The world is F*CKED

Extremely vile and pessimistic rants about dealing with loss

I was 12 when I had my first anxiety attack. I was reading “Life is what you make it” by Preeti Shenoy, having faked a tummy ache to get out of PT class. I was sitting, tucked away in a corner of my school, cool marble against my un-shorts-ed, tighty-whitey wearing ass, the feeling of the smooth pages strange against my sweaty, dirty fingers. I remember grabbing the top right of the page, reading about Ankita's (that's the main character, she's bipolar) first brush with being a survivor of suicide. I remember thinking how I'd feel if a friend of mine died. And then I remembered that she did. Kanchan was my closest friend for the most formative of my years as a prepubescent child. We experienced our first menstrual cycles together. Kanchan was the oldest daughter of our domestic worker and my best friend. Kanchan died from kidney infection that happened because of bad menstrual health. I never realised the financial mismatch we had growing up. But that July afternoon, it hit me so hard. I lost a friend, at the time the only friend I ever had in all 12 years of life to what? Money? How come no one else saw what I saw? The value that Kanchan had. She loved to sing and embroider and she was fucking good for a 10 year old. She embroidered me a welcome home wall hanging that I still have stowed away in my attic somewhere. It's yellowed now, suffered water damage, the thread are unraveling and some parts of it's been chewed at by some unfriendly rats that cohabited with it in the attic. But it's there. Kanchan isn't. I will never know how much better she'd get at embroidery when she's older. I'll never tell her about all the other boys that came after my 5th grade crush. Oh and the girls and the trannies that came after! Would she still call me friend or delete my contact from her phone the day I'd come out to her? I don't remember what I thought of that afternoon. Just that I thought of Kanchan, the one true loss I'd felt. I remembered how I didn't cry when mom told me the news. I just shrugged. I remember thinking about why I didn't cry. Was I broken? Am I broken? Last year, another friend died. A medical “misstep”, they said. I cried a lot. I was determined to cry for them and everyone who went away before, cry for Kanchan, cry for my brother, cry for my grandmother, cry for my cat. It felt unreal. It felt fake. So I stopped crying. And it still felt unreal and fake. So I just sat with that feeling not knowing what to do. So I channeled my emotions into anger. Anger at the doctors who refused to listen, anger at the systems that let lives be measured with imaginary, make believe numbers on papers and computer screens, anger at myself, anger at everyone around me who dared to breathe when my loved ones couldn't. I don't subscribe to religion so I can't even depend on delusions of a better place. I tried. And failed every time. So tell me what do I do? How do I stop whatever this feeling is? Should I just not love anymore for fear of loss? Should I be lost first so I don't have to deal with it?