It is such a beautiful night tonight! So I think it's good time to unload my burdened heart to say my last goodbye to my friend.
Truth is he was dead more than a year ago. The night after his cremation was a sleepless night for me. I must shamefully admit that I couldn't sleep not because of the pain and anguish of losing a dear friend but because of the scary and liveless look of his dead body. I can still imagine his face which was not a peaceful sleeping face like many people claim in their story about deceased loved one. It looked pale and dark like rotten skin. It was in no way like my bright friend. I guess that was just how dead body looks. I remember I cried once when confirming the news that he was going to die by cancer at the youthful age of 27 but no more than that. Still his death never leaves my mind.
A few months after his funeral, while I were running, a thought came into my mind:
- "I finally understand Hemingway!"
That might sound a bit wrong. Actually a long time ago I had read a book of Hemingway with the title "For whom the bell tolls". They quote this poem of John Donne as the foreword:
"No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee."
I felt so moved at the very first time I read this poem. It's just that for a long time I hadn't known why I had felt that way until a few months ago. Perhaps the author of the poem was a man with a big heart so that whenever a bell tolls for a person, he felt like a part of his soul gone with that person to the underworld. Another thing is at that time I listened to many Youtube lectures of this Professor named Jordan Peterson. One thing that stucked in my mind was what he had said about addiction. He said that it was easy to get rid of the withdrawal of many kind of addiction but the main reason for a person's relapse was his enviroment. The addict has built a neuron structure in his brain by years of repeatedly behave in a certain way so when he returns to his normal environment, this structure will response to the external factors to tempt the person to return to the old habit of consuming addictives.
Suddenly it dawn on me. Now I know why I still obsessed over the death of my friend. All the time that we have spent together, all the memories, experiences and great conversations, they have constructed a system in my brain that response to the activities we share. His early departure from this world is not just a tragedy in the outside world for me, it is in fact my death or actually my partial death or it can be said as the collapse of a system in my brain. It's personal.
Maybe this is just in my mind. Maybe my friend did not like me that much or maybe we were not that close. Or even worse that I am just a drama-queen who overeact to this trivial matter of life or death, that people die everyday and I myself will die eventually. You may even say that my suffering is nothing in comparison with the pain and lost of his family especially his mom and dad and you are totally right. I can not agree with you more. But for me and myself, this is the best I could do to justify my pain to myself and hopefully put things together to move on with my life.
When he was alive we met so many times and we said farewell  so many times never knowing when it was the last. But now it was the last. Goodbye, my old friend!