It’s been a packed weekend so far. I had dim sum with my aunt, her friends, and Chris today, and right after, I went to meet an old friend from high school who happened to be in town for coffee at Little Collins. The last time I remember having any contact with him was in 2010, and I don’t even think I’d seen him since 2008. When I used to go back home every winter and summer, he and I would always make time to meet up and have a meal together. I was at Wellesley, while he was studying at Berkeley (like the majority of my high school). He was always one of those people I knew was really smart, but a bit on the quiet side, and you could tell he had a deeper side that he didn’t always want to reveal easily.

The last I remembered, I’d e-mailed him in 2010 and never heard back. I wasn’t sure if we had just drifted or perhaps I had said something that made him not want to see me again, but I stopped making an effort until now, when he reached out to let me know he was in town and wanted to see me.

We tried to catch each other up on the last four-plus years of our respective lives since we last spoke. There were a lot of gaps to be filled, and some that were never discussed. He’s a bit more jaded now than he was the last time we were in contact, and he still asks those same esoteric questions he used to ask when we were in high school that would annoy others. He also still uses words like “alacrity” and “effervescent” just as easily as he did then. He said he cut off contact with pretty much everyone for the last three to four years, mainly out of embarrassment that it felt like everyone else’s lives were moving forward while his was not. He has since gotten a Master’s in ecology and is now looking for work and considering leaving the Bay Area. He’s realized that the world seems too small when you stay in the same place forever.

I thought about my old high school friendships for a while during my walk home. I’m still cynical, but I’ve always been cynical about why some people stay in touch and others don’t. I always used to think that if I had lost touch with someone, it was probably just meant to be and there was a reason for it whether I was aware of it or not. When I was with him today, I thought about how good it felt to be reunited with him again in the most unexpected context, and how amazing it was that so much has happened in both of our lives, yet we still mesh the same way we did over four years ago. Some things are meant to happen in the weird ways they do.

I spent my first night in a San Francisco hotel last night. And today, I spent the day in the Mission working out of my company’s second office before we consolidate offices in the city and move to the Financial District later this month. In the Mission, I’m overwhelmed by all the Latin food options I have, but for lunch today, I got to enjoy pupusas, plantains, and beans at a cozy Salvadorean restaurant along the main strip with my friend.

For dinner, Chris and I went to Limon, which is a Peruvian (fusion) restaurant that opened in the city about 12 years ago that had a huge following. I’d been wanting to try this place for the last 12 years and finally ate here tonight. While enjoying the chicken, ceviche, and seafood dishes we ordered tonight, I wondered why it’s taken me over 12 years to try a new restaurant in the Mission in my own hometown. I guess I’m just like most people when they go back home; they tend to want to do things that they are comfortable with or used to always doing because they have a limited amount of time. It’s quicker to do what you are used to than explore new things. But I’ve decided that I’m going to make a point to be more proactive about trying new places every single time I come back home. Then, it will make me feel like more of a tourist in my own city. But that’s okay because it will make my home experience better.

A friend sent me an article about a web-based game called Depression Quest, an interactive game where the user plays a fictional character that has depression. You go about this person’s everyday life, and your goal is to manage your illness and regular life events to the best of your ability in spite of your illness.

The goal of the game is to help those who do not know what it’s like to have depression to attempt to understand it better, to raise awareness for depression, mental illness, and suicide prevention, and to also help sufferers of depression realize that they are not alone in their feelings. Ironically, this game was released on the same day that Robin Williams was found to have committed suicide. If you’d like to play it, you can either play it for free or can pay what you want; all fees go directly to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

I think the game is a good attempt at trying to help raise awareness, but as someone who has lost someone to suicide and knew how hard his life was, I’m not fully convinced that this can help outsiders understand the state of mind better. After going through about 10 pages of the game, the only real “interaction” that happens are prompts that ask you what you want to do next (making a choice). The rest is all text and some sad background music. I can understand the state because of how close I was to Ed, but if I didn’t have that experience, I’m not sure I would gain more empathy and understanding just through this. It’s worth trying, but hasn’t struck a chord with me.

I’ve asked my friend, who works at Trader Joe’s, to see if she could ask if they’d be willing to donate snacks or beverages for the walkers this October’s American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Out of the Darkness Walk. The frustrating thing about asking is that they don’t accept e-mail, apparently because they want to be perceived as a “friendly neighborhood store” despite being a massive corporation that is skimping out on health insurance for its hard working employees, and each store will donate only $40 worth of goods for a given event. We have over 120 walkers who have signed up already, which does not include the number that may sign up between now and October 26, so this definitely doesn’t give us that much in actual food quantity. The cheapest granola bars at Trader Joe’s go for about 99 cents each.

So I’ve asked my friend to ask three different locations to donate, so that way, I’d get $120 total in donated food. Still not ideal, but it’s better than nothing, and it helps that I have someone who works at the store who can talk to them for me.

Today, I finally signed up for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Brooklyn Out of the Darkness Walk. It will take place on September 28 near Coney Island this year, and I’ve set $1,000 as my donation goal. I’ve created my own page with my brief story about Ed, and have sent an e-mail out to everyone close and semi-close to me. It’s a modest goal to set, but I figure that it is good to start off small and get bigger as time goes on.

I honestly wasn’t sure how it would be received, yet somehow, just four hours after sending out the e-mails, I’ve managed to reach 40% of my goal, with four different people’s donations other than my own. As I saw the e-mail notifications in my inbox, I immediately felt overwhelmed and could feel myself tearing up. People actually want to support me supporting Ed. Even though it’s somewhat expected since these people are a part of my life, it felt overwhelming anyway — in a good way. It’s strange how even things like this can elicit emotion in me.

While in Brazil last month, I found out via BBC News that the suicide barrier finally received approval from the Golden Gate Bridge board. In the next three years, $76 million will be spent to fund this barrier. It took over 1,600 lives to get this approval to finally happen, and just last year, we saw 46 people jump off this bridge, including Ed. Then this past week, I read that the New York Port Authority is planning to spend $50 million to build a fence to prevent potential suicides on the George Washington Bridge, which connects New York and New Jersey. Last year, this bridge saw 16 people jump off and fall to their deaths.

The thing about the George Washington Bridge is that it’s not one of those iconic tourist spots the way the Golden Gate Bridge is. If you jump off this bridge, it’s very likely that no one will ever witness you jump and fall to your death, and even more likely that your body may never even be recovered. A friend of mine told me that her friend’s friend committed suicide by jumping off the GW bridge. She wasn’t discovered until a week or two later after an exhaustive search to find her when she was reported missing. I already was aggravated when I knew that it took the U.S. Coast Guard an hour to get to Ed. How would I feel if it took them a week or two?

Chris was the one who actually saw the headline in his BBC app while we were in Brazil and showed me his phone. When I read the headline, I felt numb and even slightly defeated. It’s this weird feeling of relief because I know this will save future lives, but a deep sense of hurt came over me knowing that it came too late for Ed.

I’m painfully aware of mental illness and have been for as long as I can remember, and I am also aware that a suicide barrier on any bridge will not 100% prevent suicide from happening. I don’t need some idiot commenting on these articles about the “waste of government dollars” going toward these public projects… because apparently, people who are suicidal need to take care of themselves and take responsibility for their own lives. Why don’t we ask blind people to find their way home? Most of the world’s major bridges have barriers, so it never made sense why arguably the most iconic bridge in the world in my home city didn’t have one. We can’t 100% prevent anything bad from happening. But what we can do is not make it so easy for people to decide to end their lives. We can prevent people from being scarred for life for witnessing people jump to their deaths. We can also stop blaming the victims by saying that if they are determined to die, then they will just find a way to die no matter what we do. We have to help people who need help, give them positive options, take away the ease of access to a quick and relatively painless 4-5-second death, and not make them feel even more helpless and like death is their only option.

I came home tonight to an unexpected card/letter in the mail from a longtime friend and former teacher of mine. The card is made of a light cloth-like material with embroidered flowers, and has this quote on it:

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy: they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

In it, she tells me of the struggles she has faced emotionally in the last several months, and she acknowledges that she remembers that we’ve reached the one year anniversary of my brother’s passing. She said she thought of me often in the months leading up to it, and especially on the day of. She even remembers how I called her that night one year ago, telling her that he was missing and that I had no idea what to do or who to turn to. Despite my love, my recent engagement, my travel experiences, my friendships, and the generally happy life that I lead, she says, she knows that I am still grieving, and this grieving will never end because of how deeply I cared for Ed. How does one ever get over a life of a loved one, a sibling, cut short, especially when that life is cut short by one’s own choosing?

It’s not every day that I receive traditional mail that is handwritten anymore; actually I almost never do. It was really touching to read her handwritten words to acknowledge remembrance of Ed; I teared up reading it, partly because I was thinking of Ed, and partly because of how grateful I am that I have someone like her in my life who would take the time to write me a letter to acknowledge my sorrow and continuing pain, and to let me know that she does, in fact, remember and care. I’m sure Ed is happy to see this. Ed always did occasionally ask about her. I’m a lucky person despite not physically having him anymore.

I had dinner tonight with an old friend from high school who has spent the summer in New York interning at a law firm. He will be graduating from law school next year and may end up accepting a job here, as well. As we were chatting over pizza in the East Village tonight, I kept thinking how crazy it was that we have known each other for 14 years now, and that just 10 years ago, we graduated from high school together. It’s like every time we see each other, we are aging a teeny, tiny bit more.

On the bus ride uptown afterwards, I thought about why I’ve managed to stay in touch with some people as opposed to others. He mentioned a few people tonight that I did like in high school, people I am actually Facebook friends with, but I don’t actively keep in touch with and vice versa. Some of us tried to keep in touch shortly after high school and somehow drifted, others abruptly stopped responding to e-mails and phone calls, and others seemed to have just disappeared from the face of the earth. I thought about this friend tonight. Why are we still in touch? He is a self-professed cynic, which may or may not be a healthy thing for me to have in my life considering how cynical I have become over the years. Maybe we’re still in touch because there’s some weird understanding we have of each other because we grew up in similar environments at home, and because of that, we can understand each other in a way that gets others befuddled. It’s that feeling that when you share a bad experience you have had with a parent, that this person will look at you, and just by that look, you know he gets it because he’s experienced the same exact thing almost play by play, and he will never, ever say to you, “but he’s still your dad.”

Sometimes, it’s the optimistic people in these situations who really can’t help you.

Today, we arrived in Montreal, and we arranged to have dinner with my cousins’ cousins, one of whom lives in Montreal with their mom, and his brother, who lives right outside of Toronto but just happened to be visiting this weekend. It was a bit of a coincidence, but it was still nice to see them.

I realized after talking with the younger cousin, who is just a year older than me, how much different my life is since we first spoke at length in July 2007, when he stayed upstairs from my parents for a week with his family to attend my cousin’s wedding in San Francisco. At that point in my life, I’d only left the country once to study in China. my knowledge of the world was vastly different than what it is now. Then, I didn’t think much of his accent and didn’t really talk to him much about how he is tri-lingual in French, English, and Cantonese. Since then, I’ve traveled to over half of the states in the U.S. and have been to four other continents. He was asking me about my experiences in Asia and Europe, and I realized that I could actually speak about these things relatively intelligently and not sound naive and wistful about it all the way I would have seven years ago. He told me he still hasn’t left North America but really wants to visit Europe, and I felt a little sad. I know part of the reason he hasn’t left is because of the hold of his mother; I know the way his mom is, and I’m sure she tries her best to control what he does and doesn’t do.

Part of me just wanted to tell him to get the hell out of his house so he could be normal and lead a regular adult life… sort of the way I got out. But I didn’t want to cause any trouble, so I just encouraged him to find a friend to travel with and just book a trip. Maybe he will do it at some point, but hopefully sooner rather than later.