[This is a fictional piece. Any similarity to actual persons or occurrences is purely coincidental.]
Early morning a colleague of mine who is in his 50s and is not my friend (a superior) sent me an email: please call me when you get a minute. I was slightly surprised and couldn’t stop wondering whether I was in trouble. I rang him right away. “How are you?” I asked. “Not well, Helen, I am not well. This is perhaps one of the worst days of my life.”
I was startled at this level of candidness between colleagues and the daring approach of articulating personal troubles at workplace. “Something wrong with my dog … the vet said he got heart cancer.” I began to understand where this transparency came from: he just showed me pictures and a video of his dog yesterday. It was a slo-mo video of the dog trying to shake off water on his back. Did I mention it also comes with mellow and sweet BGM? He said, the dog is old, and the dog stopped jumping around last night and he had to take the dog to the vet. That was when he knew things are not well with the dog. If something happened to the dog, he said, he would not be able to take it.
I did not know how to respond except with unnatural and reactive condolences. His unconcealed woefulness kind of put me on the spot. It was silence on the other end of the phone. And then there was some soft sobbing. I panicked, and ended up telling him I could relate because my family cat died a few years ago. Right after I said it, I hit myself on the head – how the fuck will this story help? And why the fuck did you start talking about dying?! I panicked. The silence was killing me. Finally after a long period of sighs and silence, we started to talk about the new project. I was mortified. I was engaging in this work-related conversation half-heartedly. I could not help re-running the conversation over and over in my head. I could not stop thinking about my cat, about my mentioning of death, about his sobbing. The only silver lining was we were not having this conversation face to face. Funny, that conversation was not even about me. While I felt sorry for the dog, and the man, I was mentally torturing myself over something entirely unrelated to me.
He did not reply my follow-up emails asking for his comments on the project. I was certain he was drowning in his sorriness.
***
I have been feeling paralyzed lately, to the extent that I could not get out of bed. This is not the first time I felt this way. The feeling of despair and hollowness of living is chronic; it is there when I am drinking the night away with friends; it is there when I suddenly wake up in the middle of the night stressing about possible missing deadlines. This level of aloneness is self-inflicted, but also inevitable: when I felt like hanging out with friends, I always ended up feeling more alone than ever. So I stopped trying to find someone to go to places. It is just the way to be. To a certain degree it is a self-fulfilled prophecy: having carried with me this conviction for decades, I do not have anyone, and I find it completely normal and not out of character to not have anyone. People I hang out with do not know me. People who know me for who I really am are not around.
I think about my childhood friends who are now scattered all over the world. We used to have a gang in high school. We squandered our summer and winter vacations away by playing mahjong and poker and video games, by making up and spreading rumors about people at the school, by wandering randomly in the streets, by drinking cheap canned beers while making banters and joshing each other. They were used to be a phone call away. All of them. There was no such thing as sadness because being in the gang was the ultimate cure. Twenty years later, Georgina got married and has a kid. Zander joined the army and fast tracked his immigration status in another country. Elliot moved to a small town in Europe and also got married. Mac is the only person I am still in touch with though he lives 8,000 miles away from where I am. I always felt we are the same person. I can always know exactly what he is talking about and vice versa. He is the second depressing person I know. We are on agreement that living is a prolonged process of getting to death where we are tortured in various ways with the illusion that meaning of living can be found. A month ago, he texted me that he was touched by the tiniest kindness which rekindled his faith in humanity. He said, if we were growing up with such kindness around us, would we have turned out differently? You know, he continued, some people in the world are kind to you simply because they choose to be kind, and it has nothing to do with you. I don’t know how to respond. But I am happy for his recent encounter. In my experience, people are kind to me when they want things from me. This realization always holds water; at least it started to make sense after the gang dissipated and everyone in the gang had to grow up.
***
I cannot be alone this evening. I need to get out and go to a place full of people and white noise and chatters and laughters. I unlocked my phone and started to check recent text messages to see if anyone can join me. Those first names and the meaningless convos associated therewith are jarring. So are the blurry faces in my mind to whom these names belong. I was again mortified. And again, I stared to think about the dog. The sobbing. The silence. Oh god. I rushed out in the streets and stared to walk randomly in the neighborhood. Oh god. I started to think. I have Don Draper’s worst fear: I never did anything, and I don’t have anyone. I hate myself and I wanna die.
I deserve this. I failed to invest in my friends. Friendships easy to maintain are cheap, and are equally easy to break up. Like those first names stored in my phone – easily forgettable; already forgotten. One time a good friend in college wrote me letters and confided in me his depression and anxiety. I did not write him back. I did not have time. Yes, I was on my way to get to the best art school in the world and achieve my “goals” and could not afford to be influenced by any negativity. He moved to the west coast a few years later. Last time we chatted, he got better. I do not feel what he felt back then until now. I am just catching up. What an irony – now I get to experience his helplessness. And now I have no one to lift me up. I started to think about the recent mishap at home — my brother’s terminal illness — and the fact that I cannot be around for the only handful of people I actually care about because of practical difficulties. Right, how convenient. I cannot be there for the people I know will always be there for me. Soon enough, they may not be able to be there for me any more.
It was almost midnight. There was a ding on my phone. The colleague finally replied, and the email could not be shorter, “Tomorrow morning.” I knew for a fact that the dog had died.