Turning 40 – Category is: Life
I would have to say that I became disconnected from other people after the election of Trump. That didn’t really bother me too much since I feel mostly disconnected from society as a whole anyway what with people constantly trying to villainize gays. I guess heteros need a scapegoat, don’t they? Or I guess society just needs something to hate; humans need something to hate. The part of it that did bother me was finding out what kind of people my friends really were underneath. Needless to say after 2016 I’d lost yet another group of friends and found myself all alone and feeling trapped in the situation I’m in. Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.
More or less at this point I’m in what I would call an uneasy alliance with the people I rent the house I live in from, and with my coworkers. But I’m sure, given the opportunity, someone will pull the trigger in this massive Mexican standoff first. And maybe, just maybe, if I keep my wits about me I’ll still be alive when the dust settles. I’ve managed for the last 4 years to avoid going to any social functions at grandma’s house because of their support of…well, you know…and now thanks to the endless daily horrors brought on by COVID-19 I don’t need to make up any more white lies about why I don’t want to go over there. But in all honesty, the unraveling of this group of friends started long before 2016 happened. It started with Candice.
Candice
Candice, Jason and myself were pretty much inseparable in high school and for a time after. I met them during the first session of the school’s first Gaming Club when they noticed I was reading the official player’s guide to Chrono Trigger from Nintendo (thanks Chrono Trigger!) Even among my own people back then, I was still hella awkward and didn’t really know how to open up. Fortunately for me, the three of us were pretty awkward together. Sometimes I can still hear the cheerful way she’d say my name on the phone when we were still in school, or the way she’d ramble on and on. The girl definitely had a motor mouth when she was excited about something.
Some time after high school, she met a guy named Steven and they eventually married and had three children together. Some years after that, her health began to fail because she really didn’t take care of herself. She had a pretty serious case of diabetes that eventually required that she have surgery to amputate one leg from the knee down and three toes from the foot of her other leg (which leg was which I couldn’t tell you at this point). You’d think that after such an ordeal a person would heed the warnings of their doctors, but not her. She continued to eat sweet stuff like it was going out of style. Not long after I moved into my current home in 2008, her husband found her dead on the couch. She had passed away sometime overnight. She was among the youngest of us. But this was the point; this was the moment. It was a terrible truth that I already knew and had learned in 1998, but now the others would learn it too. This was the crack in their armor, the moment that they all learned that death comes for us all, no matter the age. Youth doesn’t make you invincible. It never did.
I remember her funeral being an awkward affair. Ghosts that I had assumed I would never see again were there. We made eye contact as I walked in. In that instant, all the feelings washed over me like a dam bursting after a hurricane. I suppressed it all and sat on the opposite side of the chapel intentionally. I sat quietly and listened to more Christian lies about the afterlife and Heaven and God. None of it comforted me. I know she’s worm food, why can’t the rest of you accept that too? But no matter, I’m not here to philosophize about what happens when we die. The awkwardness intensified during the service when Jason got up and said that he was willing to bury the hatchet with our former friends. He offered the olive branch, but I already knew it was a futile attempt and kept my silence. More awkwardness came when the ghosts came and told me they missed me after the service was over. Their platitudes were met with a simple “I know” not unlike that of Han Solo shortly before being frozen in carbonite. I didn’t wish to even bother trying to rekindle whatever kind of friendship we’d had in the past. I knew their true colors at this point, and they were ugly.
She was an organ donor and I found out some years later that her remains that weren’t used had been cremated. Steven still has her ashes as far I know, in an urn in a closet somewhere. Her death brought about the idea that they weren’t young and invincible anymore, but little changed. A thread had been pulled out of the tapestry but we found a way to continue weaving despite the damage. That was, until the next thread was pulled.
Tyler
Ever since Tyler died we, as a group, really can’t stand to be in the same room with each other, in all honesty. I’m not saying that he was the linchpin that held the group together, I think it’s the realization that we’re all going to die and we just don’t want to get attached to each other maybe? And we don’t want to go through all that pain again? Whatever dynamic/passion that was there between the lot of us I think has pretty much run its course. I see his face everywhere, you know. I see some feature on a stranger’s face and think to myself ‘yeah, I could see him being that or doing that’. It’s maddening really, not to have him here anymore.
His death really came out of the blue. He had decided to join the military and after being deployed to Afghanistan, was killed in an accident when a gate fell off the hinges and crushed him to death. He was airlifted to Germany where his family was flown and it was there that they made the difficult decision to take him off life support. He hadn’t shown any signs of recovery and was basically a vegetable. This was definitely the death in the group that put the crack in the armor. For a time after this, there was definitely a lot more sweetness among us, a lot more caring. Eventually that all washed away and we more or less started going our separate ways. Then 2016 happened and I totally excommunicated myself from anything dealing with any of them. I withdrew and started to keeping to myself. Four years later and my reclusiveness has gotten a lot worse. It definitely didn’t help that all of them said nothing when my 40th birthday rolled around, save Alex. I guess as much as we annoy each other at times, we’re probably stuck with each other at this point.
I guess at this point, what with people being selfish and careless, all I need do is wait for another death in the “family” to happen. It will surely come, bringing with it more change and more unpleasantness, more awkwardness, more nothingness. I care for none of it. I’ll simply leave a final thought:
“We should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is still time.”