2009: Pretty fucking brutal
So today Will Arlow committed suicide. Or maybe it was yesterday? I don’t know. But I today I get a phone call from my mother while I’m at work and she tells me Will committed suicide. With a gun she says.
I get mad. I tell her I think that suicide is the most selfish thing a person can commit. She asks if I can rearrange my plans to come back home sooner. I tell her no and that Will really should have held off for a week or so. My mother laughs, the stops, as though a laugh is the last sound that should be heard. But I’m not sorry. I really do think that. That is my first, honest reaction, that Will Arlow should not have done that.
I hang up and return to work, convincing tourists to go to various Broadway shows that are suffering. I push Will from my mind. For a while. Soon he is back in my thoughts. I try to remember him specifically. The image of him is exact. He is 17, clad in blue rockabilly jeans with rolled up bottoms and a simple white v-neck t-shirt. His hair is thickly gelled in the front the way Alt Rock bands wore it in the late 90’s. He has a black bracelet on with studs. I don’t know if that last element is a true memory or an embellishment from time. He has watery dark eyes, bad skin, and he speaks from the side of his mouth as if he had always just come in from the cold.
I can also remember his voice, the way I remember my old friend Mike’s (now 5 years dead of cancer), not hearing any specific words or phrases, but understanding the tambour. His voice has the awkward depth of a boy who only recently survived puberty, and escapes from him in a shaky wisp. You can see the peanuts style squiggle letters in that sound.
But he’s charming, in an overly polite kind of way. He laughs at my jokes, and occasionally offers one of his own. He and I and several other social misfits spend a lot of time together until he gets really into Auto shop and starts hanging with the Future Farmers of America; the rural mafia. He dates Kristen, a close friend of mine, who he meets in Auto shop. I remember seeing him in Kristen’s home, an odd place to see him, that place being one so clear in my childhood memory and him not.
And that’s it. It trails off after that. He and Kristen broke up and she went on to become an auto mechanic for Mercedes. Where he went and what he did is a mystery to me. I don’t even recall him at graduation. Maybe a lot happened to him these past five years.
I wonder how I can have so little compassion. Maybe he was suffering endlessly. Maybe every day was a challenge. If a person’s got some bad brain chemicals then the weight of the world really can be tremendous. But that’s where biology ends and personality begins. Every person is dealt a hand, be it good or bad, but the good card player knows how to win with the worst of cards. It’s what a person does with them that matters.
I think I know depression, to an extent. I’ve felt it tugging at the corners of my own mind, begging me to give up on everything. I feel it swim behind my knees as the subway train hurtles toward me on the track. I imagine the freedom that can come from letting my legs go, from leaping in front of that train, of the grinding metal destroying by body and releasing me from the pressure of existence. But then my mind wanders to the great thereafter, into a world that I would never know in my post mortem. To my friends and family mourning my death. To the pain I would cause them. Even to my housemates needing to find a new sublet-er and my boss needing to rehire. To the selfishness of my action. There is a knowledge that is presiding even in the darkest onslaught of depression: that no man is an island. It takes a coward to close their mind to that.
I will miss Will Arlow, the way that the world misses anyone who dies an untimely death. The knowledge that this is a world one voice quieter is unsettling. And as it has been with all those passed away in my life it hurts to know I can’t find them if I want to. But I can’t help but think what the kid did was unbelievably stupid. My mother always told me Suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The older I get, the more often I’m confronted with the wisdom of that.
I get mad. I tell her I think that suicide is the most selfish thing a person can commit. She asks if I can rearrange my plans to come back home sooner. I tell her no and that Will really should have held off for a week or so. My mother laughs, the stops, as though a laugh is the last sound that should be heard. But I’m not sorry. I really do think that. That is my first, honest reaction, that Will Arlow should not have done that.
I hang up and return to work, convincing tourists to go to various Broadway shows that are suffering. I push Will from my mind. For a while. Soon he is back in my thoughts. I try to remember him specifically. The image of him is exact. He is 17, clad in blue rockabilly jeans with rolled up bottoms and a simple white v-neck t-shirt. His hair is thickly gelled in the front the way Alt Rock bands wore it in the late 90’s. He has a black bracelet on with studs. I don’t know if that last element is a true memory or an embellishment from time. He has watery dark eyes, bad skin, and he speaks from the side of his mouth as if he had always just come in from the cold.
I can also remember his voice, the way I remember my old friend Mike’s (now 5 years dead of cancer), not hearing any specific words or phrases, but understanding the tambour. His voice has the awkward depth of a boy who only recently survived puberty, and escapes from him in a shaky wisp. You can see the peanuts style squiggle letters in that sound.
But he’s charming, in an overly polite kind of way. He laughs at my jokes, and occasionally offers one of his own. He and I and several other social misfits spend a lot of time together until he gets really into Auto shop and starts hanging with the Future Farmers of America; the rural mafia. He dates Kristen, a close friend of mine, who he meets in Auto shop. I remember seeing him in Kristen’s home, an odd place to see him, that place being one so clear in my childhood memory and him not.
And that’s it. It trails off after that. He and Kristen broke up and she went on to become an auto mechanic for Mercedes. Where he went and what he did is a mystery to me. I don’t even recall him at graduation. Maybe a lot happened to him these past five years.
I wonder how I can have so little compassion. Maybe he was suffering endlessly. Maybe every day was a challenge. If a person’s got some bad brain chemicals then the weight of the world really can be tremendous. But that’s where biology ends and personality begins. Every person is dealt a hand, be it good or bad, but the good card player knows how to win with the worst of cards. It’s what a person does with them that matters.
I think I know depression, to an extent. I’ve felt it tugging at the corners of my own mind, begging me to give up on everything. I feel it swim behind my knees as the subway train hurtles toward me on the track. I imagine the freedom that can come from letting my legs go, from leaping in front of that train, of the grinding metal destroying by body and releasing me from the pressure of existence. But then my mind wanders to the great thereafter, into a world that I would never know in my post mortem. To my friends and family mourning my death. To the pain I would cause them. Even to my housemates needing to find a new sublet-er and my boss needing to rehire. To the selfishness of my action. There is a knowledge that is presiding even in the darkest onslaught of depression: that no man is an island. It takes a coward to close their mind to that.
I will miss Will Arlow, the way that the world misses anyone who dies an untimely death. The knowledge that this is a world one voice quieter is unsettling. And as it has been with all those passed away in my life it hurts to know I can’t find them if I want to. But I can’t help but think what the kid did was unbelievably stupid. My mother always told me Suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The older I get, the more often I’m confronted with the wisdom of that.