One April Morning

Sometimes I wonder what it is I would leave behind, as my legacy, if I died tomorrow. It’s important to me that I will be remembered, lovingly, which is partly what draws me to writing. As Jorge Luis Borges once said:

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

I don’t have any books to my name, yet, but I have this blog, which will do, for now.

*     *     *

A boy I used to know died this year. One of the things he left behind was a video of himself playing the guitar. He is sitting alone, on the ground, in a grey concrete stairwell, six months before his death. It is only accessible by friends, so you’ll have to trust me when I say: he was talented. Oh, so talented.

I saved it to my bookmarks and I play it, sometimes, when I am alone, and I want to feel something. I close my eyes and listen. And I cry, every time, without fail. Just as I cry as I write these words, his music playing as a backing track, informing my thoughts, prompting me to remember.

My favourite part is when somebody, making their way down the stairs, interrupts him. I hear his voice, one last time. “Dude, the acoustics are amazing in here,” he tells the stranger, with a smile. “So beautiful.”

That is when my heart swells, from my chest to my throat, and the tears start to fall, from the pain; because I remember that smile.

It’s the smile I sporadically fell in love with - as much as a 12-year-old can be in love - during dance classes at year seven camp, my fickle adolescent heart bursting with his easy charm. The smile ever-present in our high school music classes, teasing me as I started dating one of his best friends; the smile I glimpsed in the rear vision mirror on weekends, as he drove us around town aimlessly in his shiny blue car. And the smile I unexpectedly came across again two years ago at a cafe, our separate lives crossing orbit one last time, futile promises to catch up floating in the air between us, a lingering shadow that haunts me to this day.

I cry for a life lost. I cry for unfulfilled potential. I cry at the sheer beauty of his music; his agile fingers, his talent, his passion. I cry for memories of a time gone by. I cry for the end of possibilities.

I cry, tormented by the tragedy implicit in his last words: "I don't want to die".

We weren’t each other’s closest friends. But he touched me, during his short life. Maybe I touched him, too. I’ll never know. 

I wish you could see the video, too. It may change your life. Or it may not.

Maybe you had to be there.

"You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile."

— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars