I sat next to you under the bridge. Our borrowed bikes lay abandoned against the concrete and the strange yellow overhead light illuminated the space. The light punctured the rain and bounced off the walls, making the graffiti look dramatic and eerie. Everything seemed tense and irreverent…. Like the guy spray painting across the road or the cars that drove by in the darkness, their engines echoed by the rock, making them louder and more invasive. All of this held us in a moment. Atlanta held us in a moment. The moment when we found the wheat-pasted newspaper clippings from the 1800s… obituaries from a mysterious double suicide. And then the grief wall: A strangers face plastered along the bridge, torn down, and tagged over, and pelted by the rain. It was your grief on the wall, open, raw, and available for others to mourn or desecrate. The emotion was present, like a sense, and I could feel it, pure and fresh as though a year had never passed.

You ask me if you made a grief wall if I thought that strangers would tag over it too?

I said that I didn’t know. I didn’t know a lot of things. But you said that people never know, never know what to say, and are so afraid of saying the wrong things that they say nothing at all. And you told me that the silence was worse. So I told you that I didn’t know what to say, just so that I could say something.

And you cried. I held your hand, and you cried. I sat next to you on the concrete, while the rain soaked the bottoms of our pants, and we chain-smoked cigarettes, and I held your hand, and you cried.

You told me about Stef and about Carly. You told me about the phone calls, about their funerals, about their mothers. You talked about grief and support and understanding suicide.

You told me that you wished they were ghosts.

You talked about how the grief doesn’t just go away and how people expect you to get over it and move on. But time can’t just heal all wounds and your grief felt as raw as it had a year ago. And how every time you saw someone, you wondered if it would be the last time, and how every time the phone rang, you wondered who died. You told me that people never talked to you about their deaths because they didn’t know what to say, or didn’t want to bring it up, or didn’t want to trigger you… but you told me that you were thinking about it all the time, a constant loop. And that all you needed was space to talk. So I listened. And you apologized for burdening me, but I didn’t know how to tell you that you’ve never been a burden to me.

You told me that you understood why they killed themselves, that you understood that the first and second suicides were not coincidences. You told me that you knew how Stef’s death had triggered Carly’s death and that both of those deaths were triggering your own. And I thought about my own suicidal ideations and I wondered about the plausibility of death. I wondered about how you understood suicide, how you made sense of what seemed senseless… and how the irrational becomes rational.

And you told me about how you almost killed yourself. You told me about how you almost killed yourself when I didn’t come meet you in April. When I told you that I had other things to do. When I didn’t understand the urgency of the situation. Because I didn’t understand that you were leaving your room for nearly the first time in nine months to thrust yourself into another continent, using everything you had left, looking for support and a way to keep yourself alive. I didn’t know what I had severed in that moment. You told me about the last text message that you had ever sent to Stef, the last contact that you had with her. You told her that you would see her when you got back from Perth. You said that you didn’t think that she intended to die and you wondered if it would have been different if you had been there, if you had heard her, if you had reached out. And the parallels felt too stark to reconcile. And I wondered what the differences were. I wondered what kept you there, next to me.

You told me that you wondered how loud we have to scream for help. And I wondered why I hadn’t heard you.

I remembered other moments with you. Like when you met me in the middle of the commons in the pouring rain. I remembered how you split a bottle of colt 45 with me, and we both hoped the fence and climbed the mud-pile. And danced and screamed and drank in our underwear. And it wasn’t until later, when we were lying in my bed, warm after a hot shower… our first shower together where we peeled off our layers to stand naked, vulnerable and connected, that you finally asked me what was wrong.

Or, I remembered staying up late with you in a hotel room in Arizona and you told me that when you were little you said to your dad that your feet felt far away from you. And he told you that your feet were you. And you asked me if my feet felt far away, too?

Well, my feet have always been far away. But you were the first person who brought them a little bit closer. You were the first person to make me believe myself, who taught me to believe my own understandings of this world so that I could exist. You were one of the first people who allowed me to connect to myself so that I could connect to others. In so many ways you have been home to me.

So I could say that I have regrets and yes, that’s partially true. Because I do have regrets. There are so many moments I would have changed, so many words I would have said differently. But the whole truth is that you are still here. And in so many more ways, I feel lucky. I feel lucky that I didn’t lose you, like you lost Stef and you lost Carly. I feel lucky that I didn’t lose you like so many others have lost people they love. Like some people reading this probably have. And for those losses, I am deeply sorry. I know that I cannot understand your pain.

Mostly I feel lucky for the opportunity to still have words to say. So I am learning how to talk and I am learning how to listen. I am learning how to forgive myself for not talking about it sooner and also learning how to talk about it now. I am learning how to talk about death, and about grief, and about pain. I learning how to allow space for the honesty of pain and not expect everything to be okay. And I am learning how to make space in my communities to talk about death, for myself and for others. I am learning how to heal, how to build healthy relationships, and how to create a culture of support. I am learning how to not abandon you. I am learning how to be brave enough to stay, even when it hurts and even when it scares the shit out of me because I do not want to be scared of you or me or what we have to face together in this world we live in. I am learning how to take care of myself and learning that sometimes that means taking care of each other. So I am learning how to connect, how to be honest, and how to be vulnerable.

And it’s hard.
But I am learning how to work on this shit.
And like our post-apocalyptic survival skills, scribbled on notebooks and scrap paper, in coffee shops, behind dumpsters and while drinking beer beside the parking lot…

I want to work on this shit with you.
Because in the very most basic way, all I want is to be here with you.