Somebody Died

Thursday. I wasn’t going to write this because I don’t know what I’m allowed to say when I didn’t know him properly. Somebody from the scene died. I heard one version this morning, another this afternoon and a third tonight, so I’m not putting any of them here as fact. That’s one of the ugliest things about bad news moving through a group: everybody knows something and nobody knows enough, but the empty spaces get filled anyway. I recognised him. That’s what I can say. I had seen him at parties. I know people who knew him. Last weekend there were hundreds of us in a room behaving as though Saturday night existed outside ordinary consequences, and now everybody is sending messages asking what happened. Hikari called because she’d heard too. We didn’t have much to say. Edo and I talked online later and for once neither of us sent music. I keep thinking about how strange it is that seeing somebody several times can make them part of the furniture of your life without you knowing their surname, and then suddenly their absence has weight. I don’t have a lesson to extract from this. I don’t want one. Somebody is dead. People who loved him are hurting. Everything else feels like making it about ourselves.

Remember me, Eclipse.