French Fries - Final

After that date, which I consider a failure, we kept in contact for a few more days, but then she suddenly stopped answering my messages. Eventually, I also stopped sending them. I figured there was no point in persisting; her mind was obviously somewhere else. After all, I knew she could be quite depressed sometimes. But I kept thinking about her and all that went wrong. For me, it was just a matter of giving it another try, but I believe things weren't so simple in her head.

A couple of months passed, bringing us into 2021. Around January 6th, the spirit of new beginnings that comes with every new year inspired me to send her another message. But, of course, it was for nothing; she didn't answer once again. I was very disappointed. I was eager to invite her for a second date, but I couldn't do that if she still refused to talk to me. Months went by, and eventually, she was not even receiving my messages anymore, and I was starting to get a little worried about her. So I decided to send a message to a friend of mine who used to study in the same school as Giovanna, and I asked if she had heard from her. Perhaps asking that was a mistake.

My friend told me that Giovanna had killed herself. I was shocked and extremely sad when I got the news. Even as a man, I must admit, this was one of the situations that made me cry. I still don't understand why she did such a thing, and of course, I couldn't help but think if I had anything to do with it. Her suicide was only a couple of days after I sent her that message in January. The message was short, I was just asking how she was and things like that, was there anything else I could have said? I know she saw the message. At least she could have answered and told me what was going on with her.

It took me a long time to recover from this, and for the most part, I blamed myself. I didn't believe I was the reason she did it; it would be very egotistical of me to think that. After all, she had many other people in her life besides me. But if things had been different from the beginning, perhaps I could've prevented it. Maybe we could have been happy together; that way she would have had another reason to live, and in that regard, maybe I could have been responsible. This, among many other things, was basically what was going on in my head when I visited her grave in the cemetery.

However, since then I've learned that no one is to blame for a suicide. People who do this kind of thing don't do it because they despise other people, but because they despise themselves. And I also realized that killing yourself is the most selfish thing you could ever do. Think about it: everybody who loved you is going to get deeply hurt; they may never recover from your loss. And if you think no one loves you, then you're either not paying enough attention or you're delusional. Some people aren't loved simply because they don't allow others to love them.

She wasn't the only one. Back then, there was a major increase in the number of people with depression and other mental health issues due to the pandemic, and it's logical to assume that the number of suicides probably went up as well. While social distancing was a good idea to protect people against Covid, it had a catastrophic effect on people who were already isolated from society, and it dropped their chances of reintegrating down to almost zero. I believe this may have been the last straw for her, and she was only 19 years old at the time. It's crazy to think that just one year after she died, everything was back to normal again.

In those days, I was desperately trying to understand the reason she did it, but the truth is: there is never a good reason for killing yourself. All we have to do is be patient and eventually things will get better. There's nothing that justifies throwing the rest of your life away. I just wish she had lived long enough to understand that. This was the story of Giovanna, my "french fries," and the best girlfriend I never had. It wasn't a very romantic story, and it was very far from being a fairy tale, but real life rarely is.