The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

I just received an email from my voice teacher that one of her student's 15 year old brother killed himself a few nights ago. Of course, this made me think of when ER killed himself.

I remember the phone call I got at 9am, from Lauren. I remember not being surprised at all. After she told me we sat on the phone in silence and CC beeped in on my other line. "Did you hear?" He asked. He was out of town at the time and was extremely upset about it. We calmly discussed how our friend was found, hanging, from his bunk bed. I remember telling CC I'd call him if I heard anything else. It was fine. I was fine. I walked out into the living room to put the phone back on its charger and all of a sudden, like a ton of bricks, it hit me. ER was dead. He was dead and he wasn't ever coming back. ER was dead and gone. I sat on the floor in the middle of the room and sobbed uncontrollably. Completely unable to catch my breath, or stand up. CJ walked in the room, concerned. I tried to explain to him what happened but I couldn't form the words. I couldn't bring myself to tell someone he was gone. I called Nana. There was nothing she could have said that would have made it better, and there was certainly nothing she said that led me to believe she understood. It was four days before my birthday.

I had just seen ER a week prior when he was suspended from school for possession of some sort of knife, I think. He and I had been inseperable in Drama Class and partnered up for just about everything. I didn't know ER as well as the rest of my friends knew him, but all the same, for the next few months I didn't know what to do with myself. I remember thinking how odd it was that the world just kept turning, the TV running, the radio playing, people laughing when a human life had just been put to rest. How odd it was that such tragedy could strike and virtually everything was unaffected.

A year to the day we gathered around his grave stone. 7 or 8 of us. It was December and extremely cold outside. Adorned in sweaters, scarves, gloves and hats we sat around him in a circle on the cold rocks. It wasn't so much that we talked about him, but that we talked around him and with him. We talked about some funny times we'd had with him, but we felt as though everything had already been said. There was only so much we could say about our friend who we hadn't seen in a year. One by one we got in our cars and left until only ER remained. We laughed at the fact that maybe he wasn't dead. Maybe he was playing a huge joke on us and one day he'd show up at school and we'd all sigh a sigh of relief and move on. This was never the case. ER never walked up the stairs and through the gates again, at least not ER as we knew him. At graduation, three years later, we had a moment of silence for him and a boy who had recently passed away in a motorcycle accident. Even then, May 22nd, three years later, we looked at each other with sad eyes and felt how surreal it all had been, and still was. ER was dead and he still wasn't coming back.