(Conversations with Cliche After Death)
TW: Grief, su*cide, mourning, loss
Last year, I lost a good friend due to su*cide. She was missing for three days before she was found. I was lost and unsure of how to handle it, so I wrote about it. It took me months to figure out the right words and how to properly express myself. I found myself unable to cry until I had finally finished this piece. It was a tremendously cathartic experience and helped me process her absence and my own emotions when I had no one else to turn to. That's always been the point of why I write.
Sofie was a cliche. Not in the bad way-- she was just any ordinary teenager. She worked at McDonalds. She was kind and sweet, always saying hello to people in hallways. She wanted to go to concerts and festivals. She loved the color pink and to eat mangoes. It didn't occur to me that such an ordinary girl could struggle so much. That's the thing with depression-- it could really happen to anyone.
A few months after completing this, I came across the Scholastic Writing Awards Competition. I submitted it on a whim, sending it off so that at least someone beside myself should read this. Maybe they'll think of someone in their own life and offer a little more love. More support. You never know.
I am now a Silver Award National recipient, along with the winner of the New York Life Award.
There has been a lot of healing. There has been a lot of growth. I hoped to make Sofie proud. I've decided to share this with all of you so that maybe you're reminded that there are people who do care. Who will mourn you. Who love you to the cosmos and back. And it's also a reminder to give that love back to the people in your life. To anyone, really. The world sure could use a lot more of it right now.
I'm still not so sure on how to talk about this. It's still hard. But we can try. I love you.
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(Conversations with Cliche After Death)
Cliche, tell me; when a girl drives depression as if it were a nail against a wall, did you ever stop to think? If you’ve ever read Plath, ever kept a comforting kind of cold that creeps in between silence, taming fires in bones and combing out your hair, untangling every memory, you’ll know Melancholy will sit there with me. He’s reactive, recitative; he likes to express; he concludes and dissects and stresses, tending a garden so wild it’s enough to swallow god. I didn’t notice him standing in my shadow and watching over me when I knelt in that garden to lay another flower down. You see, yesterday they told me they will find her. She’ll come home, warm and loved. I was sitting in Spanish when a friend called me.
It’s about her. Come outside.
I ran out to the hallway.
What a sick, twisted joke.
I hear someone call out my name.
My glare, my incredulous laugh; I blanch, I express my grief in silence; a marble statue was I, set in moveless despair. If I could weep… but I couldn’t. I simply sat and let others cry into my arms that day. Oh I’ll tell you! The room was filled with half-taught anguish, people bent upward to the heavens in loud tears. And there was I, days after, coloring into stupid coloring books during grief sessions, talking about her favorite color (pink) and how kind she was. Stop looking at me with those eyes. I’m okay, just leave me alone and let me go home. I thought I was a horrible person; what friend am I who can’t cry for her? I’ll crumble to the dirt beneath.
Cliche, tell me, what was the purpose of any originality, when in the midnight hours I get to dream about my own future when she thought she didn’t have one. I get to sit on my bed and sleep and wake up, when she will never wake up again. I walk to class, I go home, but what fear sweeps this little life of mine? Do I terrify? Did she? What of the sad mothers and helpless fathers?
I finally weeped. I cry because I am still here and she is not. I cry because my mother is sleeping downstairs while her father could be staring into her empty bedroom.
I kowtow into her absence, my knees– eyes dressed in dust and dearth, debris flooding her mouth before she coughs up.
You know, there are others growing in the garden. My relatives; my kin, my flesh; them in their war torn clothes and dirty fingernails. They still have their shrapnel wounded legs and their ears still ringing from bombings, lungs smothered in gunpowder even after death. Tainted, black and bruised, whatever chorus that lifted up to my mouth’s blade—
But tell me, Cliche, who wants to die this young.
Do you cut away at your life to fit whatever gorgeous blueprint? Makes me retch.
There are eggshells and my feet are bleeding again. When Death says “you were born for this,”
He clearly means “you will die for this.”
Melancholy hangs his ghastly lilies in his garden. I ask him if it’s peaceful. Quiet.
He doesn’t respond, but I know. I know death chokes the aged and the meek. It chokes the young and the strong. It’s like some fat Ceberus, wheezing at the gates, licking at whatever sins or virtues there are left. There is no fairness. The pieces of peace I’ve collected in my pockets, well jee, I didn’t know there was a tear in the stitching. I’ll sit here and haunt and wait for a small kind of revival. I’ll defend myself with a broken pen for a sword, brackets for a shield and a small prayer that no one will find me tucked between pages of books and paranoia in every paragraph I write.
Tear it! Shred it, mutilate it, beg the person in the mirror just one more day, one more request:
Come, Death! Be sure to take off that invisible cloak you wear and be a little kinder this time. Be a friend and take my hand, walk me into the friendly dark. Walk me into a different room where I will still hear her laughter.
You lose people you overlove; I pick at petals, I love me not. The passagework of pain, the way it tenderly goes; the slick, the clever, the guileful. We sit for an hour while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been; crying in the checkout line, refusing to eat, refusing to shower, the self-medications certainly don’t work, and I’m breaking my mother’s heart.
I tell her we learn so little from peace. There is no scar from happiness. So why did you do it?
She tells me to forgive myself. The heavy feelings in my heart will dissolve with the rain. It will feel like folding a blanket. I don’t have to hold it in; I can sing it, or draw it, or wear it; This hand of ordination that laid upon her brow like some birthmark…what is the power to kill without the power to die.
It seems that healing feels like clutching cold fruit in a cold kitchen. Melancholy has followed me everywhere, like a son. But what would I do without my tears? I see it now: her death does not grow smaller with the march of time. She is still there, in my mind’s eye. When I think of all our days, I wish that they would come clear– I’ll travel through the haze and conjure her up. I won’t go looking in the silence. I’ll search in the spaces between the trees, in the memories when I find us lingering in the sunshine through the leaves, so when the friendly dark visits me, I’ll tell it no. I’ve got people to see.
Cliche, I think there will be a silver lining in every rainstorm. Tell her:
I hope you’re okay. I hope the garden is peaceful and it smells like mangoes.
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