the accident

About a year ago I lost a friend in a preventable accident.

There was a moment right before. I realized that we should have talked about everything that needed talking through. And I realized we had left it too long.

Laying on a pale, scrubby rug in my Bangkok rental, some kdrama playing out pointlessly on the living room TV, I knew I couldn't let the loss destroy what had just begun. Even if, through all of that time in Asia and beyond, I wished so badly to share my adventure with him.

To go from near-constant contact with a person to none can feel like losing a limb. Amputations of this scale have found me over the years, but this wasn't like that. More like a hum in the back of my brain, unending. Here I am at the weekend market, bartering badly for pants, without him to tell. Here I am being overserved at a bar to the benefit of a Thai diplomat, without him to tell. Here I am riding a motorbike taxi at one in the morning, ears buzzing from the noise show across town, dress riding up on my thigh, in the ear of the driver to go faster, faster. Without him to tell.

One of the last conversations of any substance we ever had happened on a beach in Fukuoka. He said: if everyone else is always the problem, maybe there's a common denominator there.

Our last days. I had been whiny and dark all weekend. On the other side of this experience, I would know better than to assume perfect happiness over the first week in a new hemisphere.

I had just begun an excruciating breakup and had not even started to process the physical or emotional violence of those years, still locked into numbness as a protective habit. I was also going through what turned out to be marijuana withdrawal, which I hadn't known was physically possible until I was in a country with stringent anti-cannabis laws. For the curious, I can report that side effects include insomnia, sudden, sweaty nausea, loss of appetite (an immense tragedy if you happen to be in Japan at the time), a precarious mood, and vivid, unsettling dreams. This was all exacerbated, of course, by the jetlag.

So no, I was not in good shape, not in fine form as I had hoped, in our last days. I had come to celebrate, to party. Instead I drank yuzu highballs and felt like crying all the time. This is, I am aware, the gist of "live and learn."

One thing about a victim mentality, temporary or ingrained, is that it obscures your own wrongdoing. My first night in Japan saw me jerk awake from a romantic nightmare, where my friend and I kissed with the tenderness of old lovers. I say nightmare because the feeling permeating was one of shrill dread and sudden doom; a tone shift so foreboding I couldn’t shake it all weekend.

A significant part of me said to the other, Please don’t do this.

I had wondered, distantly, if there was more to our daily conversations, our feedback loop. Had determined it was only that: two people who liked to hear themselves talk. I became doubly sure when I met him at the airport and he radiated a defensive hostility I had never before felt from him.

In all honesty, I don't think my dear friend picked up on any of my distress--not the heartbreak, not the physiological maladies, not the harrowing dream. What he responded to was surface level: my negativity. I can't blame him, though given what would happen I wish he'd brought less of his own. I wish my last memories of him weren't of someone so hostile and unyielding. His time as a desultory teaching assistant in rural Japan had made or revealed him to be someone capable of casual misogyny, making remarks about appearance, criticizing women's knees for attractiveness as we'd pass.

"Too bony," he'd say, snapping his gum. "Knock-kneed."

This kind of talk made me uncomfortable existing near him, the first time I had ever felt that way. How could this person, the product of a 21st century Portland upbringing and someone I had confided in for years, also be someone who talked about women like they were unfuckably inferior? And more distressingly, why was I taking it personally?

The nightmare from the first night still loomed. Someone is not as you remember them.

I asked him how he was feeling. So much had been happening for both of us, loss mingled with excitement for ourselves that we struggled to own.

“Ready and rarin' to go," was the reply, followed by a throaty cough signaling incipient bronchitis.

We managed to have some fun. Walks through the city, raiding the Lawson for snacks and the vending machines for hot beverages to ward off the light chill. We went to the zoo and the botanical garden and stayed up late at interesting bars in Tenjin. We traveled up the height of the tower on the waterfront, talked about fate and mysticism over beers in an Irish pub. We skipped sushi because the sushi place had a line, and he didn't want to wait. We skipped karaoke because he had a cold, and didn't want to sing. We watched a horror movie while drunk and had a terrible time articulating boundaries.

The picture I paint of two basically unhappy people trying to get along is almost funny to me now. What were we even worried about?

Ah yes. There had been a lie--or a truth that became untrue with time. Something about my flight path. He felt deceived by my intentions.

When I initially wrote this I glossed over this aspect, but I want to speak to this part, because I cannot speak to him. I have once or twice been accused of ulterior motives. Part of me wants to say, "That's your insecurity at work," and leave it at that. And I think it sometimes is.

But I've come to realize that honesty of intention is an act of self-preservation. Worry has followed me my whole life that if I allow my true self to be known, rejection will be quick to follow. Love has remained in my mind a conditional force, like the law. Something to be skirted, or bludgeoned by, or slavishly honored even at its most unkind. And so love and fear are fully indistinguishable to me until they open their mouths.

All this to say I struggle to be honest about my feelings. To stomach their consequences.

And my friend was right. I had impure intentions. The summer previous, right before he left for Japan, for teaching, for the world, I had said goodbye and felt a chasm open underneath me midway home. My sense of bereavement and excitement, of envy and pride and love for the damn guy, collided. I struggled to parse the individual strains of feeling. The instinct was to hold on tighter. My terrible then-relationship exacerbated this, and instead of facing my unhappiness, I was guilty of taking my affection and hiding in drawn-out conversation with this, by now, very far away, inaccessable person. Like a coward.

By autumn the feeling felt important to talk about. I remember trying to talk about it, words uncharacteristically failing me. A distraction at the right moment. Simply, I couldn't face the rejection (disgust? betrayal?) I knew I'd receive. Even if, six months previous, the whole situation would have seemed absurd. Even if we already freely expressed affection, secure up to now in our friendship. There was nothing else to want.

The fall after he left, I was in the midst of planning my own trip. I knew I wanted to end my crappy relationship. I knew I wanted to visit my friend in Japan, an assuredly splashy kickoff to the adventure. And I knew if I could just see him, I'd know the score.

And I did. Man, I wished I didn't.

My sin: I told him the cheapest flight was through the city closest to him. This was briefly true, and then it wasn't, but I didn't want to lose the momentum. I don't know why I felt the need to lead with deception. He was a friend. He would have met me anywhere. I didn't want to ask. I didn't want to be told: not like that.

I spent that Japan weekend looking for the friend I remembered from the last six years. I'd swung through the country ostensibly to make sure he was okay out there, alone in the big world and fresh off a series of intense griefs. My friend, who encouraged me, called me out, laughed into my ear most days of the week. Where was he? Like a trick of light, looking at him straight on made him disappear.

On the final morning in Fukuoka, our heads still ringing from an indigo night at the whiskey bar, we shuffled out of our hotel and down into the subway, where the wheels of my suitcase on the grates made everyone wince until it was picked up and carried. (I had almost forgotten this but I remember he had to sit on my bag to help me close it that morning--packing for a circumnavigation in a carry-on is not easily done.)

He gave me a hug, told me he loved me. Which was true. I told him the same, that I'd be in better shape next time I visited. I don't think either of us bought the idea that there would be a next time.

Palpable relief upon leaving Japan. Shut down physically as I was, would continue to be for months following, I nevertheless registered that whatever had been making me feel pressed down all these days was now absent.

The accident where I lost him occurred within days of our shaky goodbye. Losing him took a week in all. And consequences linger, like radiation or the thing it actually was: heartbreak. Grief. This was a turning point. Some things are different now.

Such as, I come prepared with transparency.

Such as, I don't listen to Gillian Welch.

Such as, I am trying to stop hurting myself on purpose.

My friend and I met in an undergrad writing workshop. He could write a thousand words on meaning but he struggled to articulate his heart. More than once I’d read something of his and perceived that there was a deeper truth he wished to pull forward, only to run up against the wall of his own fear. Our fatal rupture issued from the same reality: it hurts to admit when something matters.