When I found out he died, relief washed over me.

 

I wrote about every memory I had of him, trying to nail down something genuine and raw about my emotions at the time, and my thoughts about those memories now. Memory is no different than any other biological phenomenon: it’s squishy and slippery and has layers of strange, grotesque beauty hidden underneath a simmering skin that holds in the moisture and the heat that constitutes a life. That skin can be breached easily; that skin can heal.

 

The more I wrote, the less the details seemed to hold any particular significance. Everything now was tinged with everything that would come later. What’s the joke? That time exists so that everything doesn’t happen all at once. The more I remembered, the more I realized I had forgotten, or hadn’t understood at the time about how the universe fits together. I still don’t understand how I felt at the time, and how that impacted how I acted, and what that meant for my interpretation of the actions of others. 

 

The more I tried to piece it all back together, the more I had to accept that not only was some sort of definitive Truth always lost to time – that some sort of definitive Truth might not really exist, that it might be too complicated, too branched and thorny to ever weave a cohesive narrative out of the pieces and stay true to the reality as lived. That the relief I felt when I learned he was dead, mixed as fully as it was with guilt, anger, deep regret, and a particularly cruel shard of indifference, the relief might have been a sudden inhale after more than a decade spent holding my breath for the window to close. I had to contend with the realization that, even though all these years I thought I wanted his side of the story, and might at one time have wanted it, and benefited from it, thatyat one time he might have benefited from being able to tell his side and have me judge the veracity of it, an event I was certain would happen someday, the next chapter – now, on this day, in this timeline I was certain that I wanted the ambiguity. I didn’t want to write the story together for the last twelve years, and I still don’t. 

 

In lieu of reaching out to old friends and digging up old dirt, I spent the last decade connecting with pop culture. When Sally Jupiter tells her daughter about how her relationship with the Comedian wasn’t all bad, insisting that memory has a way of obscuring certain details and illuminating others, I understood and thought of him. When Ted Chiang talks about forgetting as a mercy, one technology is stealing from us, I said amen and prayed to forget. When I read Women Talking, I wanted to gather together all the women who had been in his orbit and spend two days hashing out everything we know for certain, everything we suspect, and cry together, and decide what exactly is within our power to make this situation livable going forward.

 

Each time I see a slant reflection of what I’ve felt I am charged like an angry particle, ready to catch and burn it all to the ground like Danerys. Reading about the abuse of others triggers that aching in my bones, and I want to pull everything towards myself and then with the snap of my fingers pulverize it like Jean Grey.

 

I want to be like the Moon: cold and calm, a thoughtful witness, returning faithfully in her own inscrutable timing (relative to the Sun), and on her own trajectory. I cannot be the moon when I am brightly shining of my own accord, when I am on fire. I look to culture for a new paradigm to use as a point of reference for my thoughts, which always race past words, and find an imperfect precedent for remaining ablaze: Tatooine had two suns.

 

Every permutation of grief and relief and attempting to define what exactly I’m feeling about his death and his life and my own life and own eventual death, and all the awful ways we all treated each other back then, like experiments, like lab rats!, and about sex without romance, and romance that’s not cloying and trite but lived, like the difference between the idea of a flower and the reality of one reverberates through me, the echoes bouncing off each other into a glorious cacophony. Every friendship is a little romantic, every conversation is an impossible tangle of misunderstanding from which only sometimes emerges a miraculously accurate interpretation. All communication is charades, all meaning emergent. The eternal question - is it, or isn’t it? - boils down to moot. All that ever was will one day no longer be; and all that has not been could be in the future.

 

Here is what I know: that he and I had a lot of fantastically acerbic conversations, the sort promised me by Jane Austen and Amy Sherman-Pallidino. Proximity means circumstance chooses your friends to some extent, but that there was a time when we were in the same place, and we hung out more frequently than either of us hung out with plenty of other people in those same places at those same times. That I thought of us as peers, that I assumed he thought of me as a full human being as well. And so I believed that sex would not be a subjugation but an act we participated in together, a continuation of the conversation.

 

It was at the time and remains troubling to me that I felt the need to affirm my autonomy immediately after the fact, and then over and over. And so our friendship came to hinge on this fulcrum of a night, and two equally probable options forever forked my understanding of the friendship in its entirety: either I felt something that he did not intend, in which case I killed our friendship with misplaced mistrust, or else he did see things the way I suspected and so I can’t see how we were ever really friends in the first place. It is in this Superposition that our friendship came to rest, and here I choose to let it live indefinitely in its unknowable truth.

 

Again, my rage burns, but now I see how the rage is fueled by fear. Fear that I am capable of hurting someone unwittingly, fear that I am capable of looking someone in the eyes and being cruel. Fear that I am vulnerable in this world that runs on trust, that I harm myself first when I do not trust, and yet it is harder and harder to find a reserve of it to extend to those around me with every passing day. And again I seek to chill the righteous anger, to better observe things without the psychic interference of heat, to contain the flood of tears. Fires burn out, water dries up, and we all die.

 

But I am not yet dead.  So I find myself considering how I might generate Passive Outcomes. That I might exist and through simply existing, shine brightly and not burn, draw near to those on Earth in a way that a burning thing could not, to move the tides and the minds of the living over millennia.

 

I implore myself and you, dear reader: Do not let yourselves become blinded by the Sun, but instead consider again the Resplendent Moon. If you are quiet enough, you can hear her singing:

 

“It is possible to shine without burning;

To make an impact without crashing and crushing.”

 

Go out on a clear night and listen for yourself. The moon is made of the same stuff as Earth, like a little splash of fluid that broke free of the surface tension of the larger mass to become a world unto itself. The dot on the exclamation, the amen of the congregation. The indisputable fact of an alternative.