Check in on your friends

A very few weeks ago a friend of mine took his own life.

I keep getting stuck on the same thing. He was the last person I would have guessed. We talk now about a loneliness epidemic, about people withering alone in their apartments, and if you had asked me to point at the opposite of that, I would have pointed at him. He was always out, always with people, always laughing. He seemed like the one who had it figured out. He is the one who is gone.

I can’t decide what to do with that, so mostly I just carry it around.

I didn’t know him all that well. We had personally met maybe fifteen times in all. But we got on from the first minute, and most of what we did was talk about things we wanted to build together: Collaborate on my private projects on RL on robots, a research project of his he wanted help on, a list that kept growing. We went bouldering together for a while, and at some point we made a plan to get together and play music. It never happened. I was working too much, and he was always busy, and the plan just sat there the way plans do, waiting for a week that was a little less full. The week never came.

This morning I went back through my diary. A week before he died, I had written a note to myself about “planning to reach out” again, since it had been a while. I never did.

I don’t know if it would have changed anything. We weren’t that close, in the end. A plan to play music is not an intervention. But I can’t stop turning over the small distance between the note and the message I never sent.

So I will say the only thing I am sure of.

Check in on your friends. Rest well, V.