a thank you note to grief, its wreckage

just reflecting on losing three friends

It's February and I'm grateful to be here. It's been an odd year, as it was topped off by a strange ending to my last. Grief is a shelter, in a sense. You can hide within it, bask in it, try to control yourself within it. I have been grieving my childhood directly, my teen-hood specifically, and all of the parts of myself that existed in that period. In November, a friend of mine was murdered. Not a recent friend but one I met at a fresh fifteen. When life was possible and unknowable yet out there. I haven’t been able to write in this for a moment but I think that’s because I haven’t known how to access gratitude; despite so much to be grateful for. The pandemic was an odd thing, I entered into it at twenty-four and now I am twenty-seven. Three friends from childhood died in this period, between now and then. One died from COVID-19. Another jumped off a cliff. Another went to work at a queer bar and never went home.

All three of these friends were people I had met in an earlier version of myself, one without understanding to my circumstances, one who could never imagine really getting out of Oklahoma. I was really scared back then, of so much and everything. School was an escape, so I liked it. I enjoyed going to class, despite the hormones of being a teenager and the desperation to be understood. School provided a hope of a way out. If I got good grades, I might go to college. I was often reminded by my family that it would be easier to go to the local community college, stay home and then transfer somewhere else. Neither of them had went to college, instead they sold their lives to the US military. Their lives, interiority, core. I never understood that certain punishments I experienced as a child would be considered military corporal punishment, I felt lucky that I would be put on my knees instead of being hit. I would be reminded I was lucky. School was a place I showed some promise and one of those places was in speech and debate.

Speech and debate allowed me a space to be a kid who could argue and it was a good thing. A person with opinions, a good thing. The ability to talk back quickly, a good thing. More importantly, it was where I met Steven and Daniel. Steven was older than me, he was named after the singer from Aerosmith and loved Rousseau. Daniel had red hair then, was more focused on speech, and could make anyone laugh. A few years into high school, we found ourselves in a friend group made up of mostly queer kids. A lot trans, many transitioning at our conservative and confusing high school. It was the Obama era, there was a sense you could do something then. We got a gender neutral bathroom in the high school, we had a teacher transferred for dead naming our friend. Daniel especially was someone who was quick to bat for every person he knew. In many ways, love guided him his whole life. Steven went onto go to a local college, continued debating, married a beautiful woman he loved.

My other friend who died was happy go lucky, we did sketch comedy together, and shared many friends. His death is still something I don’t know how to settle with, even though it came before the others. I guess that’s why I’m writing this because I realized there’s no way to deal with grief but to talk about it. Death seems to have coated over so much of my life, in recent years and beyond, that I sometimes forget I should talk about it. I relieve myself often with the fact that everyone is grieving, some even grieving the same people I am. I don’t know how to pick up the phone though and say “Hey, I know the person we loved is gone and can we talk about it.” It’s sometimes easier to talk to those that don’t know who you have lost.

Losing Daniel was and is strange because his death became a national headline. It’s even stranger because Daniel was so important to me in high school, along with many other people, and the part of myself I have run away from for so long was me in high school. Those experiences of living at home, of family, and of Oklahoma, I ran away from it all. I ran away even from Daniel, Steven, and my other friend who out of respect to his family won’t be named. I didn’t want to be reminded of who I was when I couldn’t escape, even if I was someone those people found worth loving and knowing. The folly of youth is you imagine that you all go off, do your own thing, and that someday you will run into each other on a crowded street, a busy cafe, a club. Sometimes it does happen like that, sometimes you run into someone exactly when you should despite years of distance. Other times, you are peeing in your friend’s bathroom and your childhood friend’s name is a national headline.

I haven’t known how to write about this, in some ways I guess I have been avoiding it. Avoiding the fact that the loss has grown and is gaping. Avoiding the fact that I know there’s nothing in life that can change time, turn tides, undo the reality. You can visit a memory, I do it all the time. You can visit the dead but you are still only comforted by what you hoped they would say. It isn’t that the last few years are my first touches with mortality. In fact, the list of dead in my life would sound like a soap opera, or a very poorly written Tennessee Williams play. Death doesn’t always make me feel gratitude, outside of for what is already gone and what cannot be returned to. The present moment is full of love too, I try and see it every single day. I try to celebrate my book coming out, I try and celebrate being in love, and I try and celebrate the future.

When I arrived in Los Angeles, my first thought was you should be here too. Before moving here, I was here for Thanksgiving. Daniel had just been murdered, I sat at a party my body unreal. I smoked a cigarette and it wasn’t enough. I check the last tweets Daniel liked, one is one of mine. I talk to a random woman about my friend’s murder until her husband gets mad at me for talking to his wife, and then I kiss my lover but feel nothing because death is everywhere.

I was hoping I would find more gratitude here but all I am finding is release. I call my friend Alex Sanchez every time a friend dies. He always answers “Telephone” and then we share our sentiments. When Steven died from COVID, I was quarantining at a friend’s off of Prospect Park. I broke my no-smoking streak and had a cigarette off the balcony. The cars were honking angry, the pedestrians making their way towards the greenery. All I could think was Steven won’t ever go to Prospect Park.

I feel grateful I’m alive to miss my friends. I’m glad that I have love in my life, people who I have to celebrate, and that every ego death has brought me back to myself again reborn. I guess loss has felt like an ego death this time, a mass shifting in my understanding of myself, and the world. I can’t run away from grief in the same way I ran away from the version of myself that loved those people, I’m still that person even if the years have grown and mutated me into someone with more love, empathy, and care for myself than I could have imagined then.