Immortalised in a Twenty-First Century World

In many ways April began as probably the worst month of my life. Just five days in, on a dismal Wednesday in which raindrops clung to windowpanes as though they’d been stained into the glass, my mother rang me to break the news that my younger brother Toby had died.

Far from being a shock the news came more as a deep sigh of release that unfolded into an obtuse ache, being as it was that Toby had suffered from leukaemia for much of his tragically short life. Throughout my own life I had delved into the modern world and all it had to offer me with youthful vitality, of the kind that Toby could only watch with quiet envy from sidelines as an invalid spectator. In a way his passing relieved me of the subconscious burden and inescapable feelings of guilt that I felt about his exclusion from all the freedoms and liberties of health that I enjoyed, whilst acknowledging the realisation of how selfish I was in thinking in such a way. Whilst I had been making plans for jetting off to Asia in pursuit of adventure after graduating from my Law masters degree, all Toby could do was plan ahead to the next week, the next bout of remission, the next hospital appointments to keep.

What came as effortlessly more of a shock was the suicide of one of my oldest friends just a week later. David and I had grown up side by side all the way from nursery to primary to secondary school, and in the immediate aftermath I realised that, in an equally self-centred way, I had long thought of him as the brother I’d always wanted Toby to be. Like me, David was coming up to his final university exams and had a promising career in architecture ahead of him. The acute stabbing shock of the news sent me into almost a complete mental paralysis for the following few days.

Seemingly unprompted and leaving no explanatory note, David had eaten a meal with his three housemates, carried on working on a piece of coursework and then hung himself in his wardrobe using a plug-socket extension lead. The absence of any note shedding light on his well-concealed mental instability or the rationale behind such decisive action left the rest of us reeling in a spiral of questions and upset.

At the funeral we stood as a ragged band of mourners, Myself alongside friends I had known for years; all struck dumb by the same asphyxiating grief and thirst for any explanation. Seeing his devastated parents cling to one another and hearing their cries puncture the cemetery silence was only slightly less heart-rending than the way they appeared to desperately appeal to us for an insight that we perhaps were privy to and were now united in keeping from them. Regrettably we had nothing to offer them that would ease their pain.

In the weeks following the funeral I graduated and moved down to London to begin a summer internship at a small law firm, having decided to postpone my Asian adventure. This change of situation and circumstance came as a necessary opportunity to try and put the past to one side and focus on my new life away from the now dour and solemn community of friends and family that I had left behind. As a result of being so far from home and due to my limited funds – the internship being an unpaid ‘foot in the door’ – I found myself with long evening hours to while away and it was precisely at these junctions that Toby and David would float to the surface of my consciousness once again. I would always attempt to weigh them down with the anchor of finality but invariably they were never far from my thoughts.

To pass the time in those lonely evenings cocooned inside my claustrophobic attic of an apartment just outside Fulham, I would end up ingesting sugar-coated talent shows on my portable TV and downloading shit movies with Japanese subtitles despite my internet band-width routinely failing around two-thirds of the way through.

Another favoured pastime was to vacantly surf my way through AliveTime profiles and blogs, keen to sink beneath the waves of the social network embrace and resurface upon the shores of real life as infrequently as possible. I would scan through reams of personal information and photo albums, traversing my gaze through swathes of people I may or may not have met in reality and digesting every minutiae of detail divulged about themselves and their lives out there in the real world.

I frequented the profile page of an ex-girlfriend with a shameless urgency, flicking through numerous photos of her with a new boyfriend all taken in various poses of embrace. The more I looked the more they appeared to be taunting me, as if she had uploaded endless photographic evidence of her renewed affection primarily to invoke hostility and envy within me.

It could have been one such occasion when I bitterly navigated away from her photo-walls that served as an exhibition of lusting, and came upon Toby’s profile page, scrolling down to the expansive message-board upon which scores of people had left comments expressing sorrow and remembrance.

- Jason – ‘Missing you already mate. Rest in peace man x’
- Sarah – ‘I’ll always remember your bravery and constant smiling, what a lovely guy you were. U will neva be forgotten xxx'

From there I searched for David’s profile which had similarly been hijacked by countless acquaintances all gushing their anguish and shock at the tragic news. My initial reaction, as tears began to blossom from my reluctant eyes, was a feeling of anger at these people; so-called ‘friends’ all spewing their mourning onto an internet message-board in increasingly melodramatic fashion. By adorning their posts with exaggerated emotional apparel, these people appeared to be competing with each other in an effort to display even more sorrow or regale even more personal stories shared between themselves and David.

- Mark – ‘Why’d u have to do it buddy?? I have no words rite now. Heartbroken and stunned. You’ve gone to a better place now’
- Julianne – ‘So upset when I heard this. You were a great guy who always made me laugh. Hope you are at peace now, rip xx’

Over the next few nights I found myself returning to Toby and David’s profile pages, finding an odd catharsis in scrolling through their photo walls and personal information, lists of their favourite movies, music bands, and such like. Lists and details that now served as their own self-penned obituaries.

The more I thought about it, the more it struck me that this was, in effect, a way of sustaining their lives, of keeping the flame of memory lit through their virtual profiles being frozen in time, merely paused indefinitely as the curator of these personalised museums clocked off at his shift’s end.

I began to realise that in the never-ending universe of data and information beaming back and forth between and around us, every single one of us could now become immortalised in some way by our virtual-selves with which people could still converse, only now it would be a one-way conversation. In the vast ether of the web, people would float in a suspension of time like space junk orbiting reality, in a forever-expanding cyber-cemetery in which everyone could have their own plot.

This strange realisation made me feel slightly better about things. Or at least, allowed me to view the loss from a different angle and through a different lens. Mark and Julianne, Jason and Sarah, whoever they were, might be feeling sorrow now but they could revisit at any time in their lives and still find their wreaths of text un-wilted, still symbolising their remembrance, whether sincere or not.

A few nights later after I had returned from a rare night out with work colleagues, I was just ready to shut down the laptop when I noticed in the corner of the AliveTime home page –

‘David – Online’

I lay there with my tired eyes squinting at the glare of the screen, unsure through my drunken haze whether I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I must have remained in that state of breathless confusion and self-doubting for some time ,watching as various different people clocked on and offline whilst one constant radiated through –

‘David – Online’

The absurdity of attempting a conversation with David shone through to me despite my semi-conscious state and I convinced myself that I was witnessing nothing more than an internet mirage, a failure of the site mechanics rather than some virtual apparition from beyond the grave.
These rational arguments were somewhat diluted when David broke the silence between us with a flashing message in the corner of the screen.

- David – ‘Hi mate. U alright??’

Still the surrealism of this development dotted my vision and I rubbed my eyes, forcing myself to gain focus and dispel any alcoholic imbalance that my mind may have been operating under. There it was though, clear and true in bright pixellated form, a message of greeting from David, and I knew that ridiculous or not I couldn’t lose face by not responding. That would be unthinkable.

- Jack – ‘Hiya mate. Not bad thanks. How are you?’

Seeing my casual words typed there in front of me made me almost blush with the craziness of it, of enquiring after the well-being of someone whose funeral I had just recently attended.

- David – ‘Good to hear it. Yeah I’m good cheers mate. How’s the new job, life in the real world all it’s cracked up to be then?’
- Jack – ‘It’s a real drag tbh mate, wish I was back at uni already haha! It’s a good start, just need to start getting paid to work now!’
- David – ‘Lol. Don’t go getting ahead of yourself.’

And so the conversation progressed like this, light and deprecatory, each of us sliding back into the comfortable moulds that years of friendship had forged; the same old jokes and sore spots, the same humour and playful insults traded back and forth over the invisible void between us.

Not at any point was the harsh fact of David’s death brought up or even hinted at by either of us. It was a point around which we danced, talking instead about the progress of our mutual friends, who had split up with who and who had gotten off with who. But at the forefront of my dazed mind like an insatiable itch, was the desperate question that I dearly wanted to ask and yet knew I couldn’t. Why did you do it David? You had everything to live for, what reason could you have had to kill yourself?

This one question burned inside me and I knew that come the soberness of morning I would forever regret not broaching the subject with him. But right there, in the flow of idle conversation with my oldest friend, such an issue suddenly didn’t matter to me and I couldn’t bring myself to shatter the illusion of renewed comradeship that we had built between us somehow. In some way I didn’t want to know the reasons enough to ruin that.

I couldn’t tell you how long it was that we both shared the same space in the virtual universe in the early hours of morning; all I know is that it served to make me just that little bit more content. The raging waters became calmer and the warring factions of loss and guilt lay down their arms. With an intangible cyber afterlife I had made a connection and as we bid our farewells, wished each other all the best and together signed offline back into the real world, I knew that from that point on everything would be alright.

Out of the Quiet

A sunny day in June
Early-summer sun kissing slow streets
Wavering on the precipice of malice and regret
A benign imbalance that simmers, subsides
On this, an ordinary day refined in routine.

Normalcy’s tender betrayal
Anonymity’s bitter riposte
Teetering on the tightrope that traverses,
Seismic waves and hidden depths.

Out of the quiet – a shout, a scream
Before silence sets like liquid wax
So many tears wrought from the singular glare
Of an unflinching steely stare
Just a regular guy, your average bloke
Setting out on this, an ordinary day
One amongst many, nothing more or less
One of us, me or you.