The Moments You Never Share…

After hours slaving away at the job (one, I’m thankful to say, that I can do from home), I flopped on the couch to play a few songs from Guitar Hero 3. I just needed to stop for a second and regroup. After the first song, my phone rang.

It was my Best Guy (in that friend way) telling me that Heath Ledger was dead. I rushed to write up a story for work, getting dizzy by the continually updating reports. He died. It was Mary Kate Olsen’s apartment. It wasn’t her apartment. He was found naked, with pills scattered around him. The pills were on the night stand. And so on, and so forth.

I pondered blogging about it here, but didn’t decide to type anything until I read the Slackmistress’ latest blog post, “Fight for It.” She said: “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t experienced utter, gut-wrenching hopelessness.”

Could anything be more true? Moreover, do we reject anything else as much as we do that notion?

Think about it. It’s almost never okay to really say what’s on your mind when you get the inevitable question: “How are you?” Even in more personal scenarios, very few people can really deal with an honest answer. It’s too uncomfortable. If we rant, that is fine. If we wryly make jokes about it, that’s okay. The content isn’t the issue, it’s the delivery. (Oh, and how I could write a post just on the delivery of emotions, thoughts, and feelings…but that’s another story.)

Even within close relationships, it’s really hard to dip beneath the surface — to pull away the mask of “good” or “bad” and reveal the underlying thoughts — the pieces that make the whole. How often do we really open up to one another? I’ve found that for every layer I share, or someone else I know shares, there’s another level beneath. Sometimes it is later revealed to you, and sometimes not.

If we can’t tell those closest to us the details underneath the details, then how on earth can casual friends, acquaintances, or fans-from-afar ever begin to grasp who we really are, and how we’re really feeling?

Slack’s piece reminded me of one of my favorite memories, those times when at least part of the web is pulled away, and you realize that while a lot might go unspoken, there are those remote and special times when someone “gets it.”

I was in university at the time, the epitome of the happy-go-lucky girl. This was mainly due to freedom. The anxiety of strict parents had lifted. The crushing weight of high school politics had fallen away. The loneliness of isolation was a thing of the past. For a month, nothing could touch me.

Then, as naive teen girls are wont to do, I feel for some dude’s line. I loved his eyes and thick eyelashes. I loved the silent rapport we had. I believed him when he said we couldn’t date, because we had both just entered college and had to experience all that it had to offer.

I didn’t realize it was a line until a week later, when he introduced me to his new girlfriend.

The words of praise my friends and I used to describe him became sarcastic anthems of shit-i-tude. To this day, I’m not sure if he still believed that we were praising him, or if he realized that we were disgusted, and chose to accept the veiled sarcasm “innocently.”

Regardless, I was beyond shocked. For the first time since escaping my hometown, I was beaten down and sad. I grabbed my headset, hopped on my bed, and stretched out on my stomach. With headphones to my ears, I listened to Pearl Jam’s Ten over, and over, and over again. My roommate was worried. She kept saying that she’d never seen me like this. It was a shock to everyone.

Having been happy for a few straight months made it seemingly impossible that I could be sad, depressed, or withdrawn. This meant not only dealing with what happened, but with the worried faces of those who kept commenting on my state of mind.

One day, while I was laying on my stomach, listening to Eddie Vedder belt out the best songs of his career (really, everything since then is not even half as good…), the phone rang. My friend J told me he had to take a trip to another college to drop off a friend’s car. He said get ready, because he’d be over to pick me up shortly.

There was no room for backing out, and he drove me off-campus and out-of-state. We didn’t talk about what had happened. He was friends of both of us, and I’m sure he didn’t want to get in the middle.

He was just there. He knew what I needed, and he made me accept it. It was, to this day, the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me. I haven’t spoken to him in years, but he will always be in my heart for that one day.

Now, that isn’t to say that people haven’t been nice since, but there is something powerfully simple about a welcome, yet surprising, moment of both thoughtfulness and understanding when you least expect it. Flowers are nice. A shoulder to cry on can be comforting. Someone to rant away with is great. But there is nothing in this world as sweet at those perfect moments — especially when no one had ever been as thoughtful before.

It’s just a shame that we’re all so self-involved, busy, awkward, or whatever the case may be, to have these moments more often.

It’s funny… I have been thinking about that day a lot this week, planning a post about the little things (which will still come in some form). I kept wondering what to mold it into, and then this story came along.

If Heath did take his life, I’m really sorry that no one was there to surprise him with an out-of-state drive. It is nowhere near a perfect answer to life’s problems, but it’s amazing how much one small, little action can make even the darkest day seem bright.