I can't stop fucking crying
There's going to be no-one at her funeral except maybe David and her mother
How can a sixteen year old girl who had so much life and energy die and only have two people at her funeral

Fuck

Now Fie is dead too. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do.

People my age aren't supposed to just die and leave you behind.

I owed Fie what I could never have repaid. She was as arrogant as she was brave. She never stood a fucking chance.

In Memory

This post is long overdue, but I needed to get my head around this first. I had to do this justice. I had to do my friend justice.

I'm writing in memory of Rohan Watts, who died on November 25th 2015. Rohan was neither a boy nor a girl, but much more importantly, they were a person with a sense of humor and bright ginger hair and a self-conscious, lovely smile. They were funny, and kind, and quiet when you didn't know them but every word they said mattered. They tended to be that kid who everyone liked who sat and listened rather than talking, who was just nice and caring and you couldn't help but like them. They got angry at Finn sometimes and they had their personal problems but they were brave and a good friend, a good person. They made this world a better place.

I met Rohan through our mutual best friend, Finn, but I honestly never got to know them as well as I would've liked. So perhaps I'm not summing them up very well, because after all I am not the right person to describe who they were. They were fifteen years old. They would have been sixteen on 7th January, exactly one month younger than me. I can't describe how it felt to go into 2016 without them, to feel like we were leaving them behind.

Their life should not be reduced to their death, but I can't write the life of someone I knew for only a year. They were climbing a tree at Noah's place out in Makara and the branch snapped. They fell ten meters and broke almost every bone in their body. They were unconscious, the ambulance took them to the hospital but they never woke up. It was totally unexpected. Incredibly swift and indescribably cruel.

I don't know how to sum up Rohan. They were planning on flatting with Finn after they both finished school. Their favourite kind of dog was a pug. We used to call them Firehair. They had a little sister whom they adored. They struggled with depression and used to be suicidal, but they had found a reason to live again and were going to change schools this year and the timing could not have been more tragic. They were planning a whole lifetime, but when people say 'lifetime' they forget that some people don't get those sixty or seventy or hundred years. They get fifteen years of courage and friendship and struggling and then everyone who loved and still loves them gets their heart ripped out.

There were newspaper articles (describing Rohan as a boy because they hadn't come out to their parents about their gender yet- another thing they were going to do this year.) and announcements in school assembly. There were people crying and people who didn't know making cruel jokes and the world continued spinning and I was so numb, watching Finn get more faded around the edges, more lost into the depression that had been there even before Rohan died.

Rohan deserved better. Rohan had fought for better. Finn deserved better too. And Finn got stronger- we all got stronger, because in the end life isn't fair and we don't get what we deserve but it was a damn miracle to have Rohan in my life for one second. They deserved to be remembered, too, and that's one thing I can do. So I am.

People change. We reshape all the time. Grief is a hole where someone once was, the part of themselves they leave in the people they met and the things they did. Grief is knowing that that hole will never be filled properly again, only taped over and we learn to live with it and remember them.

I remember that they were loved and loving. I know that in their darkest days they thought that if they were to die then they would be forgotten. No-one would mourn. The world would be better off.

I understand that feeling in a way I wish I didn't. I know what it is to be hopeless and helpless, caught in fog. I know how it feels to not believe in the the idea of someone missing you.

I didn't understand until now, until grief set in and wormed its way around my bones. Grief doesn't have an ending.

You thought no-one would miss you.

Rohan, we will never stop.


In memory of Rohan Martin Watts, 7/1/2000-25/11/15.
Rest in peace and rest in love.

http://www.tributes.co.nz/ViewMyTribute.aspx?id=11075
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11535866
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/73395461/property-owners-gutted-after-boy-falls-from-tree-and-dies.html

I'm hoooome

Yay I'm out of hospital! It's so good to be home.
Mum's getting all touchy and huggy though, despite me being all 'seriously please don't touch me'. She doesn't understand that it doesn't mean I'm mad at her, it's not a symptom of meningitis, there is nothing wrong me with me
/Just don't fucking touch me/

(You're right, Fabi. Swearing is actually very helpful for coming with pain and stress.)

Anyway. Happy New Year, people. I've had one hell of a start to it.

Update

Still in hospital. Still have meningitis. Looks like we're not going on holiday or to my science camp. I'm still amused by it all for some inexplicable reason.

I'm hospitalized. Again.

One doctor was like 'you're having a severe reaction to your anti depressants' and another was like 'you have meningitis' so they did some tests, which involved sticking needles in my spine, and then they came back like 'lol you have both'
So I'm in an isolation ward. Fun times. And if I want to go to the toilet I have to take my iv with me. It's vaguely amusing just how terrible my health is.

jraq

I'm exhausted and scared and sad and paranoid and I hate people, but most of all I hate myself.