Amor fati

Something personal, for once

TW: Death

In the suburbs of my memory, death manifests as a series of omens: a knock on the door, a ringing telephone, a hooting owl, a high-pitched scream reverberating through the high school’s hallways.

I went to a high school with 2,500 students, and every year was colored by an accident of sorts; in some cases, a death. Our town was ordinary, which means it was prone to narrative forces (rumor, gossip) that attempted to justify it as extraordinary. Rumor has it, for instance, that one of the school’s buildings was haunted — a freshman was crushed to death in the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake — but no one paid that any mind. Most of us took classes in modular classrooms, where the sky was the open roof of our hallways. I was not close to any of the deceased, but even those who existed outside of their social periphery felt implicated in the aftershock of their sudden disappearance. No one knew how to talk about it, of course, but gossip led us to believe that there were always signs of what was to come.

In Twin Peaks, an unknown student, presumably after learning of Laura Palmer’s death, runs shrieking across the yard. The first omen, so we naively think. Then, a shot of Laura’s empty desk. A wordless glance passes between Donna and James, and Donna begins to sob. Omens anticipate and announce what is left unsaid. Donna understood that Laura was not simply missing. She was dead.

The city, by contrast, offers few omens. I assume that is because a person would go crazy attempting to decode the daily onslaught of stimuli they encountered on the subway, on the street. In such an environment, omens lose their gravitas. Death becomes just another stitch in the fabric of city life.

I think of Netflix’s Groundhog Day-esque Russian Doll, which I watched in grim preparation for city life. (I suspect I turned it on when I was bored of Sex and the City, not having yet learned of Girls.) Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is subjected to a series of gruesome urban-inflicted deaths day in and day out: She is struck by a taxi cab after recklessly crossing into a busy intersection; she falls headfirst into an open cellar hatch; she drowns after inexplicably losing her balance atop a pier; she trips to her death down her walk-up’s stairs during her birthday party. The same thing is happening to a man (Charlie Barnett) across town. I remember clocking the clanging metal hatches where, in one instance, Nadia tumbles to her death and thinking, I need to pay better attention to my surroundings. Anyway, there is a reason she keeps dying, I think. Something metaphysical, like fate, is involved. But because it’s a Netflix show, the protagonists are determined to resolve their death drive and earn another shot at life once they realize that life is worth living.

Before I moved to New York, on a weekend trip to the city, I witnessed a taxi cab mow down an elderly woman in Chinatown. It was high afternoon, and I was high off a joint a friend had rolled for me in Thomas Paine Park. I remember the horror in slow-motion: the crunch of the collision, the driver oblivious of the body crushed under his front wheel. A crowd had amassed on the sidewalk. We were yelling, pointing, crying. I was yelling STOP! STOP! He didn’t stop. A girl dug her face into her boyfriend’s shoulder. I walked around the corner and threw up my lunch.

By next April, in the midst of quarantine, I was numbly keeping a daily tally of ambulance sirens that passed beneath my tenth floor window. My friends and I were (and still are) young and healthy, and no one we knew in the city died or even suffered severely from COVID, so the factual horrors of that year feel dulled in hindsight. Yet, when anxiety is steeped into the natural ambiance of the city, the anticipation of an omen manifests into paranoia.

The day Laura’s body is discovered, the entire town of Twin Peaks appeared to cease its operations, mourning its golden girl. Classes were dismissed, and even the mill closed early. She is the face of Twin Peaks, its main character, though she functions as a Lynchian symbol. Her import, to us viewers, is forever tied to her death; we crave to know her life to understand her death. Of course, white girls who disappear under eerie circumstances still get the Laura Palmer treatment in the press and by online sleuths, but I am struck by how the lives of the living, unlike in Twin Peaks, rarely pause to revolve around the dead for very long.

Recently, I encountered a TikTok that asked me to categorize myself as one of the five women of Twin Peaks, with Laura as the first option. It’s a funny question to pose because Laura, if given the choice, wouldn’t choose to be Laura, a pawn in the demonic chessboard of the Twin Peaks universe. The TikTok, I think, is symptomatic of a common line of thinking: that we are the main characters in our life’s movie. But life, while linear in experience, is not coherently narrative in structure. What we are indulging with this main-character thinking is fantasy, which stands in stark contrast to “these ragged edges of the disappointing narrative [that] life forms — ones that certainly make uninteresting television. That life is necessarily tragic, ending with nothing but a banal or even humiliating string of leftovers, what Virgil referred to as “tears in things,” sorry remainders bereft of finality.” (An incredible excerpt from my friend Ben’s forthcoming novel, If I Close My Eyes.)

And so it ends with a fade out, scene, curtain but the supporting characters, bereft by the abrupt absence, have no choice but to carry on.

In his essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib writes: “I remember the fear I felt when I realized that I had buried enough friends to think of death almost casually. Something that I expect and know will come for people I grew up with and care about. When I see a childhood friend’s number flash across my caller ID, I exhale and prepare myself for an all-too-familiar routine. There’s a sadness in that, but there’s also an urgency. Witnessing the taking of sacred things is how we learn to covet.”

I suppose it is a privilege to admit that I do not think I will ever be casual about death. I am talking around the issue, I guess, because there is no good way to tell people when someone you love is dead, someone you felt, in due time, you could’ve been very very close to, someone you pinned in your iMessages as a reminder to text him more often, someone who asked you to partake in his annual birthday tradition of getting martinis and going to the museum (sloshed, of course) and promised to attend the reading you were slated to perform at later that night, but he never made it to 27, which you found out in a mass text about the cancellation of another friend’s birthday party, the unintended gut-punch cruelty in the form of its delivery, an “unexpected passing,” when being alive was something he casually joked about on the invite to his birthday party, him vs. the 27 club, which you found grim but texted, “Love the party theme. Very spooky,” and the “celebration of life” event was hosted on the day of this planned birthday party, and everyone who RSVP’d “Yes” to the Partiful event kept receiving reminders of this party that would never happen, reminders from the same automated number that texted you of his “unexpected passing,” and you are in Greenpoint, two drinks in, eating strawberry cake, posing for photos alongside his other friends, friends who flew across the country to attend this not-party, and you think that grief is the hollow contours of a missed future. Some weeks later, when the irreality of his death has sunk in somewhat, you walk past a graffiti sign that reads “I Miss My Dead Friends,” and put on “Dance Yrself Clean,” but only the first 3 minutes and 5 seconds, an inside joke, to edge yourself, I suppose, towards life.