To the girl crying on the stairs outside my dorm last night at 1 AM.
i was walking along the sidewalk parallel to my dorm — my dorm on my left, you in the front, sleeping grass on the right, moon above, you get the picture — when i saw/heard you. you were leaning against the rails, going up and down steps four and five. a streetlight at the bottom. i remember it casting your shadow long behind you; i remember your profile in clear relief. i remember your crying into your hands, not facing away from busybodies like me.
in grief there must be stages. there’s the grief that quietly sneaks up on you not unlike the feeling of wet egg yolk running down the chest’s insides, and it takes a while to place the feeling, which is something more than loss, anger, or sadness, which is something of a novel combination of all three.
there’s the one that wells in some deep act-iii-of-zelda stomach temple-pool that slyly paws at the strings puppeteering the lower lip and that, if you let it, pours out all at once and leaves the body gasping and impotent, like the worst orgasm in the world, like a withdrawing alcoholic grasping blindly at Kleenex and door locks instead of Jameson and a gun.
and and and there’s the one that claws at the body and renders it senseless until the choices you make are, from a very long and safe distance away, funny, but there’s no orgasm-as-relief here to be found among the barren struggle to let out a fluid faster than its pressure will let you so you are At Capacity and it strangles you, here’s how: it has delicate little ropes that find their way across your neck like ten little boa constrictors; they know where to press and contract to make you fidget from steps four and five at 1 AM in the morning, too dumbfounded — to even choose a place away from the world and the light — by whatever uncontrolled chemical cocktail our physiology has stuck you with.
phone in a hand attached to some formal-attire dress that seemed beautiful and hilarious against the three-degree weather around you, i made some stupid, wrong assumptions about you. i assumed you were going through a Relationship Thing. i assumed you were in grief level three, something i have only witnessed a few times in my life, something i have never experienced.
and i did not know what to do. these thoughts of sympathy, of intense identification and outpouring of metaphorical golden bonds of sharing and caring and hugging — crap to you, i’m sure — all come later. in that moment i stopped at the bottom of the steps, at an intersection where i would normally turn left and head into a great gleaming lit-up overpriced grocery store, and stared at you. i took a few steps toward you and a few steps back. how was i to console you? how was i, at the threshold of sobriety and wisdom, to help you? surely what you needed then was a best friend, or a mother, or a counselor. surely what you needed was not a human reaching out to you to ask if you were ok, how silly that would be to give up nothing but a few seconds to reach out to people who need it the most, how silly it would be to work up the courage to talk to you, how silly it would be the extend the most rudimentary of all human connection, “are you OK are you OK are you OK?”, which is shorthand for “you are not alone you are not alone you are not alone?.!—”
it has taken me a long time to realize that i cannot know what goes on in the cranial cavities and crevices of people, that i cannot fundamentally change people to be in the image i have of them, that people are not Platonic ideals or Jungian archetypes. and it will take longer still for me to be OK, to be OK with that.
and finally i left and walked to the grocery store and felt inexplicable shame and and and and guilt and and and and inhuman. and, god, i bought you a bar of dark chocolate — because surely that’s what you like because that’s what i like, because surely that makes sense — and when i walked back you were gone — because surely people stay in the place they are decomposing around, because surely there are second chances for people like me who say no and overthink and dawdle and equivocate. and and and and, god, i just left the chocolate there, hoping you’d come back — of course that makes sense.
you were wearing uncomfortably high heels.
i dreamt about you.
in the breeze, your hair blew in a way that seemed all right and more tragic, all at once.
and i’m sorry.
and i hope you feel better, un-alone, un-not-OK in a god-awful place.
sincerely,
hao.