There were a few roads to get to my school, and the shortest, easiest one went through a back gate about a mile from my house. It was my favorite route for years, honestly. But I can't look at that road the same way anymore, and it has nothing to do with school or anything that happened there. When I'm passing it now, school doesn't even cross my mind.
A friend of mine moved there a few years back, and somewhere along the way he became one of us who chose not to continue, in a house along that same road.
Last night I was coming back from a party with one of the others, in an Uber, not much being said. We passed the junction and I don't know which of us looked first but we both did, and I turned just enough to catch his face in the corner of my eye, and I saw how his face changed and the heavy sigh in the dark that I can't really describe better than that. We didn't say anything to each other. I'm not sure I was supposed to say something at that moment but I couldn't.
There's another one of us I call sometimes, and at some point in most of those calls the conversation finds its way to the same sentence. He says it like a fact he keeps having to rediscover: what a waste, what an absolute waste. I don't disagree, how can I? I just don't have anywhere to put that sentence either, so I listen. And even now that I don't have to walk past that chair anymore, the empty seat followed me out of the building, which I wasn't expecting.
Even writing this, I want to be careful about comparing what I carry to what he was carrying, because I don't think that's fair to either of us. We were different people with different lives and I genuinely don't know what things felt like from where he was standing.
But there are hard days, and harder ones will come because that's just how life works, the kind of storms that show up without announcing themselves. And on some of those days I've ended up somewhere in my head that I'm not proud of, where the thought sounds almost logical, like if I just stopped being here, all of it would go with me. And then I think about the specific people, the ones who would have to wake up the next day and go back through everything looking for what they missed, who would carry it in ways I can't undo from wherever I'd be. I can't do that to them. So even on the days I don't know what forward looks like, that's where I land. Survive at least. Until time does what it does.
He didn't, and I'm still figuring out where to put that.
For a long time I kept going back through the timeline looking for the exact thing I missed or didn't say, finding a new angle on the same loop and going around again, and I think we all did that separately with the same material. I'm trying to arrive somewhere more honest about it now, which is that maybe it wasn't fully stoppable.
A different night, a different conversation, maybe that changes something about the timing. But the decision itself? I don't know that it was ever mine to intercept. I'm not saying that to let myself off, I'm saying it because I think it's more true than the alternative.
At some point I think we'll stop bringing him up, not because we forgot him but because saying his name changes the air in the room and everyone knows it and no one wants to be the person who did that, so we'll quietly learn to leave it alone. We're probably still a little angry at him, too, if we're being honest. And then eventually even those conversations will thin out and just stop.
But not entirely.
At some point someone is going to be in the middle of a completely ordinary day and something will surface without asking, and they'll breathe out in that specific way that doesn't have words attached to it. Or someone's going to put out an extra cup out of habit, the way you do when you forget you're one less now, and then quietly put it back without saying anything to anyone.
