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You remain alive insofar as those who have known you outlive you. You will die with the last of them. Unless some of them have made you live on in words, in the memory of their children. For how many generations will you live on like this, as a character from a story?
If you were still alive, would we be friends? I was more attached to other boys. But time has seen me drift apart from them without my even noticing. All that would be needed to renew the bond would be a telephone call, but none of us are willing to risk the disillusionment of a reunion. Your silence has become a form of eloquence. But they, who can still speak, remain silent. I no longer think of them, those with whom I was formerly so close. But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice. Your responses satisfy
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A man once said “I love you” to you. It wasn’t me. I didn’t feel that way about you while you were alive, but today I can say the same thing, though it wouldn’t be the sort of love formerly declared to you. My words come too late. They would not have changed your decision, but they would have changed the way I remember. To love someone from the moment of his death: is that friendship?
Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.
Your choosing to erase the world exempts those surviving you from doing so. What you miss, they see. Their pains become pleasures when they think that you are no longer anything at all.
You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.
The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life.
I don’t try to explain to myself in what form you might have survived your suicide, but your disappearance is so unacceptable that the following lunacy was born along with it: a belief in your eternity.
The crowd guaranteed your anonymity.
One evening you were invited to dine at a friend’s house with other guests. To the host who, opening the door for you on your arrival, asked you how you were doing, you responded, “Badly.” Disconcerted, the host didn’t know what to say—all the more so because you were standing in his doorway, and because when you had rung the bell, an enthusiastic and impatient “Ahhh!” from the assembly of guests gathered in the living room had resounded through the walls.
You were surprised that your state of mind could be so variable without those around you noticing. Once you confessed to someone that you had been very depressed when dining with her several months earlier. She was stunned, discovering her blindness like a time bomb. And you, faithful, kept a straight face.
You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance.
To live death—was this to see it coming and to welcome it, rather than abruptly undergoing it, without having the time to feel oneself departing?
“Death is to life what birth is to the absence of life?”
You didn’t identify with happy people, and in your excessiveness you projected onto those who had failed in everything, or succeeded in nothing.
This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion.
“A self excused is a self accused.”
This party, to which you had come without conviction, ended up enchanting you. You belonged to a community united by memories. Later, none of the guests at the party believed, when they heard what happened, that you were already thinking of suicide then.
You knew that some of those close to you would feel guilty at not having anticipated your choice to die, and that they would deplore their inability to help you to want to live. But you thought them mistaken.
She had recognized the shoes you were wearing. They were the ones that she had given to her nephew, and which his mother had sold after he committed suicide.
As my thoughts turn to you again, I do not suffer. I do not miss you. You are more present in my memory than you were in the life we shared. If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid.
survivors would be alone in carrying the pain of your death. This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life’s painful commotion.
