BlackSwanWriting

Adam Hulse
HS119
Personal Black Swan Event

On March 29th, minutes before midnight a black swan event drastically and permanatly altered my life and the lives of my closest friends. After a boring and standard work day, Julie and I spent the afternoon harassing her fiancé while he played guitar hero. We jumped on the bed and made lewd gestures while he tried as hard as he could to focus. He went to his gym, we went to ours and 2 hours later we rendezvoused at the apartment for dinner. He made a statement about how he felt he was “catching asthma,” to which we jokingly replied that one cannot “catch asthma,” but he should probably get that looked at or just do more cardio. That night after 1am Julie tried to call me and tell me that Jon had died of a heart attack at 23.
Looking back, with the history of heart attacks in his tribe and even his family, his remark about asthma and the little amount of cardio it took to exhaust him we should have been concerned. We weren’t because he was Jon, he hated cardio, he loved food and he was a 23 year old body builder and bad things don’t happen to 23 year old body builders that are engaged to marry your best friend in 5 months after almost 6 years of dating. I feel that the ways our lives changed would only affect the large things. Julie moved, we both stopped going to his gym, her dress was returned, the obvious things. This black swan affected even the small things. We hold our breath when white Toyotas drive down the road, we change the channel during commercials for movies he wanted to see, turn off the radio when his favorite songs play. We’ve canceled our plans for the group trip to Hawaii, knowing the whole time we would be thinking of him on the islands he grew up on.
Losing Jon drew us all closer together in an attempt to fill the void left behind, but we’re always aware of who we’re missing. The black swan changed everything about how our lives functioned.