A friend of mine took her own life, from herself and from the rest of us, a little while back, perhaps eighteen months. After a long time another of her friends whom I didn’t know wrote to me in Berlin saying she had left behind a painting for me. We met when he was in town and he handed me a plastic bag with her rolled picture. Today in Ghana I got an email from another of her friends. She was a wonderful person and most beloved. This friend says she left a letter behind for me. Would I like it posted. I am so sorry my darling friend cannot know what she meant to us and did not survive long enough to have meant everything she was and had, to herself.
We met dancing. And at a certain point in the dance we sat down in pairs and she and I told each other the innermost stories of our lives and we both cried. That communion, when two foreign souls can grasp each other. When the self of this new person feels like paper or crumpled cloth or scatterings of cut grass on fine sand. I live for those times. She died, perhaps, for want of them. I will never forgive myself for having been too sad to reach back to her when she called out to me. I’ll never forget.