This guy is slouched back on a park bench like he owns the place, which he might, I don’t know the man personally, but I do know that we have been sitting across from each other for an hour now. He doesn’t look at his phone or read the book sticking out of his bag, he doesn’t fiddle his thumbs or even look bored. He sits, thinking his thoughts, and is quite entertained by himself. His eyes dart around. He laughs softly. He frowns. I wonder what he is thinking about.

I am not slouched, I am sitting criss-crossed and sketching in a new journal. I want to find it poetic— to take myself out to a park to bask in art and nature— but I am only here because my therapist made it my homework, and I want to do my homework because I want to get better.

My therapist— Caroline— said I had to go back to my roots. She asked me about the things I used to do before “the episode,” which is a reference to the final mental devastation I had before seeking help. After I told her why I had a breakdown, we sat on her carpet and wrote a list of things I like to do.

1. Drawing (People, mainly).
2. Going to museums (On Sundays, when it’s free).
3. Graffiti (How I met Vincent).
4. Hanging out with Vincent (My best friend who had committed suicide).

She frowned when I wrote the last one.

When I found out what happened to Vincent the world under me swayed like a violent and cursed pendulum. It’s as if life itself was teasing me for my loss, how can one cry and stand up simultaneously? And thus, I collapsed, sobbing, and woke up with numb eyes and heavy chest. I was asleep for almost two days.

I vividly remember peeling myself off the floor and looking into the mirror leaned against my wall. I didn’t look real, my eyes had no gleam. I don’t know how long I stared into myself but when I looked at my phone I realized the date-digits had moved up twice from when I last checked. I went back to sleep, hoping I wouldn’t go coma-mode again. The next week I found Caroline.

I woke up early today, put on my favorite jeans, walked to an overpriced cafe, and then ended up here. Sitting across from a man on a park bench who is almost meditating. I am drawing Vincent and the man at the same time. The figure has Vincent’s curly hair, and his down-turned eyes, but the stranger’s moving lips, rather fat nose, and all his ear piercings. I think about what a compromising position I would be in if the man had strolled over (nonchalantly but also suddenly) and looked at my distorted image of him.

Vincent had fallen asleep next to me once. I was drawing on my bed while he lay on his back, listening to a jazz album I had picked up at Goodwill, and his face morphed to the music in the same way this strangers does. His eyelashes fluttered, nose scrunched, eyebrows waved, lips pursed, until his facial-dance came to a halt. When I noticed he had fallen asleep I smiled and kept drawing.

That memory feels pivotal, as if I knew what was going to happen a month after, as if I saw the noose become tangled around his neck, as if I didn’t get to say I love you. Maybe it was my neurons translating the memory to me with a new filter of grief and depression, because I feel sick. The long fingers sprawled out beside my leg and the relaxed expression his face posed were now gone, eternally.

I loved Vincent.

Vincent is now dead.

Now I am outside for the first time in weeks.

I look up to the stranger again, lost in his own unknown thoughts. I hope he is thinking about the grieving girl who has been drawing across from him for the past hour. For some reason I want us to have some sort of symbiotic relationship, something that reminds us both that sharing space and time is in of itself intimate. He does not know I am thinking of Vincent, and he never will. Yet, in some self-centered way, as if I am using him, this stranger’s presence has been the first feeling of raw comfort I have had since my best friend felt secure enough with me to drift into slumber.

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