It’s hard to talk about sensitive topics like death and suicide even when you are around friends you would consider close. But honestly, it’s even harder to broach these topics when you already know that your friend is robotic feeling-wise and doesn’t know how to express his emotions.

I have a friend who always says that when we get together, we’ll chat about things like greater purpose in life or what it really means to travel, or how being around a diverse group of people changes the way we perceive the world for the better. Those completely sound like elitist, privileged chatter subjects, but… it’s what we touch on in e-mails where we send each other links to articles that interest us. As I am getting older, I constantly find myself questioning the “why” of everything I do. It’s not like I voluntarily toil over it; the questions just subconsciously come.

But when we do actually get together for lunch or dinner or drinks, I realize that I leave him never having learned any new, undiscovered facet of him. It’s as though we at most may have touched these topics on the surface, and I am left still waiting for what I came to hear when he has already left. It’s troubling because then I wonder, how much do I really know this person, or how much do I really know anyone? Am I ever going to see that other side of him? Or maybe even worse, how well do even my closest friends genuinely know me if I cannot express myself fully when in their presence?