Dear Drew

September 17th 2014

Dear Drew,

This still feels a bit like I’m writing to no one, just scribbling things down in a book that you can’t ever read. I’ll carry on anyway, I find it’s a good way to get out of doing homework. I had an appointment with a counsellor person today, I have to see her twice a week at the moment because apparently ‘the school are worried about me’ or some bullshit about me being ‘a suicide risk’ which is also bullshit because number one, I have a ridiculously low pain threshold and, number two, well I know how much it sucks to lose someone who you care about and I don’t want to put other people through that crap; I’m not going to pretend like I have no one who cares about me because I have my parents, and I have Tam, and I have my sister, and I have Rob, and I have some teachers who I guess would miss me a bit and other people at school maybe. I almost wrote your name on the list but then I remembered that you’re dead, oops. Anyway, I was going to tell you about this meeting.

So I got there, sat down in the old chair that creaked even though I’m like the skinniest guy at school and this woman was sitting opposite me holding this little notebook that I’m guessing she wrote ‘IS FUCKING MENTAL’ in under my name but who knows. She said that my teacher was worried I was in denial about your death or something (which I’m probably not) so she got me to say out loud “Andrew Brooks is dead.” Which I said but it didn’t feel like I was saying it, more like I was watching a film or listening to the radio. Maybe they were right and I am in denial, if I am, it’s just because I really don’t want you to be dead. I’ll try to remember how the session went but I’ll probably miss out the bits that aren’t that important.

“Can you tell me why you’ve come to see me today?” she had dark brown hair which was totally straight and cut just below her shoulders.

“Don’t you already know?” 

“I would like you to say it out loud; one of your teachers thinks you might be in denial about what happened.”

“Fine,” I was a bit pissed off about this, how in denial could you be about someone being dead? I mean, it’s not like I didn’t go to the funeral and watch as they lowered your body into some deep pit. “My best friend,” I’ll admit I started choking up a bit here, “Andrew Brooks is dead.”

“And how does that make you feel?” 

‘HOW THE FUCK DO YOU THINK IT MAKES ME FEEL?’ is what I wanted to say but instead I went for “sad, I guess.”

“You guess? what do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know, I’m sad he’s gone. It sucks.”

“So, on a scale of one to ten, how sad do you feel today?”

“I dunno, 7?” I paused, I’d never thought about categorising sadness on a numerical scale, it seemed like a stupid idea to me. “Maybe 8?”

“Okay.” This was the point that she probably wrote that I was mental.

The rest of the meeting wasn’t particularly interesting, she just asked me about you. I didn’t want to talk about you. Talking hurts, not talking hurts a bit less and I’d rather hurt as little as possible.

(I’m trying to get out of doing this maths homework so I’m going to keep writing this and just fill you in on what’s happening at school, does that sound good? Wait, shit, you can’t answer that so it’ll have to do.)

Rob and Lily broke up yesterday, something about her snogging six guys at this party last weekend which of course I was not cool enough to be invited to, not even pity invited, you know, I thought the best friend of the dead kid usually got invited to shit? Maybe I was wrong. So I got this call from Rob at midnight and he sounded like he was crying so I asked what was going on and he said they broke up. Is it just me or are the lives of everyone I love either ending or falling apart? Sorry, I’m an overdramatic arsehole. He told me that he’d been told by Joe that Lily had kissed a load of guys at this party and when Rob asked her about it she admitted it so he ended it. He didn’t want to be in a relationship like that.

Tam’s doing better, she wasn’t in school today but I’m seeing her tomorrow, we’re going out into town like the four of us used to do. I refuse to cry anymore, it won’t make you come back it’ll just make all this ink run and I’ve spent actual time writing this so I’d rather that didn’t happen. Everyone’s still talking about you, people keep asking me how I’m doing and I want to say ‘How the fuck do you think I’m doing?’ but that would be kind of rude and I don’t want to ruin my ‘nice guy’ reputation, although I think that has been replaced with a ‘friend of the dead kid’ reputation. Instead I say ‘fine’ and they just stop after that, I don’t think they know what to say and I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t know what to say either.

There’s a part of me that wonders if you’re writing letters to me in that notebook I gave you last Christmas, the one with the black cover with quotes from your favourite books, it took me so long to make so I hope you’ve got it with you wherever you are but I’m not sure what the baggage allowance is down through purgatory and I understand that your laptop and wifi would take priority. 

I can’t think of many more trivial things to write about here so I’ll just tell you about what I had for dinner last night. It was pizza. Yeah, that’s it, I don’t really have a whole lot to say because like I said last time, I really don’t want this to be tragic tale of my grief and the more I write, the more likely it is that that’s what it will be.

I should go and do the maths now because as easy as it would be to tell my teacher that I couldn’t do it because I was sad because of you or something like that, I don’t think I could deal with the fallout of follow up questions and another trip to see the brown-haired woman who seems to think sadness can be measured on a scale of one to ten. 

Jason