Rest in Peace, 17

Day16: We can’t feel the loss of a friend until they are apart from us. Grieving the loss of a friend can truly be painful as we pick our friends – they are the family we choose, cause they share some qualities which we identify with; while relatives are thrust on us by pure chance.

Perhaps why the grief I feel today – the loss of a friend, the loss of someone I loved once upon a time, the memory of high-school love, and the loss associated with it – is way greater than the grief I felt from losing J. Perhaps this is the shock I needed to be over a man-child closely surrounded by morons (Si-mon, for example). Perhaps this is what I needed to get out of the spiral, a trap, set up by a narcissist, and abused by his “constellation of social connections”. But in it all, I cannot overlook a new kind of pain.

This pain is a pain of losing a friend/ex-bf/intellectual sparring partner. He wasn’t the macho man, but was every bit the ethical man — just like many males who mature in confusion. But to be able to distinguish between a man who has violent impulses (believed to be “biologically attributed”) and a man who is that what his positionality makes him (agency), helped me understand that not just women but men too have to cope with dichotomy. Just their predicament is slightly less socially imposed, less bullied into submission, than that of women.

And then there was 17.

I can only think how much joy 17 must be bringing to those he is meeting behind the veil. Or perhaps he will just sit there intellectually sparring some angels, throwing them off guard with his comments on Marx! Meeting up with Buddha and asking him questions… “why not? How do you know? Why shouldn’t it be? Insufferable know it all!”; that would cause a second Nirvana to happen in cosmos! Nirvana hierarchy. Provoking them like the intellectual poltergeist he has always been.

Somewhere though, I feel guilty. It just hurts to know that 17 and I didn’t get together for barbecue at the beginning of this year, cause I was giving so much time to J. All that time, effort, love, sacrifice, was for nothing. Was simply a fluke, his “love-bombing”.

Lesson learnt. How you show me even when you are gone. You will always have my love. At the back of my head… part of my mind where thoughts and memories are kept, not usually thought about nor perfectly remembered. Somewhere in the back of my mind I know you will live on forever. Or atleast, my forever.

Rest in peace, 17.