banks of one river

content warning: suicide

Hello dear readers,

As many of you know, we lost a friend a few weeks back. I’ve been turning it over in my head, unsure how to write about it. Some things are private, some are better left unsaid, and some things cannot not be said. I’m not sure which is which now. Colin Self wrote a beautiful obituary about Xenia in their newsletter Note to Self, which you can check out if you would like to be introduced to this person, in a way.

Is there a lesson that can be extracted from this? If there is, it may not be a shared one, so I hesitate to write out my lessons for fear of contaminating yours. Yet how can we go on without sharing what is going on with each other?

“At the end of these nights, I would get into the car with the first throb of a migraine, saying that we didn’t have any business discussing anything until we could, all of us, articulate a coherent ideology.” Ex-evangelical Meghan O’Gieblyn, in this quote from her book of ambivalent essays about faith called Interior States, expresses a desire I share. It’s her impression of a meal at a farm-to-table restaurant with secular millennials in Madison Wisconsin. Amid conversations about veganism and netflix, the occasional interesting debates would inevitably dissolve into semantic conversation-killers like “it all depends on your definition of morality” or “what exactly do you mean by duty?” Frustrated with all this meaninglessness, she wishes for something strong enough to hold us all together.

In a funny way, I wouldn’t call my community secular. In the performance world that I wander, ritual is a thoroughly explored theatrical device. Good performers understand that simply being in a room together with some kind of intention or direction is enough to make magic happen. Xenia, who was an artist and dancer, and I bonded over astrology, especially around 2016 when astrology was more fun and interesting than it was a social currency. Colin called her a powerful witch (and a hot dyke). I would use the same words to describe Xenia as well as many other friends, and would be flattered - maybe feel the blush of pride - if someone used those words about me.

I have something to say but I don’t know if it’s important for you to hear it. Be with your feelings, I am told. Is extracting lessons from suicide an insult to the act, a misunderstanding of suicide itself? There was nothing you could have done, they wrote. In my anger at the death of my friend, I’ve been searching for meaning as a way to cope. The outcome of that search is, inevitably, an opinion. But why does my opinion about this even matter? The naïveté that used to protect me is more of a mesh tank top at this point, and I am not even wearing a bra.

Xenia was known for their mesh tank tops, spotify playlists, feeling their feelings, and a surging conviction that the only way out is through and that the way through is deep, deep within. We were both spiritual people, but in very different ways. I personify the void with a character that has many names but that I like to call God, and it helps me feel less scared, sad, and alone. Xenia desired a connection with the void, and what began as trailing their fingers on its surface and watching their reflection ripple, turned into one foot, and then another, until she dissolved into it completely, until they became one with source. Xenia was a virtuosic feeler, and felt this void coursing within her body and knew that each and every one of us has this river running through us as well. They taught me to be less afraid of it. They showed me ways to move through it. I will always be grateful for that lesson.

I may be arguing with Xenia’s ghost about what it means to feel God until the day I die, but that is between us. My actual opinion is that one person cannot have an opinion about how to do spirituality best. But what I like about O’Gieblyn’s desire for something to hold us together is that it acknowledges that the world is mighty, and without a frame we can get lost. Xenia followed the river to the ocean; so be it. For us who will spend more time in the canals, ponds, creeks, subterranean lakes, swamps, bogs and brooks, I wish us to acknowledge and be grateful to the banks that contain all this water, and to reinforce them together. We understand our edges by running into each other, in pleasant and unpleasant ways. In doing so we know that so much of what we experience is shared within the banks of one river, before we make our way out.