There are so many testimonies

I have been notorious for not responding well to tragedy. Not crisis, not emergency. I do well there. I create a sense of levity and try to calm people. No, not that, when tragedy strikes though, I go blank and feel nothing and then it slowly hits me for a week, two weeks, months, months.

I've had a lot of people die around me. I've watched old friends and acquaintances die. Flip over, fall down, whatever. Whatever. I don't know why Reynolds High School was a place of so many deaths. I don't know. I'm not processing anything.

Another of my friends died last night. This is the strangest it's been. When Victor passed last summer, I knew how to deal with it: blasting "Only the Good Die Young" and crying. For days. When Nick Vining killed himself my freshman year, I demonized him and then cried under his desk, and then demonized him.

Those aren't the best strategies for dealing with tragedy, but they were how I was going to deal, regardless. Plan set. Those were the two deaths that hit me the hardest. I was reeling from both of those, but this one,

One of my best friends died last night and I'm just not dealing with it. "That's the right way, Joel, because there is no right way." Pat on the back. "Feel better."

I appreciate it, all, but I don't feel bad. I haven't processed it. Nobody knows how to respond to death and nobody, except trained professionals, know how to respond to those who are responding to death.

I just want to go away for a while. I just want to walk for a couple miles and stare at the water. I don't want to be hassled.

One of my other friends, a mutual friend with my dead friend, she told me that we should try to publish his music. Hendrix-style posthumous. Or maybe Van Gogh-style. Beethoven. In death, he will become a legend. Maybe, is my response. Yeah, sure. Is that honoring his legacy? Would he want his legacy honored?

No, I think he would want to get paid to play music while he was alive. Right?

And there's no solace in hell.


I am disappointed I didn't get to hear his last album, the one he recorded this summer. I'm disappointed he only had recently came to terms with who he was and was able to admit it. He lived with this knowledge only a month, two at the most. I'm disappointed that he didn't get to sell his music for a livable wage. He will only live in stories and caricatures and pictures and digital graveyards, he won't be able to give his testimony. That's what's hitting me now. He's silent.