Notes Towards an Elegy by Keegan Lawler

First runner-up in the 2020 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of nonfiction.
Final Judge: Aimee Liu

Jamel Myles is gone and it has taken me over a year to write about it.

Jamel Myles is gone and besides what I can glean from the news, I do not know him. I have read every article, from local to national news, trying to rip bits of truth from the sensationalism. I search for the child under the headlines and between the statistics.

Jamel Myles is gone and when I think about him, I remember two pictures. In one, he slides his narrow body into the frame of a family-size Honey-Nut Cheerios box, his head and arms out the top, his legs popping out the bottom. He holds a hand to his face and I imagine he’s being shy in front of the camera, but a cheeky smile peeks out behind his open palm. In the other, he stands next to his mother, biting his lip in an equally cheeky way, as she positions the phone in front of them.

Jamel Myles was in fourth grade, only nine-years-old when he ended his life. He was bullied at school and had recently come out as gay, which only made it worse. If it wasn’t a news story, they’d call it cliché.

Jamel Myles is gone and I shouldn’t have to quote a statistic from the Trevor Project about how much more likely boys like us are to end our lives. Jamel was a boy who liked boys, and he ended his life like I tried to end mine, over and over again. These connections, as close as they feel to me, do not make us unique, they are, rather, intensely common.

Jamel Myles is gone and I still cry when I think about it. The tears bursting through my body like an aftershock from an old epicenter. He is gone and I am still here trying desperately to untangle the wiry nest of self-loathing, of internalized homophobia, that was given to boys like us.

Jamel Myles is gone and we teach boys they should end their own lives before they love another boy. We teach them how to ball their tiny hands into fists, slamming against punching bags in the basement or punching a crater in the drywall next to someone’s head, before we teach them how to open their palms in anything like love.

Jamel Myles is gone and the best I can do is notes, is unfinished documents and sketches, because anything like final means an ending I refuse to give. Because an ending is an estimation of the child’s presence, of his image. Because an ending means he doesn’t float through my heart still.

But Jamel Myles is gone and he doesn’t need my imagination for his feelings or his thoughts.

Jamel Myles is gone and before he was a headline, he was a child, shy to the camera, and smiling.

Keegan Lawler is a writer currently living in Washington State with his partner, their two basset hounds, and their cat. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Offing, Washington Poetic Routes, Homology Lit, and the anthology “Home is Where You Queer Your Heart,” from Foglifter Press. He’s currently an MFA candidate at Western Washington University.