The Echo

May 14, 2024

On that morning, I first received the information about my friend’s death.

I thought it was hearsay, only a rumor, but soon my reason took over. Of course that would happen. I should have been prepared. I should have thought of it all. I knew it would happen.

This, however, changes nothing. What has happened has happened.

It was a cold, dark morning. As usual, I woke up early and prepared for my routine. I felt that I couldn’t process the information, so I didn’t. Instead, I jotted down in my journal as the first entry of the day: “Natsutooi died on 2024-03-08.” It was the fourth day after her death. It was weird, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar—the death of a friend; it felt more like the death of a celebrity that I was a fanatic of, though I had never experienced that before.

The day went by like normal, and I did not think much about it. I soon received more details about her death, which I regretted reading: her trip sitter fell asleep in her home while she was using Propofol and other sedatives, and she suffocated from her own vomit.

I tried to imagine the darkness and the dreamless slumber these substances could induce, and the sensation of wet, viscous, disgusting liquid flooding the pharynx. I imagined drowning in one’s sleep, drowning from and by oneself, desperately waiting for help while the sensation took over. I couldn’t continue my thoughts. I did not abuse such substances; I only knew how it felt by second-hand testimony. However, I was sure of one thing: it was a truly gruesome way to die.

My friends disappeared from my sight to help with the investigation. The police intervened because the death involved illegal drugs and the negligence of the sitter. I felt the radio go silent: all my friends were implicated in this one way or another, and the last thing I could do was to guess at their fate. There was nobody I could talk to about her, or about anything, really. I was stuck on the opposite side of this depressing world.

I was the type of person who tears up for all sorts of reasons frequently and easily, but this time, even with all the loneliness, there were no tears. Slowly but surely, the realization came: there was no one I could go to share those silly pictures I scavenged on the internet. I would never have a chance to meet her in person, and I couldn’t even attend her funeral or visit the place where she rests forever. All of her promises were shattered. I lost her: she was not there anymore.

I first met her in a mental health institution in Beijing. I was there to meet another friend whom I had known for a year or so, and I was totally unprepared to meet someone new. After an exhausting, long trek via subway amid the bustling people of Beijing on a workday, I saw my friend and her standing together under the irritating, hypnotizing fluorescent light of the waiting hall.

She gave me her nickname on the internet. We called each other by these nicknames: Natsutooi, Nozomi, and me. I did not like her name at first; I thought it was cliché and way too artsy. Multiple interpretations stem from the conformity of the Japanese future and present tense: “the distant summer” or “summer grows distant.” I did not know at the time, but I would find myself saying this word, in my head or out loud, countless times until I became accustomed to its sound and ambiguous meaning.

I wasn’t able to gain much insight into her the first time we met. I knew that she was on the autism spectrum and suicidal, like many of my friends, but that was the extent of my knowledge. As a friend group, we went to the arcade together and bonded by playing beside each other without talking, amid the brain-flooding music and flashes of light.

A few days later, I was on the opposite side of the world all by myself.

I was happy to escape my tradition-bound, unknowingly abusive, and apathetic family, though I knew I would not see my friends again for quite some time. I had a new host family, but I felt disconnected from them, and I was truly disconnected—perhaps I just did not know what a healthy family looked like.

Something would finally fulfill this lack, though. I continued to talk with my friends over the internet. In fact, we talked more than ever. I learned more and more about Natsutooi: she had a mock family where she and her trip sitter would act as parents for each other, she started to abuse a vast assortment of substances, and her family’s attitude was much like mine. An almost doubly-parasocial relationship began to form across the oceans, where neither of us truly knew what the other was going through: she tried to become a mother figure, and I acted like an injured animal waiting for rescue.

As comforting as it felt, I warned myself that I must not grow too invested. My superego was absolutely in awe at how Freudian the relationship became, and it told me that I should feel ashamed of it. Furthermore, as days went by, there were more and more consecutive days when she wouldn’t reply to my messages, and then she would tell me that she only “blacked out for a bit.” It could not have been more glaringly obvious: she was going to die one day, and there was nothing I could do about it.

In my desperation, the relationship only deepened, and life marched on. I wrote a letter to her, filled with shallow accounts of the last half-year of my daily life and empty screams of loneliness and self-hatred.

She said that she cried while reading it. I did not understand why—I did not consider myself lovable or even tolerable. However, I was extremely happy that somebody cared about me and wanted to take care of me. She made many childish, sometimes even ridiculous promises to battle my growing despair: that she would send her reply to the letter back to me once I was in China, that I would never have to worry about being lonely again once I was with her, and that I wouldn’t have to relive excruciating memories about my family of origin once she built a new one for me.

I knew that the clock was still ticking. The gaps in her presence became longer and longer, and more frequently she expressed her hypothesis that someday something might happen. I made desperate attempts not to think about this, because I was also struggling to live my day-to-day life, and denying these anticipations would mean denying my tunnel-visioned interpretation of the meaning of life altogether.

However, her death put an end to everything.

Life in the next two months felt like walking on clouds: everything felt dreamy and unreal, while the hard, solid, dangerous pavement lurked below my feet. Grief did not hit me with a big, hard blow in the face; instead, I fell to the ground again and again until I got used to it.

On 2024-05-14, I received a software package from her trip sitter. He had made a very wise decision to record Natsutooi’s voice and put it through a now-ancient voice synthesizer that has been around since 2008 called UTAU—literally, Japanese for “to sing.” With this package, I was able to synthesize whatever I wished with her voice. It was beautiful, yet eerily terrifying.

I set off to create one final song as a tribute.

Listening to her voice again was painful but comforting. The tuning process felt like a process of healing to me: I could feel the voice coming to life as I adjusted the parameters and timings bit by bit. The voice had an identical fingerprint to her actual voice, but at the same time was weirdly distinct. It helped me refrigerate and preserve my memories—it was certainly time to put these memories back on the shelf, instead of letting their painful presence continue beside me.

The signifier of Natsutooi’s presence traveled through my lower chain of suggestion, through the Other, and ultimately reduced to a voice.

I sat back and listened as the song was completed. The familiar voice uttered its final line:

最終列車と泣き止んだ　あの空に溺れていく

The last train departs, and in the sky where tears have ceased, we drown in its embrace.