Sea of doubts

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Originally uploaded by Rachel Ariel.

What does it feel like, to really trust someone?

Suicide is a line in my life. A number of people I have known have crossed the line, one person has tried, and one person I know about has seriously considered it.

I have come just short, in this journal, of explaining how truly upsetting an experience high school was for me. During high school I became quite familiar with that line, and where it lay in my life. I took comfort in considering walking slowly across that line, but I never thought very hard about how to do it. It was more like an escape plan. Nice to know it was there, but not something I wanted to think about for long. But now... having been out of high school longer than I was in it... I wonder if I'm remembering clearly. Certainly I am not.

That, as interesting as it is, is not actually what I wanted to talk about. One of my best friends attempted suicide a couple of years ago. This was not just a friend, this was someone with whom I'd had a physical relationship, someone I was only just beginning to realize I loved, and someone I knew was intensely troubled.

What I am wrestling with right now is the idea of the fear of death. I am desperately afriad that the people I love will leave my life before I have a chance to tell them the important things. And that is incredibly selfish.

In the weeks before my friend tried to kill himself I knew something was wrong. People who had known him longer and better than I have asked me if it wasn't possible that I was over-reacting. When I described his catharsis, his complete lack of emotion, response, his complete lack of life, I think that for just one moment they understood just enough to know that in that moment, those of us who were there had not over-reacted.

But these are difficult thoughts. It is hard to keep them in my head. Almost as soon as my friend was out of direct danger I began to rationalize on his behalf. "He wasn't serious... it was a cry for help". This is something that we say to make ourselves feel better. Because it is incredibly upsetting to realize that somoene you love might be in such an intense amount of pain that you can't comprehend, or fix, and that you are not enough to make the person believe in the goodness of being alive.

These are all incredibly selfish ideas. I recognize that.

I have a friend who died almost exactly four years ago. She died in a car accident. I regret that I did not know her as well as I wanted to. It's not the kind of thing that I look back on and think "I wish I had known her better". I wished I had known her better when I was in a room with her. She was one of the people I couldn't believe would want to be my friend... she was so much more awesome than I. And I never got a chance to get to know her later, when I had a better sense of self worth. The point is that I knew then how amazing she was, and when I found out she had died I felt as though something had been stolen from me. I no longer had an opportunity to know her better.

When I get depressed now... I sometimes feel that I will have to go through the rest of my life having loss be as nearly constant as it was in those crucial years.

It feels hard for me to trust people that they will be in my life, that they won't suddenly disappear one day. I am not so secretly a control freak, and death frightens me.