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Death has been one of the more formative life events of my life this far. I lost a friend a year ago in quite tragic circumstances which dominated most of my thinking of him until now though recently I’ve been able reflect on more of him prior to his final day.
Because we didn’t have friends in common, and I don’t have close ties to his family, the stories we would have shared have fallen under my control. And what to do with them? Well, whatever I want I guess?
There's an odd sense of owing honesty that has come up when I've lost people previously. "Do right by them", "honor their memory", etc. And while I wish to retain some kind of accuracy in the details of the stories I tell and the details I retain, the interpretation is all me. With that in mind, here's my interpretations of some memories:

Several years ago, a close friend of mine began to develop a serious paranoid schizophrenia. Watching the sudden and drastic change in him was certainly hard, but something exceptionally unique came with it as well. As he began to make more abstract and distant connections between ideas, things, and experiences the results of our interactions changed. He shared a number of fascinating things with me, ideas I would have never dreamed of and that likely only he could have produced. In fact, there were a number of times he acted in ways I could only describe as psychic. Of course there were also some fairly incoherent, or even scary interactions but they were all part of a person who I cherished and wanted to celebrate. But of course “normalcy” and the “standard” could not be overcome. In the rest of his life, i.e. work, seeing not-so-close friends, and countless other spaces where "norms" dominate he faced endless antagonism to his whole existence. Others couldn't stomach the strange way he spoke and unexpected interpretations of what he sensed, and reacted out of discomfort. Anger, shame, alienation from others drove him into a self-destruction of anxiety, fear, and a complete denial of himself during which he took his life.
Fuck your normal, fuck your respect, fuck your expectations, fuck your standard, fuck your manners, fuck your psychologists, you killed my friend.