It's been a long week

It started off pretty normal, stress and quizzes and the upcoming choir concert for parents and family weekend, but got really bad really fast when, on Wednesday at about a quarter to five, an email went out to the campus that a TIUA student, Yasuyuki Sampei, died that morning. Yasu was my friend, even though I hadn't seen him much since last semester, and it managed to get just that much worse when the report from the medical examiner came back and confirmed that he'd killed himself.

So now, rather than just have a chill weekend with my mum and sister, I'm also going to a memorial service on Sunday. Yasu's parents, who TIUA brought from Japan, gave the university permission to have a service more or less as we see fit. I'm grateful for that, as are a lot of us, because they didn't have to that, but it's very kind. It's going to be open-casket, which will be difficult, but good in a way, too. We need the closure. I personally am not planning to speak, but two of my friends are - Alex as a Willamette student, and Atsushi as a TIUA - and it's finally set in that, yes, this really happened. At the meeting at TIUA today, which a few of us WU students went to because we're part of this, too, a lot of people, including the dean of students, broke down, and that was what really drove it home. When I went up to check in with Lorenzo, the TIUA coordinator, I finally started properly crying, too, rather than tearing up and stopping myself, and he and I hugged for about two solid minutes. It helped more than I thought it would.

And that's where things stand. The loud, outgoing, outrageously funny guy who came with us to Genderfunk dressed in Annie's lolita skirt and a blonde wig, who made up a long, nonsensical version of happy birthday for me last year (complete with air microphone), who would shout my name from a block away and wave like a lunatic just so he could say hi, who carried a camera everywhere and took awesome pictures, is gone.

I'm glad I knew him, even if things ended like this. He was a really great guy.