Today, I went into work to find a note that popped up repeatedly throughout the store informing staff of a shattering event: A coworker of ours had committed suicide yesterday morning. The boy in question was a quiet kid, kept to himself, and we weren't friends by any stretch of the word, but I tried to say hi to him every time I let him in in the morning. I felt shook up, like someone had pushed into the record player of my brain, jarring the needle out of its habitual groove. I thought that if I felt this disoriented about the loss of someone I just brushed elbows with occasionally, I cannot begin to fathom the loss of someone closer, someone whose elbows never left yours, someone who saved more than a good morning smile for you.
It seems that I've been faced with death a lot this year. Just a few months ago, my boyfriend's coworker drowned after jumping off a bridge after a party, and I actually had a panic attack and couldn't go into work. The finality of it cut me deep, the internalization of the idea that today something that had once moved, breathed, laughed, texted, just hours before, was simply ended, gone. With little to no explanation. I'm trying to describe the feelings I've been nudging against today, and it's hard, mostly because I think we think about death in such cliché ways that when it finally breaks into our little bubbles, that is the only way we know to respond, with half-baked thousand-times-used phrases that everyone will know. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the emptiness of the words lets others know that we feel the same, we have no words as well. I don't know.
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