Content warning: This post contains descriptions of domestic violence and difficult subject matter.

Her voice reached me, but my expression stayed vacant, my mind hollowed, and my hands still.

“I don’t have a reason to live anymore.” was said twice.

It should have been a stormy night with water pounding on the glass. Instead it was unremarkable. The inside of the car was hazy. The outside of the car was fresh, crisp, and dark. It was her and I. We were around 30 years old.

At this point in time, she was going to work at a restaurant with her boyfriend. I was in college at Cal State Fulton, and she was taking classes in Orange Coast College.

She then told me she thought about killing her boyfriend. I heard the words kill... kill him. I remember the k. She continued that she believed he was trapping her in hell. Since they had first started dating, she had been bred by him to work and take care of him, she was chained to this parasite of a human and she finally wanted out. Of course her legs worked just fine, and the way I saw it, she wasn't chained to anything.

[Four years later, her boyfriend tried to choke her in the meat refrigerator at work. It's a space around 80 square feet, big enough to walk around in, cold as a night in Death Valley. He closed the door so no one could see them, right there in the middle of the bright day.

But I skip around.]

That night, I asked her if she was going to do anything about it, you know, her having no reason to live. As unbefitting as it was, I felt obliged to share platitudes of why life was still worth pushing on for. She could get through this. (Why do I feel ashamed of such words? Do I wish I had stayed silent instead?)

She replied that she wouldn't do anything about it. She'd continue to live, she said, because she was a Christian. I felt better after that. I did not call the police when the trip was over.

This friend continues to call me and reach out, and she keeps telling me about her deepest fears. I guess she has to get it out. She shares her burdens with me, and I hold them, ingest them, gain that weight and can't seem to lose it. Her stories have made my life a little bit darker, a little more somber, and my disposition is covered with a blank sheet.

That day, I didn't come close to shedding a tear. I took in my friend's updates with a flat composure. These was her battles to face, not mine.

If you meet me, I will laugh, make jokes about myself, and talk about your day, but something in me is tilted and does not take you seriously. And if tell me about something dark you are going through, your news won’t surprise me. You won’t receive my help if it causes a slight inconvenience to my schedule. 

But I will listen.

Have you had a friend who tells you things that sucks the life out of you? Maybe their life really sucks, in a terrifying way like in this story.

Some people have experiences that make the world be darker instead of lighter.

So, you avoid people like that, people with negative energy . People who complain.

Sometimes, I avoid them too. In fact I avoid them often. Whether these people are cursed or have a "bad mindset", I simply do not want to catch what they have.

But maybe, what we're talking around here, is part of the reason why people can't talk about ugly realities like death.

This reminds me of a passage by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Norweigan):

"[There] are a few things that arouse in us greater distate than to see a human being caught up in [death], at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight...

The homeless who freeze to death on benches and in doorways, the suicidal who jump off buildings and bridges, elderly women who fall down staircases, traffic victems... why all this haste to remove them from the public eye?