sotto voce

One of her best friends is (was?) one of my best friends in school, but I never really hung out with her. She was abroad when I became close to this common friend of ours. After I started dating Andrew, I found out that he hooked up with her a couple times in junior year. They split after spring break, and she had been hating him ever since. When An and I visited my best friend on campus a couple months ago, she refused to acknowledge An’s presence in the room.

When we confirmed that she was the one gunned down, I attempted to figure out the kind of emotion I needed to feel. I couldn’t take the lead from An – because he felt nothing. She was too brief a fling to ever form any real connection. Honestly, I felt nothing but a morbid curiosity to know what happened. It seemed improper for me to grieve, and at the same time it seemed so insensitive to not feel the tiniest sliver of sadness. She was my friend’s buddy. She was someone I knew. We went to the same school. Aren’t we supposed to share common humanity?

Yet, despite my inability to feel the loss, I haven’t been my normal self since I heard the news. I couldn’t sleep. I’m distracted all the time. I can’t do my work without checking seven news sources simultaneously for the latest news. And the worse thing is: I feel ashamed to tell An that I’m affected by her death. There’s no good reason why I should be affected by her death. I initially thought that the more I learnt about her, the easier it would be for me to grieve and therefore, archive this bit of news as another young life lost to stupid, senseless violence. So I stayed up the whole night reading her old blog, googling her last name, figuring out who her friends and families are, what kind of person she is (beyond the stories that An told me about her). But my fact-finding mission only turned me into a nosy acquaintance who truly didn’t know her when she was still alive and therefore, why would I feel anything now that she’s dead?