The Eyes Have It

It hit me this morning that it's almost exactly a year since my friend, L, died. She lived fast, and died young as a direct result. L was One of a Kind, as is everyone, but I use capitals here because she was indescribably different. Put simply, she was the finest female mind and wit that I have ever had either the delight or misfortune to cross swords with. You may question my inclusion of the word "female" in that sentence as if I'm saying she was the 'best of the rest'. Not true: she was the best, but I must explain. For me, a cerebral and verbal duel across the gender divide is the ultimate. Tone can easily change mid-sentence from confrontational to flirtatious, condescending to affirming, dominant to submissive, pie-throwing to hand-holding. Who would not delight (on the rare occasions that she was stumped by a riposte) to hear the reply, "The very hand of the Almighty, dipped into the primordial ooze must, and can only fail to raise you to the depths of degradation"? A favourite line of hers and one that will remain with me eternally.

She was quite simply an entrancing enigma. Renaissance and baroque Italy would not have coped with her. Botticelli or Titian would have fallen for her facial features and wavy true-red hair, while the purity of her soprano voice would have easily captivated either Carissimi or Monteverdi. These features combined with her fanatical love of Arsenal, her unrivalled collection of (and collages made from) prostitutes' business cards and her ability to shame the swarthiest lag with her complete, elegant and encyclopaedic usage of both the vernacular and the obscene marked her out as special.

L and I first met as teenagers at a couple of residential music courses. Although we rarely performed together (my area of music being instrumental, hers vocal) we soon hit it off on the social side because of our shared infatuation with calling a spade a spade. A great friendship was struck. In fact, for a period, it was more than a friendship, but in a silly teenage kind of way. She then came to university in Aberystwyth, which was initially difficult as I had embarked on another relationship in the interim, but after a couple of months the friendship was fully restored.

As often happens, we then drifted apart when she embarked on her post-university career in the US. This, I think, is where the trouble started. The employment was in a part of the creative arts industry in which 'excess' and substance abuse are as much the norm as they are the exception. Details from this point on need not be gone into, nor shall I. Suffice to say that years down the line, L was back in the UK and undergoing some of the most brutal rehab I have ever heard described. We exchanged letters over the two periods during which she was "incarcerated" (her word not mine) and her sharpness and wit were all still there - I remember being described as "an incongruous baboon smuggled into the pantheon of correspondence" for addressing an envelope upside-down. Five weeks after that letter was written, L was found dead in her flat. The only blessing being that her eighteen-month-old daughter was staying with grandparents that night.

That is obviously a sad and tragic story, and it's one that pops uninvited into my head every day. The reason it sneaks into my head is that when L left university, that was the last time we ever physically saw each other face-to-face. There were many handwritten letters but when it came to hearing of her death, it was my first social networking bereavement.

Innocently going to someone's Facebook page on a whim and being confronted by a 'wall' filled with "what's happened?" and "I can't believe it's true!" is something I will never wish on anyone. For a part of the media that sells itself on engaging people in more personal interaction, it makes it so impersonal. It's like standing at the scene of a fatal accident but only knowing one other person in the gathered crowd. From the messages I saw on that page it was clear that the vast majority of people had no clue how bad things had been for L. She was a master of language and before her page was removed I looked back over her posts. A lot of the messages were almost identical to sentences she had written to me that I had recognised as containing thinly veiled pain and fear. The only difference publicly viewable online was that they were followed by, :)

I think this may be the root of my aversion to emoticons. It's easy to recognise the bracket as a smile, but when each eye is nothing but a block of four pixels there is no way to discern any of the pain and fear that might exist within them. Most people can fool most people with a false smile, but it's the eyes that betray you. I just find it sad that vulnerable people can hide so effectively behind a punctuation mark.

Social networks are here to stay. I just hope that people don't fall into the belief that they've 'spoken' to someone if they have simply 'poked' them or 'tweeted'. Nothing electronic will ever convey or betray emotion as much as handwriting, speech and facial expression are able to. I missed well over a decade of spending time with L. Nothing in the world is certain, so don't lose sight of the joy that is looking into someone's eyes and seeing those eyes smile.