Day 29: Forgetting

My year abroad in 2014/15 was a big year for many reasons: it was the first full year I spent away from home; it was my first Christmas without my family; it was a year in a totally foreign country.

It was also when I lost a friend to suicide.

The title of this post has nothing to do with forgetting about Saagar. I think about him almost every day, especially now that I’m in London, his hometown. I think about him when I get on the train, I think about him when I see Arabic or when someone has a fish curry. I think about him in May, when it would have been his birthday. I especially think about him in October, the month that it happened six (!) years ago.

This post is more about forgotten pain, how empty and alone I felt for parts of that year. I know I felt it. There were times when I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about him, thinking about suicide, thinking about what it all meant. At first I thought I was okay, thought I could keep studying as normal, thought it would all just pass by. By the end of October, it was clear that was not the case. I cried a lot, I ate a lot, I couldn’t focus on my studies and nearly failed an exam. I tried to contact my teacher the day before the exam, asking for an extension, but the message didn’t go through – I think I had saved her number wrong – so I had to show up anyway. I showed her the message and she apologized profusely when she told me that I would still have to do my oral exam (luckily these were one-on-one) and I cried through it.

See, I thought I had forgotten about how hurt I was, but thinking about that moment brings the sting of tears. I don’t often think about the misery of those few months – for good reason, I guess.

Everything was made worse by the sudden departure of my flatmate. I had gone to stay in a hotel with my parents and sister who were visiting over Thanksgiving (thank god they came for that visit – planned before Saagar’s death). The morning they left for the airport to go back to the US, my flatmate sent me a message to give him a call. I had a bad feeling about it, I think I even said to my sister that I felt like it was a bad sign, and then he told me over the phone that he had moved out of the flat and was staying in a hostel. I got back to the half-empty little two-bedroom flat in Wudaokou just as my family were out of contact for the next 15 hours. I was completely alone.

To be clear, I don’t blame him for moving out. I can’t imagine how awful it was for him living with an almost-stranger whose former housemate had just committed suicide, who had no idea how to manage her grief plus the stress of living in a completely foreign country, trying to make new friends, and trying to balance Chinese lessons. It must have been pretty terrible for him. What I do still hold against him is the way he did it. Obviously I was pretty immature too – I don’t know why I should expect more from him – but could he not have waited six more weeks for Chinese New Year? Or given me some kind of heads up?

Another friend from our university later told me that people were really angry with him for ditching like that, which made me feel better I guess, but no one said any of that to me at the time. I thought my classmates all hated me because I didn’t know how to grieve, because they didn’t know how to help me. I felt so alone. I was so alone.

Look, in the end it was the best thing to have happened – in the second semester I moved in with some really great girls. Neither of them were from my UK university, on my course, or even studying at the same Chinese university. It gave me license to start fresh, about four months after Saagar’s passing.

This probably was not the best post to write before work. I started out thinking that this post was going to be about how time passes, wounds heal, how we forget the depth of the pain we’ve felt. Clearly, the weight of the sadness is still there, it’s just not as heavy anymore, it’s not as sharp. I don’t think it’s a repression of those feelings – I think I did a lot, in the end, to move through it rather than push it down. It’s just much easier to pick myself back up now – I know that this is not going to send me into a month-long emotional spiral, that I’ll be fine by the time we have our morning call in 20 minutes. I can look at it with much more perspective now, and I can choose to look away without removing it completely.

I wonder about Saagar all the time, where he would be now if he were still with us, if we’d be hanging out in London now. He was a smart dude, a talented drummer, and had such a kindness about him – he would talk to anyone and could talk about anything. He gave great hugs.