#and quotes which are either wildly out of context or should not be really worth considering regarding the discussion

[selfawarenessawareness-blog]

Nous Sommes Si Seuls Dans Ce Quartier

There was always a bit of darkness to Sydney. It was hard to miss, I suppose. He could be really withdrawn sometimes. You’d be sitting with him, at a bar or pizza place or something and everything would be just fine. But then, he would get this very far away look in his eyes and just sort of, I don’t know—drift off. He would snap out of it eventually, after a few minutes or so. The first couple times he did that, I’d ask him what was wrong, but he’d just smile at me, this perfect smile of wildly imperfect teeth and tell me it was nothing and I shouldn’t mind him.

At first, I thought it must have been something I did or said. God, he could get you so anxious by doing nothing at all. It always seemed like there’d be a day that he’d just sort of drift away. He always stuck around though.

That darkness he had though, it was quite appealing, really. At least to me. Maybe that sounds crass, but I don’t think it ought to be, and I certainly don’t mean it in a crass sort of way, at all.

I wish we could be telling this story together. He wasn’t a great storyteller. His stories meandered, never quite getting to the point. Sometimes he’d begin telling a story and by the end I wouldn’t have a clue how we’d landed at that point. He was really insightful though, he saw things that most people ignore. People often say things like that to describe some bon vivant or something, but that’s not quite what Sydney was. It wasn’t that he loved life, he just had a clearer picture of what life is than most people do, I think. Maybe I’m wrong. I read Plato’s Socratic dialogues once, and that old Socrates seemed to get people, too. Maybe lots of people are pretty insightful, it’s really hard to say. Most people, though, if you take a look at them you sort of get the impression that they’re a bit of a moron, like this guy I once took picture of on the train—I took the picture to send to Sydney, actually. He had like this very shiny looking suit on. He was trying to be very suave as hell and all, but he just looked like a moron, you know? He was doing this terrible thing to—first he was posing, which is a very lousy thing to do. He seemed to want people to be taking pictures of him. But also, he was standing in a way that his butt was mere inches from this guy that was sitting down, his face. It’s a very crummy thing to do. I’m sure he thought he was very insightful though. If for example, you’d gone up to him on that train—or wherever the hell he was going, who knows where that could be—and told him you were having problems with your girlfriend or your husband or something, he probably wouldn’t have even asked for any details, he’d just give this very stupid answer.

“A lifetime sure seems like quite the daunting undertaking, doesn’t it, Hol?” That’s the last thing Sydney ever texted me. It was maybe vaguely insightful, but it lacked the humor and originality that I’d come to expect from him. His last text should have been something like, “Jesus Christ, did you ever figure out your real bra size?” Or, “I’m going to be reincarnated as someone that sings show tunes when they walk down the street, won’t I?” But he died without saying any of that. He would have said something even better though.

I still have our texts on my phone, even though it’s been a year. I have to scroll through dozens of conversations now though to reach the conversation we had daily for three months. Our conversation was always one of the first in my messages, and now its not. I got a new phone a few months after he died and I asked the Apple store guy three times if he was positive iMessage conversations would transfer to the new phone.

I still talk to him sometimes, sort of. Even if I don’t think about him, sometimes I think of things I want to tell him. I’ll text him. Twenty minutes later I’ll get a notification saying the message failed to send. Sometimes I’ll just pretend it’s him trying to be funny. He rarely made me laugh out loud, but he was always funny. Bitter. World-weary. He had short black hair and mossy green eyes.

Sydney killed himself. I kind of knew it would happen sooner or later. He hinted at it at least a dozen times. I did ask him not to, but he’d gone off and done it anyhow.

The worst part was—nobody seemed to care. People said he had seemed to make me depressed and anxious. They said I’d become emaciated and withdrawn. I always look so tired when he was alive, people would say. Nobody had the nerve to say, it was for the best but they all seemed to think so.

Now that he’s dead, nobody wants to hear about him anymore. He didn’t have many friends, besides me, at least for the time I knew him. Even his family has put him behind them now. His funeral was really more for show, a chore they had to complete before they could move on. His younger relatives all thought he’d put them through hell and now it was time to move on. His older relatives all shared that sentiment, while also pointing out that he was now in hell. Once he was underground he was Out of Sight, Out of Mind, as they say.

It’s been a year now and I still think about him all of the time. I would be lying to you if I said I hadn’t often thought of just joining him, wherever he is now. It’s May, New York is vibrant. God that’s a word and an atmosphere that I really hate. The moment spring rolls around the only thing I’m excited about is for winter to come again. It’s almost Fleet Week, which will mark exactly one year since we buried him. On my way to the funeral, I’d been stopped by three sailors to ask if we were near the Natural History Museum. We weren’t — we were on the East Side and the Natural History Museum is on the West Side. They’d have to cross Central Park to get there. I told them that there was definitely a crosstown bus stop somewhere, but I didn’t know where exactly. I hate busses, I never take them. When I do, it’s always either a bus with a door that you have to push super hard to open and you practically fall out once you do, or it’s one with a weak hinge that opens with the slightest push, and, yeah you practically fall out of that one too.

My little sister, Francine, got me this really nice notebook for Christmas. It took me five months to start using it. It’s such a nice, clean notebook and my handwriting is so lousy, I didn’t want to ruin its crispness. But, I need to talk about Sydney, and these pages seem inviting.

I have a nasty habit. I’m a writer, see—strictly a dilettante though, you won’t find me in any particularly notable journals or magazines. I have a really depressing habit of falling into puppy-eyed love with the characters I create—and then I’m entirely unable to let anything bad happen to them. I can’t even make them slightly ill without agonizing about it. Sydney was the only person who ever read my fiction. He said it was “too saccharine.” He thought I wasn’t thoughtful enough to write something meaningful. I think he was right, but I think I changed once I met him. I told him that once and he absolutely hated hearing it. He said that the only things worth reading were written for God, not for simple human consumption. He also thought he was an inadequate human, so writing for him was particularly blasphemous. He may be right about how we ought to write for god, but he was wrong about the inadequate human part. He was an extraordinary person, a superlative human. And I think I’m the reason he’s dead. I always was clinging to his words, I guess you could say, but I don’t think I ever really listened to him. And now he’s dead.

I’m not a particularly religious person, but I rather like God. My father is Jewish and my mother is Catholic. Dad’s not particularly devout, but mom sort of is. I was baptized Catholic and confirmed, all of that stuff. If I ever get married, which seems doubtful, I’d probably get married in a church. Sydney was the same unusual mix of Jewish and Catholic, not that it matters but it always does seem to matter a bit.

In college, we’d always have these late night discussions about the meaning of life and all that stuff. There was this guy, Jerome Castor, he had a pretty good argument for why God didn’t exist, well rather that God was dead—that was the phrase he was always using. I don’t remember the exact reasoning he gave, but it was something to do with the Enlightenment, I think. Jerome studied philosophy, so he knew lots of great quotes that maybe he used out of context, but none of us knew any better. There was this one guy, Steve Bick, who was very Catholic. He would always argue with Castor, but Castor always said, “You buy what the Catholic Church is selling? Those perverts?,” whenever Bick would back him into a rhetorical corner. But Bick was a bit goony looking, so nobody ever really took his arguments seriously.

Sydney was the first person to really get me to give God a second look. He didn’t go with the usual argument, stuff about the beauty of sunrises and stuff, he didn’t try to prove his existence. He just said that you can’t try and do things for other people because other people are an ephemeral part of our life. You can’t do things for yourself because humanity has agreed that selfishness is wrong. So—you do things for God, the you know your doing things for the right reasons. So, if you’re going to make anything, you really need to at least believe in God. He hated writers of the modern era. He thought book tours and publishers and the whole lot was the secularization of a particularly spiritual craft. He thought the best writers in the world are the ones whose words are never seen. He made an exception for Emily Dickinson.

I spent about three months telling everyone I was going to write the story of Sydney before I actually sat down and started it. The characters in this story hate the idea of being identified by at least a very small subset of the world’s readers that may someday read this. I offered to use fake names for those that resent anyone attempting to immortalize them in print, but my mother, who spent some time in the public eye in the 1980’s resents that he’s even mentioned and pointed out that a pseudonym would do her no good.

Some of the sentiments come from the same sentiments that people felt when Sydney died. The belief among that cohort is that I would be much better moving on with my life, in effect, letting the whole thing drop, dead boys be damned.

Others have attempted to suppress my story for the good of the community. My sister—a successful psychologist operating out of a strip mall in Buffalo, New York has informed me that American readers don’t desire what I have to offer. “If it’s not mystery or thriller the public will not buy it,” she said cooly while balancing one of her auburn haired, two year old twins on her lap. I told her that new mothers may crave escapism but they do not reflect the general public. She quickly assumed the air of moral authority that anyone who has a child takes with anyone that does not have a child and told me that most Americans work very hard and yes, do crave escapism. In effect, she is not the outlier, I am.

I’ll concede that he may have a point, I suppose. This is the story of my dead friend.