I’m Rachel, and I am Arlen’s friend from high school.

When we met, he was in our school’s production of A Comedy of Errors. I wasn’t really involved in it, I think I was just sort of hanging around, and I don’t know if my memory of him delivering the opening monologue as Egeon is from a rehearsal or a performance. What I do remember is one small movement he made that, in its restraint, seemed to capture the splitting of a ship in two better than any bigger gesture might have.

I looked up his monologue to see if it would bring anything else back, and it begins:

“A heavier task could not have been imposed
Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable:”

And it feels like time is a ball of string, with all the moments touching, and I’m sixteen hearing those words from him, crossing not only the 28 years from his lips, but also the 430 years from Shakespeare’s pen, to me, now. And I cannot speak my griefs unspeakable. The task is too heavy.

So let me speak on joy.

Arlen was obsessed with lemmings and would work them in to conversation, no matter the cost. Which was steep.

He was a sophomore when he came to Montclair High, but due to some bureaucratic error, he had to take Freshman English. Here’s that experience, in his own words: 

“I’m sitting in fifth with time left until six and I sit and cringe, holding onto each precious second until I am made to sit in a room with thirty freshmen. I close my eyes and I can hear their annoying voices, see their faces, their demonic faces, and I can truthfully say that I wasn’t like that when I was a freshman.” (He was only like 6 months older than them.)

He was awkward as hell, but so curious about people that he was brave enough to put his discomfort aside and embark on shenanigans. Example: I have seen Arlen Lawson headbang.

The worst thing I ever did to him, according to me, was convince him that the song Glycerine by 90s rock legend Gwen Stefani’s Ex-Husband was a good song. I know he doesn’t count that as my worst transgression, but I also know that it is on his shortlist.

One night, a bunch of us played Trivial Pursuit, which isn’t necessarily a good idea with someone as brilliant as Arlen. But he did have one mishap, and he apparently carried what he perceived as my abject disappointment in him for decades. In October of 2022, he sent me the following random text, completely unprompted: “Oh, by the way, that one time in high school at the coffee shop when we were all playing Trivial Pursuit, I obviously knew that James Earl Jones did the voice of Darth Vader. My brain just nervously misfired and I spat out the other three-named James, Edward James Olmos.” To which I replied, “This is an elaborate lie, so I understand why it took 25 years to craft.”

But here’s the memory that matters most to me.

Back in high school. Arlen and I had already had our first graceless parting, and we weren’t really on speaking terms. I was seventeen, it was mid-terms of my senior year, and I was in the throes of a sudden and desperate crisis of faith. My understanding of God was changing, and I was terrified. I could not sleep or think, or even stop shaking. Nothing made sense. 

But even though we weren’t speaking, Arlen was the only person I could think of who could make my hands stop trembling. I wrote him a letter, and he found me. He put aside his own hurt and anger to meet me in my fear. We sat outside the theater on a stone bench, and he held my hand–well, he endured my hand crushing his–while everything I ever thought I knew became a supernova. There must have been other people wandering by, but I have no recollection of them. In my memory, it is just us.

We remember his words differently, or else we experienced them differently. He remembers me being afraid of a godless existence and him trying to convince me that there was a god. I was not afraid of a godless existence–or at least, I was equally afraid of a godless existence as I was of the possibility of there being a god. What I was scared of was eternity. And of there not being an eternity. I was terrified to die. I was terrified not ever to die. I was 17, but now at 45, the fear I felt remains unmatched.

When we realized that we had different recollections of what he said that day, it didn’t bother me at all. Didn’t seem to bother him, either. Our memories, of this and others, served us differently throughout the years. His version of it didn’t change what matters. 

What matters is that was the only time I felt peace. I’m not saying he’s the almighty savior or anything, although he would LOVE that, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that he saved me. With my hand in his, eternity felt manageable. 

Since that day, I have carried a certainty about Arlen that I don’t think he shared. We drifted apart many times over the years, and many times as gracelessly as the first, but I never felt like he was out of my life. I felt tethered to him, like any parting we had would obviously be temporary. I regret that certainty now because I feel like it kept me from saying and doing things I might have done if I hadn’t had it. 

I was in the path of totality the day I learned that he was gone, that my certainty was unfounded or at least misplaced. I went outside and tried to make sense of what I had learned, and I stared up at the sky as the sun disappeared, and I thought of enormous things, about how history must have viewed the blotting out of the sun, how people must have attributed it to their own actions, like it was something they said or did, didn’t say, didn’t do, that made the sun go away. And how even though we have answers now, and we get it, that there’s something electrifying about an eclipse, how it’s a bright night in the middle of the day and it feels impossible even though it happens so regularly it could even be called mundane. 

I’ve always felt that whatever Arlen’s and my relationship was, it was bigger than the two of us. And then it was like the world conspired to show me I was right because his absence took away the whole sun.

And now when I think about forever and always, it’s looking back. The view of it is far less terrifying but far more heartbreaking. 

Arlen will always be the person with the incredible laugh, not just for the quality of it but for the honesty of it.

He will always be the person who gave me spoiler alerts after the spoiler, or sometimes just simply acknowledged, “There. I’ve ruined it for you.”

He will always be the man who made us stop in the middle of the sidewalk, in the middle of the night, to listen to the Mountain Goats on his phone because it had to be right-that-second.

He will always be the man with the most confounding mixture of patience and impatience, the poet who unflinchingly met that heavy task of speaking the griefs unspeakable, the musician who slammed songs through his guitar and once described his voice as ‘deeply horrible,’ the mathematician who found art in that side of the world, too, the actor who leveraged his vulnerability to make us all acutely aware of our own. He will always be the man who left too soon.

And Arlen Joseph Eben Evanjel Lawson will always be the boy who saved me.