This week has really been a mindfuck.

Shortly before I left for home, a high school classmate of mine went missing suddenly. She apparently had dinner plans with her mother that night, and had not called home or made any contact.

The news came a few days later that she had committed suicide. I felt surprised; I had not confronted the reality that she was missing, nor had I considered what her disappearance likely implied. She had always had problems with depression, and a part of me was ashamed that I was surprised; I was ashamed I had not had attempted to connect the dots and that I had allowed myself to be casual about her disappearance in my own thoughts.

The thoughts and emotions that these events generate in me are a tangled mess. Something inside of me says the natural response is to be purely sad. I want to be just purely sad, I feel like I need appear to be purely sad, but my mind races everywhere. I think about the living. I wonder what kind of person I am, what people would say about me; I try to think what I would say about others. I become desperate to organize my thoughts about every person I have ever met. I try to experience in my mind the funeral of all these people; I imagine how I hear the news and who speaks and how I have to remember them.

And then I am ashamed that I am allowing my mind to wander. A few seconds later I am disgusted with myself for caving in to an external idea of how I should feel. And then I wonder if other people in the room are having the same thought, and how they are reacting.

What are my memories of her?
I had an embarassing, awkward crush on her in middle school. I remember thinking she was very beautiful in a very delicate and interesting way. She had long hair at the time, and I remember I perceived there was something very gentle about the way she moved (I was brutally shy at that point in my life and that was something that really got me). I will always remember her as the first girl that let me feel that kind of marvelously fucked up spritual infatuation.

I went to college in St. Louis, and during those years she took some time off of school and was back in town. She worked at a burger joint I liked to go to sometimes. I knew she had had some struggles with depression, and seeing her back suggested to me she was having a hard time. I always had the painful feeling of wanting to help and not knowing how. I would also occasionally accuse myself of being a patronizing prick for even imagining I could help.

I didn't ever really know her well, and I don't really think I know how she would want me to keep her memory. Sometimes I think all the things you do in your life are little tiny waves on the ocean, and they all combine into one wave thats your life. Then after you die, all the little vibrations you've made live on. And it occurred to me at the funeral that the vibrations shes left in the world are good ones. I hope if she is still out there somewhere she saw that too and takes it to heart.

More on this later

gotta start writing shit down

I decided today that I am letting too much slip away from me, and I need to start writing down my thoughts. So I got this blog