The Year of Sad

On boys and bikes

Georges Braque – The Bicycle (c. 1961)

It all starts with a boy on the subway. He was about twelve and he looked just like you. Or maybe he didn’t, but he came in with his father and they had their bikes with them. So maybe that reminded me of how I would call you and your grandmother would tell me you were out on your bike, then later you’d tell me all about going down slopes and falling down. The next Monday, the scrapes on your knees would have scabbed over the scars of previous falls. You were such a boy’s boy that I can’t help but think you’d never approve of the middle-aged manchild types I crush over now. Or maybe it wasn’t the bike, but his eyebrows. They always were the most distinctive feature on your face, and I remember wondering after our big fight if the reason I liked you in the early days was that those eyebrows kind of made you look a little bit like Liam Gallagher.

Or maybe it’s just the fact that that boy sitting there while his father held on to their bikes was just a small little person, and that when it all happened – when you’d be reckless riding your bike or playing football in P.E. or making silly jokes mid-class, back when we used to talk on the phone all the time as easily as I would with my best friends – we were not much older than that child.

I suppose it does not start with a boy on the subway, after all. It starts with laughter, and braces, and sweaty palms. It starts with firsts: glances, blushes, coded messages in the middle of trig. It starts with a novel I wrote for and about you that I only allowed my best friend to read, because I can’t help but feel that the people who don’t know you, who don’t care enough to read the many letters for you and the many stories about you that I wrote, are not exactly meant to read this one shred of truth that I managed to write to honour the parts of you that remain alive, very much so, within me. I fell in love with somebody about a week after I finished our book last year, and sometimes I wonder if the reason I felt he was worth my time was that, on some level, I hoped the universe – you, really – had sent him to make me a little happier.

It starts with feeling both very right and very wrong all the time, with letting go and then holding on to the many versions of myself I hoped to become. It starts with picturing you in stories, revisiting you in dreams. I am aware that even when I don’t talk to you like this, you’re very much still with me, because it’s not just our old usual spots that you haunt, but all the new ones I explore, especially when I’m on my own. There is, it’s true, a part of me that is very much you. Call it longing, call it a muse: the man you never got to be is the one I write best. You’re a language I devised for my own use only, you’re the first snow in a chilly November and my favourite actor I get to meet after a play.

It starts with telling everybody about you, and it scares them – the magnitude of the loss, the sheer amount of unsurmountable grief. Who could ever tell, looking at you, not much older than a boy on the subway, that you could possibly be meant for tragedy? But I tell them anyway. I can afford anybody’s discomfort if it means one more person knows about you. It’s the forgetting that I cannot bear.

It starts with boring men and unoriginal frenemies. It starts with raging against the fact my teeth are misaligned and, once again, I’m told I’m supposed to wear braces. It starts with feeling that life loops around itself again and again, but you never come back. It starts with being overworked but underpaid, and somehow always putting myself in the position of accommodating random acquaintances while my own feet are raw with blisters. It starts with reaching for extraordinary things in the most ordinary places, but insisting on the beauty of doing it anyway, because there are moments of clarity. I wonder about you as I walk past our old school, the one you hated. And I wonder about you as I ride past our older school, the one you loved. They are tearing it down, but it’s still there – a vacant building – and I know you sometimes haunt those hallways. I wonder if they still smell the same without teenagers in skinny jeans, carrying nylon backpacks around, but I guess I’ll never know, because they will never let me in there ever again.

I find that it does start with love, impossible but endless love for a boy who never knew he didn’t have that much time. A boy who thrived in some ways and floundered in others. I dreamt about you in the pandemic and talked about you to a therapist for eighteen months. She was sure the reason I could not let you go was that life was chaos, but at the same time too quiet. You will be dead ten years next month, and as people flood Instagram and Twitter with the 2016–2026 trend, I’m constantly reminded of the fact there is not a single photo of me that year where I look remotely happy. I call that my year of sad.

In the end, I bet you can’t believe that I’m the one who still thinks about you this often. Sometimes I do believe in heaven, because how can I not when I can feel you perplexed at how simultaneously brilliant and ridiculous my life choices are? There was a horrible fire at the mall last month and I kept thinking of how our places are disappearing, and how you would hate the people I hang out with now. I kind of hated your friends too, but who would you be now if the year of sad never happened?