CW: Suicide.

I truly hate time travel stories. The root of them, the real fantasy, is that people can change the bad outcome that they didn't want, to the good outcome that they did.

You cannot change the past. You cannot, and we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can. It is not a worthwhile thought to have.

I.

The Friday after it happened, a big group of friends joined Alex's mom to clean out his apartment.

It is a particularly surreal thing, to go through the personal effects of a dead friend. I'd been to his apartment before to hang out, so I recognized plenty of objects:

• That one awesome, blue-white patterened T-shirt that he frequently wore.
• The stupid bed headboard made of cut log cross-sections which weighs two hundred pounds.
• The truly absurd amount of Lego he ended up collecting.

There are other objects too, objects that I did not know about, that make me question whether I ever really knew Alex:

• A big stack of mail from his mother, unopened, never read.
• Hundreds of Hello Fresh recipe cards. He talked about Hello Fresh all of two or three times.
• Ten smartphones. Why did he have ten smartphones? I only ever saw him using two or three of these.

I see these, now, devoid of context, bereft of the person whom I knew, and I'll never get to ask him about them. They are just things, objects that must be sorted. I ask if any friends could use this projector, this keyboard, this lightbulb. When they say no, I wonder if he would want them donated to a thrift store or a homeless shelter.

We were there for six hours and we didn't get the entire apartment cleared. We'll have to go back again, soon, before his mom leaves town. We'll have to keep sorting through this dead man's belongings, continually second-guessing ourselves on what is meaningful enough to keep.

II.

I tried a local thrift shop first. Unfortunately, they only took the clothes and shoes. Honestly, I totally respect that - please only take the things that you can use. Don't just take it and throw it into the dump for me. Regardless, the car was still full.

His mom had heard some bad things about Goodwill, but I couldn't find a different donation center, so I drove to a Goodwill anyway. Oops - we'd been at his apartment for so long that they were closed. I drove to yet another thrift store. They only took furniture. I gave them the furniture. The car was still nearly full. I was already late to meet up with my parents for dinner. I texted them an apology, and headed home to clear the car first.

I opened the trunk. There were all my dead friend's things. I began lugging them to my house, one by one. The dish set his father had given him. A bunch of kitchen doodads and a soldering iron. A box of assorted bathroom objects.

Later, as I'm sorting through some of his things, I think, why? Why have all these keyboards, all these Lego, all these computer parts? Surely he meant to use these later. Surely he didn't buy them just to put them in the trash.

Fuck you, Alex, I thought. Fuck you for dying and leaving us with this. Fuck you.

III.

The question all our friends ask is: what happened? For some reason, everyone asks about the timeline. Why do people ask about the timeline?

From our perspective, the timeline was:

• Monday: The last time any of our friend group had heard from him.
• Tuesday: He missed an online meeting with a friend to discuss contract work.
• Friday: I went with my partner to knock on his door. There was no response.
• Saturday: I went with the police to knock on his door. There was no response.
• Sunday: We sent out a frenzy of messages trying to locate his family.
• Monday morning: We heard back from his mom. He was supposed to visit, but he never stepped off the plane, nor indeed, got on it.
• Monday evening: We got a call from his mom's friend saying the medical examiner had his body, and had ruled death by suicide.

The autopsy is designed to give us a window into the timeline from his point of view, however hazy a window that might be. So we "know":

• He chose to end his life in a particularly brutal way.
• He died sometime around Friday.

These views into the past leave us with questions, rather than answers. Here are some of The Questions:

• Why did he schedule a meeting that he knew he wouldn't make?
• Why did he book tickets for a flight he wouldn't get on?
• Why wasn't he responding to texts or calls for the entire week?
• Why didn't he tell his mom he was in a dire situation?
• Why didn't he talk to his friends about it?
• Why did he end his life in such a brutal fashion?
• Was he alive or dead on the other side of that door on Friday, when I went to check on him?

And the big one:

• If we'd just known - somehow, somehow - could we have stopped him?

IV.

I've never been diagnosed, but I'm all but certain I'm somewhere on the autistic side of the spectrum. In many social situations, I only appear normal because I have observed and replicate what seem to be normal behaviors.

The same goes for grieving. I've only gone through two deaths in my lifetime - not much opportunity for observation and practice. Sometimes I second guess myself: should I look more sad? Should I give more hugs? Should I ask "why would he have done this" more?

This time around, I've done a lot of thinking about why people ask The Questions.

They want to know, if they had done something different, if they had just done the right thing, then maybe they could have gotten the outcome they wanted, instead of the one they got, which they did not want.

So yeah, of course people ask these things. They seek to know if the outcome could have been changed. What should I have done? What was the right thing to do? And more importantly: Can I do the right thing next time?

But the truth is, as much as we wish it otherwise, The Questions offer no real learnings. Without a time machine, we will never get the real answers to the questions - and time travel doesn't exist.

Without the answers, without knowing, how can we do better next time? We do not know what the right thing was. We will never know.

Of course we'll try to change for the better, to prevent tragedies from happening, to stop another friend from dying. Of course we will. But without knowing, without really knowing, I am afraid of learning the wrong lesson, of making things worse next time, not better.

We will never get the answers, and it will have to be okay. We'll keep doing what we've always been doing: making ourselves better, as best as we can, messily, and imperfectly.