This photo was taken in the most sacred place in all of Demarest. It’s hard to explain this particular tradition to those who are unfamiliar with my dorm, and to avoid divulging too much information to those whose jobs are to keep this place so secure, I will leave it at this: we are the first generation of Demarites to reach this place in the past four years, and it probably will not be done again for quite some time. I have to avoid posting any of the (better) pictures that reveal what this place is and who is in it, but it was amazing to see some of the things that were written in this place, some of it dating back to the 1950′s. Unfortunately, days after this success, we learned of a tragedy in the dorm that affected our community in a way I’ve never seen before. On Thursday night, our friend and beloved Demarite took his own life.

I chose this particular photo for an entry about my friend because when we reached this sacred place, I noticed one psalm in particular that was written on the wall: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” (Psalms 30:5) My friends know that I’m not one to quote the Bible as anything that is meaningful to me, but that psalm has always struck me as particularly moving, and I know it is something that Onion wholeheartedly believed. In spite of everything, Onion was the most positive and outwardly optimistic person I’ve ever known — and when I say that Onion lived to cheer people up, it’s not just something to say. I remember distinctly the times we counted attendance sheets and request forms in e-board meetings and always stopped at his name to mention how wonderful, how involved, how dedicated, and how sweet he was. There was never anything Onion wasn’t willing to do for a friend or neighbor. It’s hard to think back now on how suffocating it must have been for him to live every single day for another person, because he never even let on about the difficulties going on in his life. The few personal struggles in his that we were privy to, he seemed to handle with ease. I know it’s pointless and vain to look for warning signs after the fact, but it’s so difficult to think back on every memory I have of him and realize that he was never as happy as he seemed, and that every smile and every hug he ever gave to me was for me, and not for him. We always question the people who look more upset and more depressed than usual, and never think to worry about the people who don’t seem capable of expressing any sort of negative emotion at all.

I don’t really know how to begin explaining what we’ve been going through these past few days or what our response has been. It’s just hard to believe that something like this could happen in our own home, and I don’t think I’ve ever lost someone in quite the same way before. When someone passes away in a place like Demarest, there’s hardly a single person in the entire community that isn’t affected. We all grieve together. We go to bed and wake up with a hundred people who are all crying with us. It wasn’t until hours later that I realized life was still going on outside of the dorm, and that it was a regular Thursday night of drinking and partying and everything else. It’s almost assaulting to finally walk out into that after an experience like we had. I can’t even write about how I found out because it was such a horrifying realization when it finally clicked for me, and all I could think about was finding Kayla… never mind trying to fathom how this could happen to someone like Onion. But returning to normalcy, I’m realizing, is even more frightening. I’ve slept in Kayla’s room for two nights, avoided the dining hall, avoided leaving Demarest at all, and cried with people I don’t think I’ve ever had close relationships with at all. I think we’re all getting over the initial shock of it together, and I’m amazed at how supportive our entire community has been, but it’s not easy to know how to grieve when someone passes away like this. I do know that we’re all lucky to have known Onion, and for now, that and the support of our Demarest family is what’s getting us by.

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I visited my high school on Friday — a trip that’s always followed by a frantic search for old photos, essays, projects, and whatever else I can find as I subject my friends to cheesy anecdotes and a list of complaints about changes I do not approve of (a maroon carpet, really?). What I found last night were these photograms, made during my senior year with whatever jewelry I was wearing that day in the fall of 2007 and the help of a pen flashlight from my Harriet the Spy phase. If you’re wondering why I was still carrying around my spy gear at age 17, take this as a hint that you should never have private conversations within earshot of me…

So, in the midst of a rant about the class registration process, I mentioned to my former photo teacher that I’m taking Digital Storytelling next semester, a class he was already familiar with, as the new film course at Prep is apparently an offshoot of some of the Literature & Technology courses at the Writers House. They created this course with the help of the former chair of our English department at Rutgers, whose daughter I had just met, randomly, in the art studio… and I’m now absolutely certain of my theory that when you graduate from Rutgers Prep, the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon is cut to just half that. I’m hoping that next time I visit, I can meet a student who is somehow related to Mariah Carey. In the meantime, I’ll begin composing my list of reasons why I’d make a better spouse than Nick Cannon.

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