One sad part about life is you just have to accept that no one owes you anything. But after knowing him and how he lived and how he's not now, I don't believe that anymore. He made me realize that you get what you get, or really, what others choose to give you. He had a lot given to him. And not in a good way. I mentioned earlier that everyone saw him as a monster and that really was true. Not that he was a monster, but that he never owed the people who treated him badly anything. They didn't owe him mean words but they still gave them to him. I wish I would've been braver and stood up for him more. I owed him that.
We had something fun we did together on occasion. A weird ritual that was specific to us, that we were both obsessive about. Driving at night in the rain. He had a car but only drove it to school and work mostly. Of course he wasn't going to make me walk to Outback Steakhouse or to the overlook, but we did often walk places together just to spend time with each other. He said that gas money was just a way for the government to rob you, whatever the hell that meant. But on special nights, we'd go driving when it rained. I had a kind of supernatural feeling for rain so we'd check the paper to see if rain was due that night. It was always such a treat. Looking back, it feels like living in heaven when I think about the rain and the soothing sound of the windshield wipers moving across the glass. Sometimes I would lie back with my eyes closed and imagine there was no roof and that the rain was falling down on me. If I did it for too long he'd ask if I fell asleep. But it was always just nice to be around the things I loved. I got lost in it. Sometimes we would roll the windows some of the way down and let some rain come in. If we were driving on the highway, I'd stick my arm out of the window and let the rain hit my hand. It was sharp against my skin since we were going so fast and it was coming down so hard, but I loved the feeling of it. I could be hypnotized with watching my hand wave around in the rough wind. He'd always say and my arm was gonna get taken off but I didn't care. I listened to him anyway though.
This experience as a whole has made me see the chaos inside myself. I don't want to be bad, I want to be good. But it's hard sometimes not to go to the dark places inside my heart. To go into the places that call me to them. It feels more natural to be bad than it is to be good. I don't like that feeling. I want to be good but sometimes I think, in my bones, I am naturally bad. In that way, I have experienced life through his eyes even though he's no longer with me. Maybe he was the same way, and all he was doing was following his instinct.
The winters here are bleak and dull. Everything is white and stagnant. We just entered winter weather and so this has amplified my mourning. But it also has given me a chance to reflect on people and how they are. I look at the trees and I see most of the leaves have fallen off, but some are still hanging on. Some leaves follow the flow of nature while some are strong and fall when they're ready. It would mean more if there were only one of these leaves, but there's many that still cling on to the branches. I think in a way this can represent people. They don't know how many others are along side them, until they've all fallen. He was one of those people. Not knowing how many other people were just like him. How many other people struggled the way he struggled.
I just wish I could've helped him.
Something I find hard to do is to look at pictures of him. Everyone around me has moved on, but I haven't yet. Every once and a while, his picture is shown at an assembly or on the boards in the halls and I don't know how to handle it. All I can do is freeze and stare at him, scanning every detail of him in the photo: his position, how his hair looked, his outfit, what obscure jewelry he was wearing that day and then all the memories of the moments we spent together on that specific day come flooding in. I think to be as close as I was to him, it's hard to see him in the spotlight, painted over as this person everyone is trying to mold him to be now that he's not here to show them different. No one is there to help me through it except for all of the other broken people that were once around him. No one wants to help me because they see me as a disgusting person, willing to love the person they hated in life and even now more in death. I can live so long in a disastrous sort of peace, only visioning him as what's stored in my minds eye. But once I see his eyes staring dead into mine in a photograph, it's like I can't ignore him anymore once he's looking right at me. He takes an actual form that my body can't handle, and I am forced to relive every moment I spent with him over again just wishing I could've changed things. I can hear his voice in my head, bringing me back to the night he died.
