twenty-five

I remember waking up that morning. Isn’t it strange how you can immediately sense when you’re alone? You can just feel the silence of an empty house, like white noise fizzling between songs on the radio. It was nice to have the house to myself though, you can only imagine how hard getting a moment of peace and quiet was in a house of six girls. Even if we weren’t a party house, we always had people over and hosted days and nights on end. We all agreed that even when it was just the six of us, it felt like someone was missing. Almost as though we needed a bass line of a masculine voice vibrating through the house to make it feel complete.

It was a nice morning. Though the sun hadn’t managed to peek through the clouds just yet, you could nonetheless feel the vibrancy of the day swirling in the slight breeze. I was looking forward to some down time, finally some space and a mummed moment to start ticking boxes off my ever-growing to-do list. It was just past eleven o’clock when I sat down at my desk and tuned my speakers into some jazz guitar radio; I’d always been slow at starting and needed a jazzy judder to get the caffeine flowing through my veins. Mapping out a plan for the day, the coming weeks, my Moleskine soon started to brim. Once I felt buzzed enough to start my real work, I turned down the strum of the strings and finally decided to face the empty shell of a fresh word document.

Then, suddenly, a little banner appeared at the top of my screen: a private message from one of the girls. Strange, as everyone was either at work or in lectures. She was asking me if I had also just received a text from our manager – we temped together at a small family-run business nearby. I had yet to check my messages that morning, so I clicked on the banner to go and read my texts. The message read…

Hey lovely, just wanted to let you know in preparation for tomorrow that unfortunately Aidan took his own life yesterday. There’s going to be some people in the office working tomorrow but we may be a little all over the place. You don’t have to come in as we may not necessarily get much done in our state of minds, but if you’re free and would like to you’re more than welcome to! Xxx

I could barely catch my breath. My heart dropped further and further past the ground with each time I reread the qualm of the words so innocently staring at me in black and white. I didn’t know what to do, what to think, how to act. This was the first time in my life I had come into such close proximity with death. He was twenty-five. Makes you wonder. How, if I didn’t even know him that well, was I so trounced by this occurrence? Makes you think. Makes it unimaginable to ponder the what if. What if that had been my house mate, my father, my partner. Makes you realise just how precious human life really is. He was twenty-five.