mind has drifted and watch the same effect in my hand. How the bones move, so close to the surface, so elegant, a wonder of movement, right beneath the skin. Cut to int. dangling feet, did he stop to put socks on?
Art imitates life. And death.
What is there to celebrate at 25, when one of us will always be 18?
Back to the steps. I'll be climbing them for the rest of my life I think. Wishing he was here, hating that he's not, hating myself for what more I might have done. I'll never stop taking the record from the sleeve and having another listen. It's over, the finished piece, but we sure as hell had a good time making it. Only the good die young.
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