Makes you think...

I walked by it today, for what may have been the first time all year – and looking into that murky green water, I was suddenly transported from a rainy fall day in 2004 back to a sunny afternoon in May of 2003. He jumped in and never resurfaced. Something inside me snapped when I saw them pull that lifeless body from the algae-clouded water, when they pounded on his chest for what seemed like an eternity, desperately trying to restore a heartbeat, when they finally loaded him into the ambulance and sped off… when I heard a few hours later that he was dead. I’d seen dead people before – experienced death both expected and unexpected, but always tragic – but I’d never watched someone die right there in front of me. I didn’t even know him, but watching his young life come to an end struck something within me. I think it was the last of an onslaught of emotionally traumatizing events that year, and it sent me over the edge. Something changed in me – my attitude, my perspective – I’d been miserable for ages, and I didn’t even realize it. Now I knew. The death of another always makes people contemplate their own mortality, and I think witnessing the actual event had an even greater effect on me. It sparked a period of excruciating introspection that would continue over the following months, eventually resulting in my acceptance of my disease (clinical depression, general anxiety disorder), my realization of my sexuality, and my reevaluation and redefinition of my relationship with my mother. Now, I don’t attribute all these changes directly to the death of A.R. – it’s just that the tragic events of that day were kind of the straw that broke this camel’s back. I stepped back, took a look at my life, and realized I wasn’t living it the way I wanted to. Hell, I was hardly living it all. And now every time I walk by that festering man-made lake, I think about what happened that bright, sunny day in May 2003, about who I was then and who I have since become.

Rest in peace, A.R. You’ll not be forgotten.