Just before my sixteenth birthday I was busting with a teenage-grade depression just screaming for validation.
I'd made it for the past three months on the fumes of betrayal after the boy I'd practically decided to love as he had already decided to love me, moved to Louisiana to fulfill his dream of getting his GED and giving handjobs to sweaty junior college co-eds.
But it was getting harder and harder to justify the hours I was spending in my room listening to Violator and re-reading a worn copy of Go Ask Alice by candlelight. So when I heard that a casual acquaintance from middle school whom I hadn't spoken to in two years had committed suicide, without the premeditation and maliciousness this reflection implies, I let the waterworks fly.
Andre had been a peripheral friend, and maybe even that is too generous. All I know is, after Brian Kincaid beat the shit out of me in the hallway on the way to Ms. Hu's Life Science class, Andre took it upon himself to get some vigilante justice a couple days later, in the library behind the periodicals. And I always thought that was nice of him.
You know, you just feel things big when you are fifteen and angsty. Or you convince yourself that things like a distant acquaintance suicide or what ever else in the world around you would make good fodder for an After School Special are the causes of all your nocturnal sobs. It is too terrifying to admit that your sadness has no cause or direction; if that is true how can you ever be better?
I see now that I used Andre, he (among other things) became an excuse to cry, to write bad poetry, to stop going to class, to talk to my therapist, to pepper my register with heavy sighs. But it was the greatest cop-out. Once I dug myself off and moved on to seventeen, it seemed like I could only attribute my repair to time and its power to heal all wounds. Anyone can get over their first break up with a loser boyfriend, I mean, big deal. But persistent directionless sadness? I don't know, I think it is kind of heroic.
Now here is the kicker...Andre didn't die. I recently found him on myspace - very much alive. Looking through the comments people left him it seems like he skipped town suddenly when we were in high school and became the stuff of urban legends.
While I'm a little bit embarrassed that I mourned so intensely for a boy that a) I hardly knew and b) didn't actually die - his phantom death helped keep me straight, helped me make sense of things, and helped me move on. And maybe in the end I could have sloughed off all that despair without any place to hang it, and maybe that would have made me more of a hero. But who knows.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
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1 comment:
Well, I just heard from the guy I found on myspace - he wasn't the real Andre and confirmed that he did die. So I'm a big fat lying liar.
But the point of the post remains, even if there is no kicker.
I do still feel sad that he died, even if my intial response was quite overly dramatic.
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