Akshay Menon Tribute

There was a dream that I had about a year ago that brought me, if not closure, a peace of mind.
---
I was sitting in a crowded movie theater, scanning the crowd for familiar heads/faces, when I saw you. I knew that you had been gone for two years now, and though to a lesser certainty I also knew that I had to have been dreaming. Yet for some reason there was an immediate sense of opportunity; this was my chance to communicate with you, however unlikely your representation in my mind was indeed actually you. I approached you.

You were cold. Not unresponsive; that would have detracted from the realness with which you were portrayed; in fact, I heard your voice and I recognized your mannerisms, whatever my fading recollection of those may be. You sounded angry and your words were a rant against our hometown, against their preconceptions of suicide, of death, of what you did, of what you felt. I recall not what I had actually asked you or what had prompted your response.

Then you stormed off, through the movie theater’s emergency exit; naturally I followed, but you were far ahead and I could not catch up. We somehow found ourselves now in the familiar Fox Meadow Elementary School playground, and you eventually disappeared into a trail of woods. It was then that I gave up on your pursuit and shortly after woke up.
---
I am in little position to interpret dreams with any sort of authority, but I think it was really me doing the shouting and ranting in the movie theater and perhaps even the fleeing into the woods. For two long years, Akshay, I was upset. It was less about what you did, however, and more about why you did it; rather, I vehemently disagreed with the agreed-upon notions of why you chose to take your life.

That may seem trivial to anyone else reading this, but I felt such a sick comfort in feeling that I was one of the few who truly understood you. I knew loneliness deeply, both recently before and after your death. I was always skeptical of the societal tenets held pertaining to the value of life; I saw life as wisely disposable, though I was certainly extremely distraught from the sheer fact that you had died. I couldn’t claim to have been suicidal but I was depressed and it strengthened my hatred for people who could not comprehend how painful life could be. Furthermore, I was so compelled to draw a mental parallel between us, feeling that I would be able to carry you in spirit and also bring myself closer to you than anyone else was or would ever get.

I think my dream about you revealed that, beneath this supposed understanding of what had happened inside your head, was just my own selfishness and guilt. In reality, Akshay, we were never great friends, only acquaintances who probably could have been closer but never developed that connection.
---
My chronological recollection of our most memorable interactions made me realize how guilty I felt without even realizing it. I have such a curiously profound memory of us being in a 5th grade yearbook picture standing next to each other, mostly because of our preceding conversation. It was nothing much but we agreed that neither of us was to smile. It was silly but I felt defiant, and at the time I don’t know if I recognized anyone else other than you who found such satisfaction in what was such a small gesture.

I feel that through our middle school years I both found the small victories essential because I enjoyed little else socially. Again, my impulse was and to some degree still is to consider you under the same mental and social scope, though we were never good friends. I remember our fleeting discussions over RuneScape, which at the time consumed me and now I can hardly comprehend why. In eighth grade, I remember having an admiration for your desire to get stronger when I ran into you at a boxing class, in which neither of us seemed fit.

Around the same time the guiltier memories emerge. In 8th grade Tech class you were left to work on your group’s project by yourself; I was in another group that was well-off and instead of helping you I simply lamented while slacking off myself. 9th grade Spanish class is probably the most difficult for me to accept now as Cullen and I had undertaken a playful but exclusive game of odd-man-out where we generally took the front two seats before you could snag one of them and sit next to either of us. The few times you did I remember enjoying your company; once I even went to sit down with you, but that did not end the seating game. And then I recognized your progressively noticeable sadness and reclusiveness in school but didn’t say anything about it. And then you died, and your history and our history was over.
---
With years of random interaction, I never really got to know you all that well. I can’t say I made you up to be someone with a more intelligent outlook (nor can I qualify what constitutes an intelligent outlook on the meaning of life) than I knew you to have, but I can say that I made you up, to some extent, after you died. I made you up to be someone who should have been my best friend, as someone with whom I consistently developed a friendship throughout the years. But that wasn’t you and I will never know you, Akshay. For me to impose ludicrous imaginings on what actually was there of your memory was selfish, possibly disrespectful. Disillusionment brought me comfort but never long-term comfort or closure. I needed someone who saw what I saw, only that I never knew what you saw and even if I did, your death just made me the sadder because of how much closer I felt to you for those reasons. I understood for the first time, having dreamt about you, that I was making you up ever since you died.

I still think that your death has offered me invaluable lessons, though I am reluctant to declare them in a post that would suggest that my mind has reached some sort of conclusion or agreement with those lessons. I have not been depressed for years. Lonely, sure, and sad, absolutely, but I’ve also had the happiest year overall in my life. I’ve learned love for the first time and hope to retain that consistency of love for the duration for my life, though at the same time I recognize that I’m 18 and, though years removed from my freshman year in high school when you died, have a ton more lessons to learn over the course of life. I still vacillate on what life truly means, occasionally revisiting the idea that life is meaningless and for those simply intimidated by the unknowns of death, though not with the same dark spirit that would look at that idea with anything other than an intellectual mindset. Then I look at the more inherent biological reasons of reproduction and love and these reasons, of which I was so cynical in the months immediately following you death, finally hold true stock in my mind.

Then I think of what you saw in life. If there’s one thing that I still hold onto, it’s the belief that you died because you really didn’t want to live. It wasn’t a cry for help, or even an impulsive response to stress, but rather a result of a series of logical thoughts that determined that life, in the long-run, was not worth it. But it is only up to that point that I wish to interpret anything at all about you, and that I fully intend out of respect for you and your death, whether I or anyone else who knew you agrees with it or not. You were a bright kid and I at least knew that much about you. I’m sorry for having ever for making the same mistake, if not worse, that our peers made immediately following your death: I made assumptions. I admired you for so long but with my dream I realized that it wasn’t you who I admired; it was myself, and that artificial admiration was destructive to me and to your memory.
---
I now only wish offer you my gratitude for these constantly-evolving lessons. Though they lack an end, by accepting their beneficial nature without perverting the source from which they came my mind is at peace with the matter. I used to think that it was selfish to appreciate your death; now I know that what you have done for me, let alone hundreds of others, is as much as any individual can accomplish with his/her life.

I will never forget you and will always love you.

Tyler Foote

Hello to you all the friends of Akshay. ..
after long there is some good news from Akshay's family, his family has been blessed with a little angel..