I remember my reaction: Surely people don’t just die at 29? Some minutes before midnight: a phone call which has changed me in ways I am still unable to fully articulate. He said he had no intention of actually following through. He wrote goodbye letters to each of his cherished friends, assuring me all the while they were just expressions of how he was feeling. Soon, his writing turned to the deeper issues he was facing and became darker. Bad poetry about feelings that burnt intensely for a few months or weeks and then petered out as if they never existed. His first writings were about men he loved. Maybe if he put them on paper it would be the catharsis he needed. Work chats turned into intense talks about the dark thoughts that overtook him. There were times when he took so much medication he could barely keep his head up. The following Sunday Shadow Man was gone. I planned to do so later that week but I never got the chance. But I knew I had to make the appointment. I sent him a list of black therapists and psychologists I found in a now-defunct feminism group on Facebook. We had talked about the possibility of him needing a black therapist, someone who understood how he had to move around in life as a black man, someone who was not going to be dismissive or try and provide him with tools that he could not implement because of his social identity. The therapy we talked about never happened. Often, it sits in the back of my head, worrying me with thoughts of everything I did not do to save his life. At other times, it feels like an ache in my chest, a small sharp pain which leaves me a little breathless. Sometimes I feel his weight on my shoulders, a pall of regretful remembrances shrouded over my days. Later that evening he texted me: Thank you for keeping me sane. The indications were there-I should have seen them. It did not occur to me our time together was limited. I treated our last night together like I treated all our other nights: with commonplace fondness. ![]() As long as he went to therapy, I told myself, he’d be fine. His illness was a riddle to me, something that had to be approached logically so it could be “resolved”. We both knew he needed to see a psychologist. We continued the dance we had been doing for two weeks preceding that date, where I kept bringing up therapy, and he kept changing the subject. We sat on the floor of his lounge talking about men and sex and Frank Ocean. He could not shake the compulsion to take much more of it than he was prescribed. He had been discharged from hospital on that day-at his insistence-after promising me, the doctor, the nurse, and everyone he wouldn’t be foolish enough to take that medication again. The laughter made me feel as if everything was going to work out and that, maybe, laughing provided the healing I was otherwise powerless to engineer. As long as we ended up laughing, there was no harm done. We often argued over wine, throwing ugly cuss words at each other and then laughing until every little thing became hilarious, even the topic of depression. I don’t remember what they look like.Ī week before he abandoned his body at the bottom of the bathtub we had an argument while laughing into our wine glasses. Their eyes were invisible behind their sunglasses. I compared him to the sun and politely lamented how he would not brighten our lives again.Īfter I left the stage, his family nodded politely. At least six of his co-workers stood up to express their grief, although of his family members, only his sister spoke. In life, our Shadow Man was popular the line of people who wanted to commemorate him was long. Bae, the beloved medicine student Avo Bae, so called because he hailed from Limpopo and always had avocados and One-Shirt Bae, who always wore the same striped shirt every time we met him.Īt the official memorial service, organised by our employer, we were invited to say something to a crowd of his loved ones as well as our co-workers. We laughed at the random code names bestowed on each new flavour of the month: Dr. It tells us jokes sometimes, prompting us to look at old pictures and laugh for who we lost until our bellies ache. ![]() The shadow is present in our quick glances at each other, an unspoken acknowledgements of secrets we all know but can never discuss. Every so often we smile in pain as we relive drunken nights at our favourite after-work bar, or easy going Sundays under the Winelands sun. Mundane things like the taxi ride home, or buying lunch, take on the shadow’s weight sometimes. It whispers our loss to us in harsh tones. It waits in the corners of a familiar song, a funny incident at work, or a silly story about a man. Not as often as before, but often enough. It constantly stretches and distends into uncomfortable silences and awkward but-anyway-how-are-yous. The shadow does not respect the boundaries of physics. My friends and I have a man-shaped shadow between us.
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