it's hard when someone you used to know dies. even harder when you don't know anything about it, only the fact of his death. and harder still when the person is someone younger than you, who you still thought of as a kid in many ways.
i met brandon because of beanies. which, to my dismay, i've never spoken about here. beanies was a coffeehouse in salisbury, maryland, where i went to school. i say was because now it's apparently an office building for the university. it closed down while i was still there. but before it did, i pretty much lived there. i make a mean latte still.
when you live in a dorm, it's pretty well priceless to have a place that you can go to escape from it. when you live in a small town, a place like beanies is your haven. i think it was even moreso for the kids i met there. beanies was run by two amazing women named laura and dianne. laura grew up in the same town, and her vision was to have a place where everyone would be welcome; a safe place for kids who had nowhere else to go. and we went. we went to open mic nights to read poems, we came to draw with chalk on the sidewalks outside, we came to see bands, and we came just because laura and dianne made us feel safe and welcome all the time. we made friends for life in that coffeehouse. we fell in love with one another, nursed our heartbreaks there, my best friend jenn spent a lot of time with her future husband in beanies.
beanies changed hands once, and then went back to laura and dianne again. it closed down, partly because it financially couldn't make it, and partly because the extreme homophobia and dislike of the "different" kept a lot of people from ever even opening the doors (thus making the financial situation that much harder). but while it lasted, it was magic. while we were there, we were a family.
brandon was one of the kids from town who frequented beanies. he was quiet, and shy, and seemed a little lost sometimes. i know things were hard for him, although i never really knew the story of why. he was someone i talked to, and one of the kids that (though i feel weird saying this) sort of looked up to the college kids who hung out there, the beanies brat pack. though god knows i'm not sure we were in any way to be emulated, most of us struggling through depressions and addictions and mistakes of our own. we tried though, and i think it was good for us, too. i know i listened, i gave what advice and comfort i could. brandon shaved his head once to try to stop cutting, something right out of a scene from empire records...he wanted to hurt himself even that far back. i know he attempted suicide after i left town, and i can only imagine that this time he succeeded.
if that's true, i hate to think about the pain he must have been in. i've been there, and i feel it all again thinking of what he must have felt. i wish i could have saved him. barring that, i wish someone could have. that someone could have held him and told him was a special and gentle and good person he was. i wish i'd been around to do it. i'm not very good at keeping track of people when i move away; i think about them all the time, i wish them well, i wonder and i get updates from mutual friends. but i forget that they don't know any of that. they aren't privy to my internal well-wishing. and they tumble away from me, as if blown by the wind.
it's been a long time since i really thought about any of it. i think just keeping forward helps me to forget that i once had a life that was very different from the one i'm living now. everything was open, and i really believed i was going to be something amazing by the time i was thirty. every day was exhilerating and frightening and exhausting. everyone and everything was connected, and it was our whole world and it was vitally important for some reason we could never define. we felt like characters in a novel, like our lives were important and everyone was watching everything, from the late night cigarette confessions on benches in the bitter cold, to marathon all night pool tournaments in the honors house that someone always managed to steal the passcode for, to the time jenn puked red stuff down the dorm steps, or rupert cut all his hair off, or we tried to rescue a cat, or the night (halloween night, actually) tim first kissed me.
life now seems so much staler than it did when i was 20. the friendships more distant, subordinate to the demands of daily life. i guess the mourning i'm doing isn't just for brandon, although most of it is i think. it's also for the person brandon used to be, and for who i used to be, and for the people we all were. for the heartbreak when we realize that these ecstatic states aren't, and can't be, sustainable.
goodbye brandon, may you finally find peace. --christina
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