And She Said to Mr. Sandman...

It was February and nobody was dead yet, so that was alright. She wandered around the staircase outdoors and it was raining but she didn't have a coat. The sun had already gone down and she didn't feel like going home yet, her hair matted by the water and a thunderstorm rolling in the distance. Stepping down two at a time, she walked across the university square and into the bar where she placed herself down for one beer. Her friends sat across the way and walked over almost silently though the bar was crowded. It was a long 6pm and they had all noticed that if they caught the trains now, they would be packed out - there would be no point. Waiting in the bar across campus therefore, became a staple against the storm.

Nobody really said anything except for a cool 'hello' and pretty soon, she would be the only one left, she just didn't know it yet. That didn't mean everyone would go, it just meant everyone would leave and those were two different things. Her hair was bright red and everyone's bank accounts were huge. She stared down at her beer, then up at one of her friends - he had an obsession with the Sandman. He loved the song, the story, you name it. Rumours swirled about a TV show based on the Neil Gaiman book of the same name.

It would be a few years before he would be deleted from the public consciousness for the greater good and so, fantasy was still in the air. She wore her work uniform, ignoring the fact that whilst she listened to the new poem about the Sandman, she'd be late for work. It was alright for now and she didn't want to ruin it.

Some of the professors sat behind them. They turned to look at what kind of laughter was happening based on a book by TS Eliot. She locked eyes with an elderly man who put the book down and asked "don't I know you?" And he did. They knew each other. From a few years before. They were sat in a bar like this one when she was a couple of years younger. She read him a poem about the colour blue. Needless to say, they would meet again a few years later under quite different circumstances. For now, they both looked older and yet, both of them would age significantly in the next few months.

Her friend had since taken out a notebook filled with poems and stories about the Sandman and she was surprised there was so much within. The module only said one or two pieces for someone else to edit but here they were, notebooks filled with scattered papers - perhaps twenty or thirty pieces. Another one of their friends came and sat down, sliding a phone number acorss the way to her. "I chose your pieces to edit" He said, and she handed over a notebook with a 15-page story called Music in the Cafés at Night and Revolution in the Air.

He admitted he was obsessed with it and only knew she had written it when their professor - a Swedish woman who spoke non-stop about her European upbringing, had asked him about whether he wanted to edit it. They were in different classes but he assured her there was a fight over her piece. Normally she'd feel special about this, but not now. It was relatively normal for her lecturer to call her pieces 'charming' - it almost felt like an insult, as though they didn't read it. As though everyone was just trying to make her go away.

Back on her undergraduate, she was less keen to play about in the bars and campus markets, but now it almost seemed like a duty. It was approaching 6:30pm and they had decided to take a walk across the square and towards the train station. She held the copies of various stories and poems about the Sandman in her notebook but not in her bag. She didn't want them to get dirty near everything else.

She would read them on the 35-minute train journey back to her hometown and then think of an explanation of why she's late for work. She'll feign an illness and hopefully go home. They sat together and read his 'Sandman' poems. She chose five that were the best to put into his portfolio without going over the word limit and she would write the responses where she had edited them.

She stared out of the window and watched the rain roll down the window, the creaking of the London Midland carriage bouncing on the city lanes. She was going out of her mind and yet, she didn't care. Everything felt alright for now. She had been invited to a party and thought it was pretty fine if she didn't go.

By the time March had come around, the rain had pretty much stopped and she had forgotten about the friends she had left behind. This time they sat in a place called the 'Marmalade' - a cramped Jazz bar across town, just outside the theatre. There, they would work on the portfolios, down some mojitos and laugh together, eating the most expensive sweet potato fries they ever had to buy. This is where she'd brag to friends that she had met the likes of Benjamin Zephaniah whilst reading a book of his poems over a daquiri.

Everyone was always impressed, wondering where she met authors. Her favourite tale to tell was always about him though, because it wasn't just a fan having a book signed, they sat and talked for almost an hour. It may have been years' ago but it was quite something and even she could not believe it.

Coloured pictures of the Sandman often littered the table, a formation between her editing and his drawings. She had assured him he couldn't decorate the portfolio, though she thought the drawings were brilliant - almost professional. "I've taken a different direction. I want to do blackout poetry to formulate the drawing in the words." He said this as she stared in to space. It was a fantastic idea but near-impossible.

It was him that in November had taught her how to forget some friend who had abandoned her for not attending a wedding. "You can't hanker on these people." She had almost lost her mind, finding friends in various bottles and stuffing her mouth with various mental health medications which she probably should have questioned before they were assigned to her. She had received a letter from said friend explaining there was no point keeping this friendship up if they weren't prepared to be there for each other.

"She's just jealous you kept going on without her and left her behind." But it was true. She was jealous that she was left behind. The wedding didn't matter all too much because by the time the invite had come through, the marriage had already happened. What had been an almost four year tight-knit friendship where they would run around London, go everywhere together and live in Cumbria together for some days became a deep resentment. Neither of them could stand the sight of each other.

And it was all because she was sitting there, a month away from Christmas, holding a letter in graduate school somewhere other than with her. "You can't sit around waiting for other people, especially people who write things like this..." He took her letter and read the various insults and profanities and she sat there, wondering about what would have happened if she had gone to the wedding. She shot cheap vodka once, and then twice before he told her to stop.

"I'm your friend now." And it was true. He was.

She'd skipped philosophy so much that she was sure the lecturer would confront her if she was found, so she sat in the bar with her new friend often reading a Batman comic or a Dostoevsky novel - it didn't matter. They'd discuss the Norton Anthology essay, her's already coloured in. "No fair, you've already read it!" And she had only a few years before, but they'd laugh about it and he'd get the answers as if he was going to the philosophy lecture as well. Their writing portfolios were almost done, he only had his response essay to add to hers and they had their screenshots of conversations to put in the appendix - he said he'd take care of it.

She believed that.

It would be years before she'd be sitting down at a kitchen table, writing about them laughing in a bar and unable to find any trace of what they'd worked on together not here, not in any cloud storage, not in any drive storage, it was as if it had never existed. But then April rolled around, the Spring capturing the scent of the flowers of the various gardens and the metal sculptures looking as though they'd melt. The showers had come and gone - the turn of orange in the evening skies burned on the horizon out of the bar windows as she sat down.

She exhaled, putting down a copy of The Wasteland beside her as one of her friends came to collect it to read her notes, returning her piece after editing it. It had looked like it was chewed out and he thanked her for providing a list of all the Bob Dylan references within. "I wouldn't have been able to find them all myself." She shook her head. The only reason the professors liked her is because she was a huge Bob Dylan fan. Quiet, she barely spoke in lectures, simply providing her work - asking someone else to read it out. She had lost too much time and at this point in her life, too much weight to care. She looked around, keen to return her labelled versions of 'The Sandman' so that the portfolio could be completed - but he wasn't there.

She checked her watch and stared out of the window, but he was nowhere to be seen. "Have you seen the email?" Her other friend stapled together the papers and slid them back to her. She shook her head. At this point, she had been drinking for a while but she wasn't drunk and yet, she didn't really have her wits about her. She signed into her emails on her phone and stared and the impossibility. The Sandman papers would probably never be returned at this rate - he had been reported missing.

"I'm sorry." Her other friend said to her. She didn't respond.

She held up her shot glass and asked for a refill, slowly but surely losing count of what she was drinking. Her reflection appearing in every single shimmering surface. Eyes red. She slowly rested her head on the bar. At least it was nice to know she was not alone. "I'm so sorry." He hadn't had a drink. Instead, he was just shuffling about in his pocket.

In the coming days one of her close friends would hit on her but it was neither the time or place and she didn't really like him in that way nor was she flattered. She just wanted to find out that her friend, now missing, wasn't hurt. It was true, he had taught her to overcome the very worst of it by forgetting people and leaving them behind - especially if they made a point of being left behind.

They'd often walked about together laughing and she wasn't a laughing person, though he was a comedian. After years of remembering this, she'd never really forget the jokes about the Sandman, Dante's Divine Comedy and the notes passed around class when the professor would turn off the lights so he could see who was using their phone. Her professor with the TS Eliot poetry book turned up again but it was too late by that time.

It had been almost a week when she woke with a bitter taste in her mouth, constantly checking emails, phone calls, messages, the news, everywhere for something she would never get used to - she would just learn to turn it off. The same news that had reported him missing the day after the email had now reported him dead. He had hanged himself in the local forest.

***

There were many ways I had tried to reconcile it with myself but I never understood why it had happened. There was no way to guess he was feeling this way and though it happened some seven or eight years' ago now it never gets any easier to address. I didn't go back to graduate school apart from when I had to hand in assignments, I simply couldn't attend lectures or supervisor tutorials for my thesis anymore. The assignment we were working on together did eventually get done, albeit not entirely. It's been a while but it always hurts to think about. I know we have these memories together but there are quite a few things I would give for one more - even if it's just sitting in the library or the university bar together, talking about his stories on the Sandman, making jokes and all of the rest.

Sundown, yellow moon

I replay the past

I know every scene by heart

They all went by so fast...

- Bob Dylan