These Days

I think it's sad the amount of disregard people have for their fellow man. My theories about this are that all of our technology is allowing us to accomplish things independently, making it to where, since we don't rely on people as heavily, we don't have as much a need to take their feelings or their person into consideration. Now, I guess I haven't lived 200 years, so this could be inaccurate, but as far as I can see, this makes a lot of sense.

Another reason is that we don't have to account for the things we say or do online, so people don't care about people in that respect either. I myself have fallen into being more forward online, or not responding to emails. Maybe people don't really care since an email is so easy to send. Maybe not only the receiver doesn't care, but neither does the sender.

I've always thought that the way people shut themselves into their houses, cut off from their neighbors, was a clear sign that our society was going to hell. Since people used to live in their parents house until they moved in with their spouse and created a new family, I can't imagine they had very much "alone" time. Maybe when doing their chores. So why then is it that we need so much of it now? I guess maybe people in the past needed it to think, but I feel like, more and more, people are using it to recharge themselves so they can go back out and brave the world with their polished masks on.

Another thing that's been getting to me is that people are so depressed nowadays. I mean, they have hardly any suicide rates in tribal settings because I their main existence is survival. I think THAT'S the meaning of life right there. In most larger dominant countries, though, we're just focused on our comfort of living, so now we walk around finding problems because we're all so bored.

And people feel like there's something wrong with them because we all perpetuate this standard. Everyone's supposed to be happy and content and if you're not, you need medicine. But hardly anyone is, it seems. At least most people MY age. Or at least most people my age who are my friends. So they keep it to themselves. And this just exacerbates the problem because then, on top of feeling depressed or anxious, you feel like you're the only one. Like something is WRONG, and so you go to the doctor.

I saw a lot of this among older people too, but they seem better at swallowing it. I saw it when I was a bond trader. A bunch of people who hate their lives and buy expensive italian leather shoes, and BMWs, and big houses. They give their trophy wives allowances to keep looking like a trophy. And they think, "I have the equation right....why doesn't it equal up?" Society told them that chasing the carrot equals happiness, but that's not what it really yields and they find out too late into their mortgages to do anything about it.

A lot of things along these lines have been depressing me lately, but I've been trying to think of the good in it. All of these social networking sites are trying to act as a barrier breakdown. I've been able to keep in touch with a lot more of my friends that way, and it's so easy to contact them. I try to imagine it sort of being a newage version of walking to someone's hut in your village. I thought the other day that a lot of mammals build houses, but only humans build doors. But that's more negativity creeping in.

On a ridiculous note, the next age is the age of aquarius, which is supposed to bring enlightenment, so hopefully all the bullshit that's been happening in our government will be lessened. Or maybe we can follow in Egypt's shoes......

No Motivation

I have had a serious lack of motivation lately. I just question everything I do and it all feels pointless. I'm sure this sounds like some stupid kid talking, and maybe it is. It's so difficult for me to just sit down and concentrate. I feel like I'm more fit for an artistic avenue than anything else, but how can I even go THAT far if I don't sit down and get to stuff? I am so sick of school, but I feel like in a few months, I'll be really wanting to go back. I just have to keep that in mind. I feel like there's so much I have to do before the end of this semester, I told Jasmine that if she heard a gunshot in the middle of the night, it's because my brains are on the wall.

I might think I'm pretty smart, but I have an exponential amount of respect for people who can go to school and stick with it. My friend, Josh, is about to graduate with a bachelors in Math and another in Programming. That's just incredible to me. I'm not sure why I can't study or take any of this stuff too seriously. At the same time, my GPA isn't too bad, but I feel a lot of times like creative classes are all-to-easy to pass when I read some fellow students writing. Not to say that mine's great, but I'm not trying to get my masters or anything.

All this feels like me trying to justify to myself why I should quit school again. The thing is, I really do felt like I learned a lot this semester, but I wonder if the knowledge was worth 4K. Maybe one could argue that knowledge is priceless. I definitely wouldn't want to give it back. I keep feeling like I'm either too immature still for college, or if I just wasn't cut out for it. It's so stressful. I think if I took it less seriously, I wouldn't be so badly off. I just feel like if I get an "F" in any class, despite my lack of desire to finish a degree, it would just prove that I'm not good enough for college instead of the other way around.

Blah.

4 Dimensions

I had a dream again last night about Duane. He was alive, of course, otherwise maybe that wouldn't have been the focal point of my dream. It was like normal, only halfway through seeing him the first time in a while, I remembered at one point that I thought he was dead and trying to remember all the things I had wanted to say to him when I thought he WAS dead was difficult. I did at least remember that I had to tell him what his new email password was, since I had hacked it when I believed him dead.

Instead of making me upset, like dreams where I see him normally do, It just made me think differently about his death. I was a little jealous of all the Christians at his funeral getting comfort from thinking that he exists, in some form, in heaven. When they talked about he and his brother in heaven pulling jokes and laughing, it just made me envision some gross puppeteer of Duane's body moving him around. Needless to say, I wasn't comforted by the funeral.

But lately, I've been thinking that he DOES still exist, as much as anyone like Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln exists. He exists in time. Three months and 4 days ago, he existed. Twenty-four years ago, he existed. We all die, and still, we all exist. I know, countless times, when I read about someone in history, I always imagine them alive, and rarely sit and realize they're dead. So, Duane, though not existing in THIS time period, exists none-the-less. I have emails, and letters, and memories, and pictures. He EXISTS, just maybe not in this dimension (the fourth one). Physicists say that all the time, that time is just a concept. Something to that effect.

An acquantance told me today that he lost his friend. But what caught me off-guard was that he was mentioning all the things going wrong in his life. His friend happened to make the list. When my friend died, it felt like the end. I'd been having a pretty bad week, but this...my friend's death...it wasn't close to being added into the same equation as my sister trying to leave her abusive husband and leaving her daughter with me while she went to gamble at the casino. It was distracting and depressing to be sure, but I would never add him to my laundry list of bad things I was going through when it happened.

Which leads me to a point I considered shortly after it happened. Friend is a very relative term. To him, it was someone he sort of knew, and who had eventually married his cousin. To me, it was someone who I'd had a crush on for years, who I stayed with in high school when I was homeless and my mom was in jail, who turned his back on me and made me feel worthless, who I hated for four years after high school, who tried to find me to apologize, who DID apologize, who I talked to every day, who saw right through me, who let me take his virginity, who wrote me letters while I was away last summer, who was my kitchen helper and cut the vegetables just like I like them, who was my future business partner.

Last Friday was the three month anniversary of his death. I cried for so long it seemed while I was in Amarillo. I was there for a school workshop for critiquing theater performances, but I felt really disconnected and separate. But it's hard for me to hide how I feel, but there was another girl there whose brother committed suicide 7 years ago, and the other girl whose cousin died 3 years ago. The one who lost her brother said that death is a universal gatherer. She was saying that death is the one thing that everyone can relate to if they've been through it. I'm sure she said it more elegantly, but to be sure, the death of a loved one is the hardest thing to go through.

I know that if my twin died, I couldn't go on. Even before I'd experienced death, my sister had a teacher she told me about. She found out my sister was a twin and would go on and on about her twin that had died. She mentioned it a lot during my sister's classes. We joked about it uncomfortably because we both knew that would be us some day. The idea is unbearable. To have someone you can communicate with without words. She is so much a part of my everyday life without having to see or talk to her, that going on without her would seem blasphemous.

Human Hunger

It's amazing that humans have such a will to live based on activity in their lives. You always hear that whenever you get older, the people who keep working (even just part time), as opposed to those who retire and sit around, live longer. During this snow, with everything shut down, I kind of shut down too. It was miserable. I was miserable, getting the worst sleep ever and feeling anxious and stressed. I think it was because I didn't HAVE to do anything, so I didn't do anything. For 11 days, I haven't done anything. Then, right on cue with having to go back to school today, here I am, up at 6:30 this morning for no good reason, working on homework, eating breakfast, paying bills, cleaning, planning on working out, and I feel SO much better. I've already known that humans are only focused on their comfort of living, and the reason we're all so sick and have so many problems is because we're not focused on surviving any more. It's why there's no "depression" in African tribes.

I've been trying to go without for a while, not because I need to, but because I find the more "comfortable" I am, the more depressed I become. I think the closer you are to survival, the better you feel. So, though I've had money to fix my car heater, I just haven't. The other night, I drove for an hour and a half in the snow and it was FREEZING. I wore two pairs of pants, three shirts, two coats, and a few blankets, but it was still pretty cold. The next day, driving home, I was crying thinking about Duane and all my friends that are important to me, and I noticed I wasn't so cold, so I guess crying gets your blood flowing. In fact, I had to roll my window down.

I'm getting off topic. The point is that doing without BY CHOICE makes me feel better. I think the "by choice" part is important. Because I've done without before because I've had to do without and that in itself is a different kind of depression. So, I still have some money from when I was a bond trader, which is nice, but none of them understood this way I try to live. They kept trying to tell me to get a nicer car...so I could be in debt like them, I guess. You want to have the nice job and go to fancy dinners making money from other people's money, so you have to act the part. Get a house, a nice car, and a family you can't stand to be around. It was funny because, for a while, they had me believing that same thing, and no matter what kind of nice clothes I bought, it didn't make me feel better. I'm so glad I realized before I was too deep that I needed to get out of there.

Again, I think I'm straying a bit from my point. Or maybe I've stated my point already and I'm climbing out onto it's branches. So, I'll stop fighting it and go off onto another one. I think that American society (along with a few Asian cultures, and more I'm not aware of) encourage people to chase the carrot because that's a form of consistent need to replace our fighting for survival. So people try to get the best paying job to go into debt for the bigger house and the nicer car, all to realize that those things don't make them happy because they're replacing a natural need with an unnatural one. So, after figuring that out, it's hard to want to work at anything I'm not interested in. Because I realize that, the more I can do without, the less I have to buy into that system.

So what then do I replace my natural urge to survive with? How do I continue to live? It's nearly impossible NOT to live these days. You can get arrested for trying to kill yourself. Placed in a place that prevents those sorts of things. So, what should *I* do? I guess I'll keep looking. Maybe that can be my thing I do. Look for my purpose. As I said in the beginning of this entry, you have to have SOMETHING to work towards or your body can shut down. Maybe not at such a young age, but still. I had intended for this entry to sound hopeful. I was trying to imply that humans need a purpose to live, which is kind of beautiful, but breaking it down like this makes it sound kind of pointless. But, I suppose it's okay that there's no point. That's the reason I've never killed myself. Any time I wanted to when I was an angsty teen, I just thought, "Well, I'm going to die eventually one day anyway, might as well see how good or bad things can get before I do."

Short story about...who else? Duane.

I sent an text message to Duane asking him when I should come over to start cooking a dish we were going to take to his family's house for Thanksgiving dinner. See, I didn't know when I sent the text that he was already dead. I wouldn't find out until about two or three hours later.

For that moment, though, I got to think that he had let his phone die instead, on accident of course. His phone was always dying on accident while he was back here in Oklahoma. Or he'd leave it somewhere. He was always on top of his phone until he'd come back to Oklahoma to visit, and something would fuck up his phone situation. Maybe he was so excited to be home. At this point though, he'd been dead for eight hours, which made the most sense since he'd called me the night before.

See, the night before, he called and I was busy. I was busy trying to get with this guy I kind of liked. I answered anyway, but the conversation was short. The last conversation I had with my best friend went like this:

Me: Hey, Duane.

Duane: Hey, I'm home!

Me: Oh, heeeellllooooo.

Duane: (Laughs) Well, just thought I'd let you know.

Me: Hey, Duane, I'm a bit busy. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?

Duane: Oh. Sure. Okay. Talk to you tomorrow.

That was around 8pm. So, he died six hours later. While I was fucking this guy I'd met a month before, my best friend was dying. As I was lying in a stranger's bed, my best friend was lying crushed in a vehicle's unforgiving back seat, having broken his neck and dying either instantly, or while unconscious. His friend sitting next to him said he looked like he was sleeping, but his brother's friend (his brother was driving and was also killed) said he looked like a crumpled mess, and he didn't know it was Duane until he moved him around a bit to see his face.

There wasn't an open casket.

I sent Duane a text at 10am that morning. He died at 2:00am, so he didn't respond. I asked, "When should I come over?" Then I waited. I went home from that guy's house. I stayed there the night before. My older sister was trying to get away from her husband, so her and her two daughters were staying in my one-bedroom apartment with me, which had started feeling a little cramped. I got home around 11am and my older neice, who was 10 years old, was taking a bath. Amanda, my older sister, was yelling at her.

"What the fuck did you get in your hair! Your dad is going to be here any minute!"

And then she stormed out of my bathroom. Amanda was staying with me because she was leaving her abusive 7th husband. My youngest neice, who was two at the time, Brooklyn, was that husband's child. Reyna, my other neice, had an unknown father, but the third husband adopted her, and we all thought it was nice that he got a tattoo of her face on his arm.

When Reyna got out of the bath, I volunteered to blow dry her hair, which was a pain in the ass. Her hair did have some kind of sticky shit in it (which she confided in me was jell-o) and I had to dry it in small peices at a time. I was two-thirds of the way through when my phone rang. I picked it up. I picked up my phone. Finally, Duane, I thought. When I saw the caller ID it said, "Restricted Caller". Oh God, it's James. Well, better to know he has my number than not know.

James is Amanda's abusive 7th husband.
James had threatened to harm or damage property of people
who were keeping him from finding Amanda.

I answered the phone. At this point, you all know what happened. But I had no idea.

Me: Hello?

Unknown Man: Hello, this is Sargent First Class Smith. Is this Brandie....I'm not sure how to say your last name and I don't want to buther it.

Me: Gaudette. Yes, this is she.

SFC Smith: Are you in contact with Leutenant Gibson?

Me: Duane? Yeah, I was about to have Thanksgiving with him, if he'd return my texts...

SFC Smith: Ma'am, did you not hear about the incident?

At this point, I think, Oh my god, he went a-wall! He tried to leave the military and went missing! No...that doesn't make sense. Duane wouldn't do that. Oh my god, t here's been an accident and he's in the hospital. He's lost an arm or a leg. He must be asking for me!

Me: Oh my god, no. What happened?

SFC Smith: Ma'am...I'm really sorry to be the one to tell you this but...Leutenent Gibson is dead.

Me: NO!!!!!!! NO! No! no! It's not true!

I went on like this. I'm not sure what I said exactly, or how he responded. I don't know when my neices left the bedroom or who ushered them out. I'm not sure how long I was on the phone with Sargent First Class Smith or when I handed the phone to Amanda. I can't remember when I called my twin sister, Bobbie, and cried into the phone. I cried so hard that she couldn't make out who I'd said had died. Not that she would have been as upset anyway since she and Duane weren't good friends, but she thought I'd said "Mom's dead". She couldn't understand why I was so upset. She finally heard me and came right over, though she was on the way to her boyfriend's parent's house.

Amanda, at some point, had come into the room to say, "Brandie, the reason that guy called was because Duane named you as a beneficiary...isn't that nice?" NICE!?! FUCK YOU! I turned to Bobbie, "Get her out of here". Amanda sat on the bed, "Brandie, I was crying the other day too...over James." It is NOT the fucking same, can't you see that!?!?! Bobbie told her, "Amanda, I don't think you're helping." And I said, "Can I talk to Bobbie alone?" Amanda looked pissy and left. I asked Bobbie, "Can you get her out of here. I can't take this right now." Before Bobbie got there, I'm not sure when, Amanda had tried to give me a pain killer after knocking over a chair, and I threw the pill across the room.

Pain. Pain. Go Away.

So, I had planned on working out today, but instead, I'm sitting here smoking a cigarette. These past couple of days have been hard days. I still think about Duane every day, but usually with less sadness than I've been experiencing. I don't cry every day any more, or even every other day, unless you count the past few.

My sister just started volunteering at a hospice and during her training they told her to write 4 people who were really important to her, and she'd go by and take your list, saying a name from the list signifying that they were "dead". She grabbed Bobbie's list and said, "Brandie" and she started bawling uncontrollably, which is rare for her. At the end of the class she said she picks one family member of the deceased person and gives them a "pocket angel" to remind that person of the loved one they lost. She then gave everyone in the class a "pocket angel". Bobbie called me right after the class to tell me how much she loves me and that she wanted to give me her pocket angel for Duane.

At that point, I started crying, which is also unusual, but hasn't really been for the past month and a half. I don't think I'd cried for about 4 days at that point. But even when I did cry, I was only down for an hour or so. But now it's been 4 days of depression. And to feed my depression, I'm sitting here listening to a song by the late Rocky Carlton. Rocky killed himself in June of this last year. My friend Ross that I met in late October was his best friend, and he's been very instrumental in my grief process. When he'd told me about Rocky when we first met, I didn't really care too much. I just thought, "Well, it happens. Get over it." Really cold. But since Duane has passed, I've talked a lot about Rocky with Ross. He used to play a lot of music. He never had a girlfriend and was a virgin. I feel a little sad now for not knowing him, but I guess that's life too.

Sargent First Class Smith, who called me with the news, had been making a lot of stops by my apartment for all the paperwork I had to sign concerning Duane's death. I'd been trying to break into Duane's email for about a month at that point, but none of the methods I found online had worked. So I went to the "forgotten password" page to see about answering the security question. To my chagrin, the answer was his social security number, but the only paperwork I'd gotten only had the last four digits.

The last time SFC Smith came by, I was determined to try to sneak a glance at HIS paperwork. And when I sat next to him, I looked over and saw..."444-88" That was it! I was so nervous about forgetting it. The numbers were easy enough, but if I forgot them, I'd never forgive myself. But then, he gave me 10 forms with his social on all of them. It was the paperwork that a wife normally gets to get death benefits from the state. But Duane wasn't married. I was the closest thing to a wife designated as his beneficiary, so I got the paperwork instead, and I was burning a hole in that man waiting for him to leave so I could get on Duane's email.

When he finally left, I got on gmail instantly and typed in the code. Then it asked to change the password, instead of sending the old one like I hoped would happen. I felt bad for changing the password, but I figured no one else would care. When I did that and it logged me on, I signed Duane out of his chat so I didn't disturb his friends by them seeing his name light up on their chat boxes, and then I went through his email.

It was awful. I saw journal entries about his sadness, which broke my heart. But the hardest one to read was written on October 5th, 2010. He said, "Every time I talk to Brandie, it just makes me feel worse. Whether I'm talking to or about her. I still feel like I owe her, but I wish I'd never met her. Even if I was a worse person, I wouldn't feel like this."

It was the first time in a while that I just stayed in my apartment all day with the lights off. Just thinking. I was miserable. Two months before he died, he'd wished he'd never met me. When I talked about it with my guy friends, they explained that guys go through that with their first love. I don't think I've mentioned yet that I was the closest thing that Duane ever had to a girlfriend and I took his virginity when we went to Europe in February of 2008 almost 2 years ago. But he was in the military. Always in Iraq, or Germany, or Florida, or Alabama, or Kansas. When we started being good friends, he hadn't lived here since that time and I had to grow to be good friends with him over the course of two years through online conversations. I knew him and had a crush on him and lived with his family in high school, but when he started opening up to me was 4 years after we graduated, and two years before his death.

I guess I don't have much to say about this. I hope I start feeling better.

More Dueams

I had another dream about Duane last night. My request for him to be alive had finally come through, but I didn't realize that, in being accepted, I had to do all of this paperwork and go from place to place and get things signed by certain people to keep him alive for exactly 24 hours. Well, since they had accepted me and were busy, they sent him back to being alive earlier than I thought they would and I still wasn't done with the paperwork. It had a deadline too, so I wasn't allowed to put it off. I was so excited to see him but I kept only being able to talk to him for a few minutes or see him a few minutes at a time because I was trying so hard to make sure and keep him alive by completing all of the forms and processes. I was very upset because I just wanted to have one last perfect moment with him. Just one more time that we could look at each other again and just FEEL all the love we had for each other. But my moment never came. I was waiting in one of the offices and I looked at the clock and realized with horror that Duane's last hour was up. I called him frantically, and to my overwhelming happiness, he answered the phone.

"Oh thank god! I thought...you know..." I couldn't bring myself to say it.
"Yeah, it's awesome! I guess they forgot about me."
"God, Duane, I'm so sorry this is taking so long...try to hold out for me," and then I was back to another office. A few hours later, I called again, I was about 2 hours away from finishing everything, and he answered again. I was more relieved than I think I've ever been. I told him to just wait a couple more hours and I'd have the rest of his time free and I'd gladly spend every last second of it with him.

After the last bit of paperwork I walked out of a different office and happily grabbed my phone and called Duane. Only this time he didn't answer. I had this horrid sinking feeling because I knew by this sign that Duane had been taken back.

So I cried today. I guess I feel like I've been doing this. Listening for anything. Waiting for Duane to come out and talk to me. My closet doors moved yesterday and I asked, "Duane? Is that you?" I'm so desperate to see him again, I've been letting my logic fail me, and every time he doesn't answer back, it's a new wound I have to tend to. Everyone that's been through something similar all say the same thing, "It'll never feel okay, but it gets easier to deal with." I feel hopeless.

I've been plagued with thinking about how my relationship will change with him over the years. I'll grow old, and he'll always be 24. I was always so impressed with his insight and looked up to him when he'd impart some wisdom to me. But one day...there will be a day when I am wiser than Duane was when he left. How can I still maintain my feelings? I WANT to always look at him as a teacher. Going through his emails I find things that I never took the time to notice before. He was such an intelligent person. But...what kind of anguish will I experience when I understand that I have learned all I can from him? He'll take on a new version of death, and it will hurt all over again. All of these steps I take away from him make him more dead. It feels like sawing off your hand to escape a worse fate.