Richie finally did it. Walked in front of an ambulance on Boxing Day, died a few days later. Dan Hughes told me over the net-lines, so I don’t particularly have the details. It’s a shame striking a hollow chord within me. Last I’d heard, he was doing better, out of the hospital. Bill and I stayed with him when we went to the Island second summer back. We sat on the back porch in the dark and talked about politics and music and the swirling moments that make up the world. I was on a porch swing and there were cold beet bottles in their hands, something golden. Plastic covered seats behind a upper class house, he had a room in the basement with framed Metropolis posters. We curled up there and watched The Muppets, drumming the walls with laughter. His mother collects fairies, there was a room of them upstairs where we slept. Little framed pictures of flowers. He drove us in his VW van on a search for Bill’s crazy mother. Apparently rumour had it that she was feeling better, but we never found the cabin. Instead we spent time at the bookstore and I bought a book that he sold to them only a few weeks before. There was a letter inside from somebodies mother, thanking him for giving her son music lessons. One Thousand and One Nights, he was wretched at answering his e-mail.
I wonder how Bill is doing. Richie was his best friend. I imagine he called Trish about it, but he never told me. I’d never have known if it weren’t for finding Dan on-line a few months ago. It’s a habit I get into, thinking that I’m going to be important enough to be remembered, but I really should quit as much as he needs to finally quit smoking. I’d like to tell myself that I knew Richie better, but I didn’t. It’s not as hard for me as Jon hanging himself, but it adds a sorrow to my day. The empty space is getting bigger, though it’s being filled with bodies. Jon I loved and will continue to. I’d like to send my condolences but I don’t know what to say.
I suppose this is part of being older. Friends kill themselves or die in accidents. It’s a Fact of Life like everything else. Relationships, affairs, how the neighbor steals your newspaper daily. It’s poison gas to think about, a miasma of “my friends are killing themselves”. I can’t think of Jon without crying, so I think around him. I think of his big hands and the way he got his hair cut, but when I think of how he would phone, I hold his voice to my heart like burning sand. We had a game of flirting too seriously. His hands would inch up my thighs until I stopped him, I would hold his eyes and claim something outrageous, severely physical, until he laughed. It was a terrible game, terrible like formidable, terrible like intense. He would scare me, I loved it. Warm heat in his hugs, it was ridiculous and charming. I wrote a letter to his mother, but never sent it. It sits in an envelope, stamped, ready to fly from my room, and I look at it. I hold the rectangle of paper and glue and consider sending it, but somehow I never do.
When I get back to Vancouver, I’m going to. My silence is a crime.