December 31, 2001, 3:18 a.m.

Thoughts of a twenty-one year old.

December 31, 2001, 3:18 a.m.

H. died two days ago. He was drunk and he slipped and he fell under the Tube, the subway in London. He died like that. Some suspect suicide, but information is incredibly sketchy. He was an only child. M., his mother, collapsed when she heard the news. He used drugs. He constantly smoked pot and was either almost kicked out of or actually kicked out of Cambridge for selling drugs. He was frequently drunk.

He lived in Palo Alto for a while, and went to Paly for a year. We were freshmen, and he was in my photo class. I remember his curiosity about the edges of life, and those beautiful eyelashes that always made him look angelic, no matter what he was doing. I heard through the grapevine that he had (facetiously?) suggested to B. that they were so intelligent they could easily kill someone and get away with the murder, because they knew how to plot and plan perfectly. I was afraid of him after I heard that he’d said this, but the last time I saw him, we were both nineteen and he was rolling a perfect joint. He was spending that summer in Palo Alto, after years of living in Kazakhstan and England. I never really knew him. I thought he was a curiosity. Once K. told me that H. thought I was interesting, and she said he’d said this with a hint of a sexual suggestion, and I was at once flattered and intrigued by this grapevine knowledge. Everything I heard about him I heard about through grapevines, because have spoken to him directly very few times. When we were fourteen, we played soccer with C. in the mud pits behind Paly. C. had a crush on him and I did also, but I didn’t know how to express that and I didn’t know how C. and I would reconcile that. I knew so little about him. Years have passed since I’ve thought of him.

Today, I arrived at T.'s house late for a night of board game-playing.  T. said to K., “Does she know the news?” and immediately I knew something was very wrong. K. said, “No, I don’t think so.” And then she paused. “H. died.” T. released a paroxysm of laughter. I was shocked, holding a donut in my lap that I’d picked up to eat. K. reprimanded T. for laughing, and I felt disgusted that T. had laughed, but mostly I was scared and stunned by the news. I hardly knew him but it turned my stomach to think of it. “He was very drunk and he slipped and he fell under the Tube and was hit.” Everything turned leaden and I struggled to breathe. "Why did you have to show up late?" T. said. "We went through the same trauma earlier."

We chatted, nonsensically, about the possible circumstances of his death, and how we would tell our other mutual friends, and whose task that would be, and how his family was dealing with his death, and finally, about memories we could piece together about a person briefly and vaguely in our lives. K. knew him best among us in the living room but B. had spent a summer as his best friend. The summer capped with an expression of desire undercut by fear. B. is in Turkey with his family on vacation. K., unwilling to write him an email, left a weeping voicemail instead and now we dread to see how B. will take the news.

I’m frightened of it, the premature death of this insanely taut-skinned youth. But mostly I didn’t know H., I didn’t know him when he became "Fred" in London, and I knew almost nothing of the person who slipped under the Tube. Would he have killed himself? Why was he so drunk? Who was he with? What did he think those last drunken seconds as he was waiting for the train to kill him? What of those plans he’d made to go to grad school to major in “rocket science,” whatever that was?

K. and O. and I, unwilling to go home without having spoken, drove out to Lake Lagunita on the Stanford campus, and stood on a drain cover for two hours talking and balancing on the metal lip. When we arrived the stars were clear and the moon was full, but by two, a thin layer of storm clouds covered the moon entirely. O. didn’t say much of anything, but K. wanted to talk. And I was relieved that she expressed sentiments similar to mine; we grieved, but we didn’t know why, or really, for whom. Neither of us knew him so well, and we felt guilty in our grief as we knew we’d feel guilty if we didn’t grieve. We didn’t know if we pained for him, or for his family, or for the generic fact of a young person dying. K. loathed herself for not feeling immediately able to grieve for him as a person, but rather for the circumstances of his death and for his devastating youth. I didn’t know how to respond to her but to understand, to empathize, and to stand silently beside her on the drain, hands thrust into pockets with shoulders shrugged. We stayed late and then drove home, talking distractedly.

After we dropped off K., O. and I drove to her place in silence. I hugged O. when we arrived.  She is leaving for Seattle tomorrow. I feel like this is sort of an end, because most of our high school crew will graduate this June, and then scatter indefinitely. What now? Our friendships have survived through college, with the aid of the regularity of our returns to Palo Alto. O. is going to grad school next year and can probably be counted on to return, but where will everyone else be? I will be at Harvard, and then I will visit Palo Alto and write very similar words in my journal about the crushing ennui that is Palo Alto, this and that, etcetera. I will sit at this desk and sleep in the bed that is now four feet behind my back, and I will swim in Rinconada if I am still able to swim. I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to think that I cannot always see everyone I love, all at once. I don’t want to think that there won’t be the reassuring regularity of board game nights, or movies where we all scream and clutch at each other and annoy the other theatergoers with our commentary and giggling. O.’s leaving tomorrow, K.’s going back to Boston in four days, R. is going to Vancouver. I detest the ends of things. They leave me so hollow. I don’t even know if this is the end but I'm not considering it. I don’t know anything else. I didn’t know him so well.