I, Death

Tuesday August 28, 2012 - 3:18 AM

I had to stop writing the last time because it was becoming a little overwhelming for me. But I couldn’t sleep for the longest time either. That night I just lay in bed, the events that followed going through my head.

But it was all going through my head too much to write them down.

And the same thing kept happening to me again every night.

Tonight, or this morning rather, I'd had enough. I finally just got out of bed and thought I’d try to slow those thoughts down, try to write it all down.

The weeks following Jagdish's death, the time at school, everything, is just a huge blur. Or at least, the images and memories of those weeks are mostly swirling around in my head so fast that I can’t catch them, hold them down long enough to write about.

But I have been able to pick a few of them out of the air.

Yeah, I remember moments at the funeral, sitting there in the pew, looking up at the casket, then across the aisle at Neil. (He’d been sitting with his folks, me with Uncle Bob and Aunt Shelley) Like me, he’d been grounded as well, and, like me, it had been suggested to him that it would be best if he and Harley and I kept our distance from each other until the school year finished. So, perhaps under the fear that others were watching us and would report our behaviour, we stayed away from each other during lunch or spare periods.

It was like being back in that exile I’d been under when I first broke up with Sarah. Only, this time, it wasn't self-imposed.

Damm it to Hell, though — and this is something that you’d think at least the guidance counselor would inject on our behalf — we needed to talk to each other, we needed to deal with our feelings of what happened when a friend of ours died. We needed that.

But we didn’t get it.

Now, though I’m no longer grounded, I still haven’t spoken much with Neil or with Harley — to be honest, I never did much with Harley one-on-one — we only hung around together as part of the larger group, actually. Neil or Jag were the only ones I’d ever had any deep or meaningful conversation with.

I’d always kind of shunned Harley, to be honest.

Perhaps in the way I’m convinced that Neil is now shunning me.

You see, Neil’s a smart cookie — he doesn’t know about my good friend Donnie, because his family didn’t live in town when that happened. And I’ve never talked about it to anyone. But he knows about my parents, he knows about Sarah’s dad and he witnessed the thing with Jagdish firsthand.

So he must have figured out the bizarre combination: that getting mixed up with me was an invitation to bring Death into someone’s life.

He must have figured that out.

It’s why he didn’t call.

I get the feeling that he’s shunning me, the way that we all used to shun Harley.

It has to be.

Okay, I think I got most of whatever I could snag out of the air down. I actually feel better. I think I'm going to be able to sleep now.