I didn’t get a chance to talk to Grievous again yesterday, but I did talk to others who knew him. It’s unclear what his feelings about me were at the time Shanti died. According to Fender and friends, he asked about me a lot. Fender was very annoyed by this while we were together, and made that known. He was out of the picture by the end of summer though.
There are no indications though, that he saw me as more than a friend he’d like to shag again, but a friend-friend. He didn’t seem to have much emotion attached to the shagging idea. By all accounts, he was concerned about how I was doing when he asked, and didn’t have anything lewd to say about me. When I explained things to him the last time we talked, he wasn’t exactly thrilled, but he seemed to understand and be okay with me deciding not to keep going down a path that was draining for me.
From what I gather, his suicide was about something else entirely. Like I said, he had a condition that is something like Tourette’s syndrome. He’d say random things from time to time, and it took some getting used to. We talked about that once, and he said it’s a problem he’s had all his life, and it has gotten worse as he’s gotten older.
I’m thinking maybe he just wanted the tics to stop. That sort of thing can make a guy depressed. It’s easy for someone who doesn’t have it to say that he should have pushed through it, but I’m not that stupid. I haven’t experienced it, so I can’t tell someone else what they should feel.
I can say though, that I wish he was here. The world is missing something without him in it. The racism in the culture isn’t his fault, and he had no way to navigate it because nobody really talks about it. People tend to desexualize disabled people, so maybe nobody thought he would ever be in the situation to have to choose between a woman and his parents’ approval.
I’m glad I don’t have to hate his memory. What I am slightly worried about though is the perception that I had anything to do with his being depressed and suicidal. Grievous had a weird tone when he was talking to me about it. He thought I knew, and that I didn’t come to the funeral because I didn’t care. He was surprised to find out that nobody told me. I’ve seen his best friend a couple of times in passing since then. He didn’t tell me.
So it seems I have someone to cuss out.
