http://www.startribune.com/local/south/118025164.html
I knew that kid.
And now he's dead.
I found out over a Facebook message, of all things. His mother must have sent out a message to all of his Facebook friends, a brief, generic message telling that he died in a car crash. A freaking car crash. In fiction, a car crash is a euphemism for "killed by plot." You forget that since it is used as a generic cause of death, that it really does happen a lot to people. Sometimes people you know.
I'm sure there's a plot in here somewhere, though. I met him in high school. In a film club that a mutual friend had started, and even though I had no particular interest in film, he needed a certain number of people to keep the club going, I liked the people there, and I had no better way to spend a Friday afternoon.
I think we first started talking when I was reading Stephan King's Dark Tower series. (Of course everything comes down to books in my life.) He thought they were the best thing ever. I thought they were good, but kind of a mindscrew. I gave him a copy of King's Insomnia for his seventeenth birthday.
And my senior year of high school, his junior year, I was not so dense as to miss the fact that he sort of indirectly asked me to prom. But I was dumb enough to accept. I brought my best female friend along, because it wasn't like a date or anything, I didn't like him that way...and I think I forgot to make that quite clear. But hey, prom is an important plot point in any high school drama, and I was intrigued by the image of doing something so normal as going to plot with a boy (and a girl). I wore a dress that night for the first time in about 12 years. And even though I had probably one of the sweetest, most gentlemanly prom-boys (not a date) ever, I realized that night that I would never be able to like him as he (might have) liked me. He was a nice boy, but he was still a boy, with a boy's sense of humor and a boy's taste in literature, and we didn't really have much in common anyway. Nothing about him even struck me as particularly interesting, though admittedly I was wary of getting too close to him. But his friends seemed to like him, and when I say he was nice, I'm not just searching for a generic, positive adjective; he really was one of those people that really tried to be polite and never really acted like a jerk.
So then I graduated, and we went on with our respective lives. I thought of him only occasionally, mostly as a stepping-stone in my coming out story. There was a squirmy feeling of unresolved issues, that I never really told him I didn't like him back, because I was not quite sure that he really liked me as such. And going along with that, that I never came out with him. That I more or less went to prom with him under false pretenses. I felt that I had used him. But such is life, and you move on until the pain is nearly forgotten, and you never see these people again, except perhaps at a reunion, or by mystical accident.
But not even that will happen. I'll never be able to explain any of this to him. That brings me no relief. The only relieved feelings I have that I might feel guilty about are because I am in Germany and don't have to feel obligated to go to the funeral, to mingle with his relatives, and his friends who I vaguely knew in high school. People who feel a greater absence for his loss than I do.
It's strange. When someone close to you dies, you go through the grieving process, that's perfectly understandable. But when someone dies who wasn't particularly close to you but you knew beyond merely a face and a name, you don't know how you're supposed to feel. Or you feel guilty because you aren't sad enough. There's just shock, and the guilty relief at surviving this round, but you're still shaken by how close it was. And of course life/death doesn't work like that, but emotions don't know that.
Plot: A lesbian goes to prom with a boy who dies two years later. What a stupid story. I've put up with my Author's inanity thus far, but he really has a lot to answer for now.
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