I’m feeling a tad melancholy today. This is not new. There are a handful of days in the year where I get like this.
Today a guy I went to high school with would have turned 36. I say would have, because he died over 15 years ago.
I’ve written and spoken about him before. Heck, a lot of you either knew him, or knew me when it happened.
His name was Eoin, and a long time ago we used to be friends.
In year 12, Eoin and our group of friends spent most weekends together, my house, Katie’s house, some random party.
He was annoyingly smart, sarcastic and often moody. Which is probably why we were friends; I had the sarcastic and moody down to a T.
Case in point, we became friends in VCE when I walked into a classroom angry and flipped a table. In my defence, I thought Katie and I were the only people in the room until it was too late.
So, I flipped a table, and we were friends. Who said teenagers were complicated?
I’ve written about his death before. It was traumatic and it took me and my friends a very long time to come to terms with it. I won’t say to deal with it, because I don’t think anyone ever really deals with a loss like that.
For years I wouldn’t say his name when I’d talk about ‘my friend’ dying, it was always ‘my mate who died’. I could never combine the two.
When Eoin died, we hadn’t been friends for a couple of years, not really, he was an old school mate, and every time we would run into each other we’d say the same empty promise of ‘let’s catch up soon’. Whether it was an empty promise or an actual suggestion, we’ll never know. Time didn’t give us an option.
I carried a lot of guilt for a long time. It was a defining moment in my life, and I changed because of it.
If someone suggested that we catch up soon – I’d make it happen.
If a friend, heck even an acquaintance, seemed down/sad – I’d do whatever I could to be there for them.
I would try to be the person all my friends needed, all the time because I couldn’t lose another friend that way.
It sounds noble and shit, but it wasn’t, not really, not when I would hold it against my friends when it became too much. Whatever, I’m not perfect, we know this.
I carry guilt about Eoin because part of me feels like a fraud and that it shouldn’t have impacted me as severely as it did.
People were closer to him. People have lost people closer than we were. What right did I have to be so fundamentally broken because of it?
Fuck, it’s 15 years later and I still think about it. Talk about it. Write about it.
That doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem right that I still think about my friend calling and saying “He’s dead Tanya” while I was sitting in the Hungry Jacks car park at 9 in the morning on the 5th of March 2004.
It doesn’t seem right that it was only recently that I thought about how hard that must have been for her. To have to call people and tell them that he had died. How he’d died. That she had to repeat the same story 3 times within 3 minutes.
How did that break her? How did I not consider this?
We were so young, and it all seemed unfair and unprecedented. I refused to talk to my family about it. I think for a good 2 months I would only hang out with the people who were close friends with him. I’d only go home to sleep, or if I had no other options, I’d lock myself in my room.
I’d randomly drive to the place he died at all hours of the night, by myself, because I was very stupid and very sad.
I carry guilt because had Eoin not died, he’d be another person on Facebook that I used to go to school with, and who I never catch up with.
I know I’m being a little dramatic here. People grieve, I get that. There’s no rule book for who should or shouldn’t be sad.
I carry guilt because I remember being such a fucking bitch to him. I remember flippantly telling him to stop messaging me because I wasn’t made of money.
Because we weren’t friends anymore, and my last conversation with him was in the drive-thru at Hungry Jacks. That our last real conversation consisted of us bagging the people we were with and being assholes.
I will always think I could have done more, even in the face of knowing that it would have meant nothing.
I’d still feel guilty, he’d still not be here.
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