In Memoriam

I recently heard myself described as a ball of "glowing light... but solid," which is so amazingly awesome but made more sense when spoken out loud and accompanied by a fantastic gesture/facial expression combo, but anyway... for my first four months in Lawrence, that light was more like Tinkerbell when nobody believes in her: fading away and all the kids are supposed to clap to bring her back.

I was nearly unrecognizable that first semester.

I was quiet. Unnaturally so. I don't remember laughing much at all, and if I made any friends that semester, I don't remember who they were or what we did (No illegal substances were involved, either... I just wasn't there.). I've always had introverted tendencies, but not like this. I stayed in my dorm room a lot, praying every second of every evening that my roommate would stay out all night getting wasted and grinding up on questionable men instead of bringing them back to our room while she passed out on the communal bathroom floor. I threw myself into my overloaded schedule (6 courses, 2 had extra discussion sessions, plus marching band and my new job at the library), kept myself purposefully busy at all times, and relied on my iPod and the final season of The West Wing to shut out the world. I was so miserable, a blizzard literally had to chase me back to Kansas after Thanksgiving or I never would have left my bed, and by the time winter break arrived, I was seriously considering a transfer to Northern State University back in Aberdeen.

It would be easy to brush this off and assume it was typical homesick behavior for a college freshman living 584 miles away from home for the first time, especially when said freshman was deposited in a 12x14 box alongside the greatest waste of human life she'd met until that point... but that doesn't tell the whole story.

On August 12th, 2005, my debate partner from senior year was killed in an alcohol-related single car accident near Richmond Lake just outside Aberdeen. He was 17; just weeks away from his 18th birthday and the start of his senior year.

Matt was a special kid, so indulge me in telling a few stories. He was a great storyteller - whether he was rehashing the events of an intense round or reading the embarassing confessions from the latest Cosmopolitan out loud, the attention of the entire bus was captivated. In that last wonderful year, Matt was the comic relief and heart of our team. Sure, he could be infuriating (like the time he put an entry slip covered in obscenities into a *clear* raffle box at a Taco John's in Minnesota and got himself - and therefore, me - suspended from debate tournaments for two weeks), but by and large, he made everyone laugh, even our opponents.

He was constantly a mess. It took me until January to decipher his handwriting reliably, his hair was always unkempt, and his frequently neglected glasses were woefully crooked. He only had two modes of fashion: suit and tie for debate, sweatpants for everything else. (You can understand my surprise when Matt came out and became my first openly gay friend.) He took ceramics for his fine arts requirement his junior year, and on the last day of the quarter we each got to choose one of his pitifully deformed projects to take off his hands. The guys made cracks about using them for target practice, but I still have mine - it holds quarters for laundry in all its misshapen, unevenly polka-dotted glory. Another piece still survives in the debate room: the "Pomo Pot." Matt had painstakingly painted the names of postmodern thinkers (Foucalt, Heidegger, etc.) onto the sides of what looked like a caveman's cereal bowl as a form of protest for being forced to waste his time on ceramics when he could be researching.

Matt lived and breathed for debate. He saved my ass in rounds more times than I can count, and he dreamt of being a national circuit debater, despite being confined to a non-circuit team and a partner who obviously cared more about Oratory than Policy. He loved the strategy of it all: during prep time or while we waited for judges to show up, he would predict the winners on every schedule, overanalyze each match-up to determine whether the tab room was using straight, random, or high-low pairings, and doodle lists of circuit tournaments (or the richest people in the world according to Forbes - he had the list memorized).

Thankfully for me, Matt loved Extemp as much as he loved debate, so we struck up a deal that made our partnership work: we knew we both had better chances to qualify separately in our I.E.s than together in debate, so we worked hard to keep him improving, and we had a lot of fun along the way knowing that we could both go to Philly and he could grab a ride to nationals in debate the next year. So there were crazy rounds where Matt convinced me to kick our entire Affirmative case and go for the kritik just to piss off our coach, rounds where timers flew through the air when his piece of crap timer (which I now own and still curse at regularly) would give out and just beep incessantly, and rounds where he wore my glasses for entire speeches because he refused to wear his own and we had the same prescription. He used the word "extrapolate" too much and was always trying to convince the judges to "buy" his impacts, and in turn, I abused "conducive" and was always certain that my flawless analysis on Topicality should win the round every time. We had successes as well as a good deal of failures, but for every weekend of failure, Matt just let it roll off him and gave me a big bear hug to let me know that everything would be ok, although it must have been torture for him to watch other members of our team bring in armloads of Policy trophies.

I won't lie and say that he was my best friend in the world, or even that we were particularly close beyond the unique relationship formed by working in close proximity to each other. We took care of each other, learned to read each other's minds, and made the best of a partnership formed by outside forces. (For those of you who need a reference point - the student teacher/cooperating teacher relationship is the closest thing I've experienced since.) Now, I like to think we would have stayed in touch despite the fact that we seldom socialized outside debate-related activities, and we knew relatively little about each other's personal lives. But at the time (and to this day), Matt's death affected me in a way that no one, including myself, could have predicted. I think this is partly because his age and the circumstances of his death made it heartbreakingly tragic, but also because it was the first time anyone I actually knew had died.

Combine this with my inability to return home to attend the funeral or to simply grieve with my debate family, and that lack of closure (I've still never even visited his gravesite - something I plan to change this summer) explains it all. August 12th was the day I arrived at KU, so as soon as I got my phone charger back from Grandma's on the evening of the 13th, the semester was already doomed. Who wants to be friends with that quiet girl who's always gone for band and when she is here she looks like she's been crying all the time, and she seems to be having some kind of existential crisis? Freak.

As they tend to do, things got better. I decided to give KU one more try with a new roommate and a more cohesive schedule that spring, and boy am I glad I did. It hasn't all been easy; friends and roommates have come and gone, but I wouldn't change a thing from the past four and a half years. I've learned a lot about myself and about other people, and this year alone has been worth every bit of the crap that preceded it.

I'm ready to move on to new and exciting things now, but I think I needed to do this - to write this - before I truly could; a bookend, if you will. So if you're still with me, thanks for reading this novella, please stay just a bit longer for the poem I've been wrestling with over the last week, and thanks for providing an audience for what I should have done to cope with this years ago.


Richmond Road Farewell

I.

Under a clear, bright, South Dakota sun
minivans purge themselves of their heavy burdens.
After ten long days filled with longer hours,
a team navigates the awkward transition
from ever-present family (for better and for worse)
to scattered individuals
for the last time.

The moment has a weight felt but denied by everyone present.

A well-known hug and a stubbled cheek stand out amongst the others -
“take care of yourself.” A final command
from one partner to another –
a particular pleasantry never to be spoken again out of superstition and anger.


II.

Cell phone charger forgotten in the excitement of a new beginning,
voicemail overflows silently as a Kansas dorm room is filled, territory bargained for.

Listen to messages before the third Wal-Mart run
-hurry, rehearsal starts early tomorrow!
Familiar voices sound foreign,
weighted by distance and a guarded, ominous secret,
too monumental to be revealed via recording.

Heart simultaneously pounds and sinks as I hit ‘call’ and stare at the door.
News of an accident is cautiously conveyed.
This brand-new tiled floor is uneven – glad it’s not on my side.
The truth – my depression less than 24 hours old – erases innocence.


III.

Acceptance is a lesson learned alone,
dictated by distance.

Not all farewells are tragic. I know this. I’ve remembered this.
But each one carries for me a subtle, unconscious reminder.

Every time a dear friend walks away, I am compelled to gently assert –
imploring the powers that be to let it be true:

“I’ll see you soon.”

I’ll see you tomorrow… Monday… next weekend… in June…a month from the day after tomorrow’s yesterday… it doesn’t really matter when, but I will specify.

Because I will see you soon.


April 23rd, 2010





From left to right, top to bottom: Nisha, Shana, Tessa, Brenna, Molly, Paul, Me, Tyler, Matt, Chris
April 2005