In Memory of Lauren Blackburn

It has now been over a week since my friend and classmate Lauren Blackburn was found dead. I am writing this first blog post after attending his funeral via Zoom. I've felt a physical repulsion to working since Lauren went missing. I've spent hours on Instagram reels each day watching bird and baby videos to numb feeling. I haven't been able to listen to music. I check my friends' locations hourly to try to make sure they're okay. I've skipped meals, stopped exercising, and tried to control who I see and where I see them to escape unwanted pity.

At the same time, I've felt like a fraud. I call Lauren a friend now when I tell everyone how I used to know him, but I don't know if he would've called me a friend. I guess we were in that ambiguous stage of pre-friendship between mutual friends and definitive friends.

Before I officially met Lauren, I asked my best friend Julia probably three or four times to introduce us to each other. Julia and Lauren were incredibly close, and I'd heard so much about him through her. He was an English major who loved Virginia Woolf. He wrote poems. He was also, notably, really the only guy Julia allowed into her closest circle of friends. (She has a beautifully high standard for acceptable men.) I just had to meet this guy.

So for a while, Lauren was just the friend-of-a-friend who I'd exchange smiles with from time to time. I saw him in dining halls sometimes and admired his alluring style from afar. He often wore form-fitting black jackets and carried his books in a satchel. Many have said you could look at him and tell he was an English major.

I finally formally introduced myself to Lauren on Thursday, April 17th. I didn't have dinner plans that night but went to Terrace (my eating club) and saw Julia and Lauren eating together. I sat down with them. I'd submitted my 29-page junior paper the morning before, so I was in exactly the right headspace for socializing. Lauren and Julia, on the other hand, were both freaking out—the English junior paper deadline was Monday, April 21st, only four days away. Lauren and his advisor had also come up with an artificial deadline for the following day; he was supposed to send in a draft the following morning.

For a guy who had to send in a draft of his paper the following morning, albeit for an artificial deadline, Lauren seemed relatively calm. Calmly stressed, if that's possible. He told me how he was writing about Virginia Woolf. Julia encouraged me to tell him about my Virginia Woolf-related bedtime routine, so I did. (Each night this past semester, before bed, I would do a 5-minute gratitude meditation, read a poem from Thich Nhat Hanh's Call Me By My True Names, then read Woolf's To The Lighthouse till I got tired.) What I didn't tell Lauren, but what I've since told his family, is that my desire to read Woolf was inspired by him.

At this dinner, Lauren and I connected over the fact that we were both STEM-turned-humanities majors. He used to study math and physics but changed to English. I used to study ecology and evolutionary biology but changed to comparative literature at the start of my junior fall. My junior fall was filled with imposter syndrome—I was suddenly a humanities major but had little experience in Princeton humanities classes, and the eloquence of my peers intimidated me. When I heard about this Virginia Woolf-loving English major man from Julia, I decided I too wanted to start reading Woolf to embrace my newfound humanities identity. At a bookstore in Washington, D.C. in late December, I asked my dad to buy me To The Lighthouse.

I asked Lauren if he would like to write about Woolf for his senior thesis too. At first he seemed hesitant (maybe too much Woolf?) but when I asked if that would be fun for him, he said absolutely. It seemed, for Lauren, there could never be too much reading or writing about Woolf. I learned later from Julia that Lauren personally identified with Woolf's stream of consciousness in her writing, finding it similar to his own.

Lauren was curious about my academic interests too. I told him about writing my junior paper on the Lotus Sutra, where I analyzed translation choices between Chinese and English versions of it. I told him I wanted to translate my Chinese Buddhist great-grandfather's writings about Buddhism to English for my senior thesis. I learned Julia, Lauren, and I were all enrolled in a translation class together for senior fall. I told Lauren I was also enrolled in a creative writing class for the fall, and he asked, "poetry?" When I told him yes, his face lit up, and he nodded approvingly.

I realized I had been so focused on maintaining steady conversation with Lauren that I was eating my dinner too slowly, and Lauren and Julia were already done. I knew they had junior papers to work on so I told them they could leave, but they insisted on waiting. To buy myself more time, I asked if they'd grabbed dessert. Julia got up excitedly to bring us back blueberry pie. I told them both it was my favorite dessert and that I actually had blueberry pie instead of birthday cake most years.

When we had all finished, we went to Firestone together to study. I didn't have that much to do and was going to an acapella show in an hour, but I decided to accompany them anyway to pass the time. We went to the tables in the back corner of A floor—Lauren's favorite spot in the library, as I learned a few days later from Julia when the campus police was asking us where they should look for him.

I saw Lauren again the next day, Friday, at lunch. He joined Julia and me, but he didn't eat much because he'd already eaten and was going soon to get ice cream with his friend Kelly. He stayed and chatted with us for a while, telling stories about how everyone had been convinced he was gay his entire life. He made us laugh uncontrollably as we tried to wrap our heads around his stories of what sounded like reverse conversion therapy. A counselor he'd had at Princeton would start their sessions with questions like "so, when did you realize you were gay?" despite his insistence that he was straight. His friends also often admitted long after knowing him that they still thought he was gay despite the fact that he'd only dated women. (Perhaps it didn't help Lauren that he had pretty much exclusively female friends, but this was one thing Julia and Lauren had in common: an extremely low tolerance for bad male behavior.)

At this same lunch, I told Lauren I wanted to start a blog. Without hesitation, he said, "I would read your blog." He had known me for fewer than 24 hours and without hesitation expressed his belief in me. I had known him for fewer than 24 hours and yet could tell that he meant what he said. He would read my blog. We would take our translation class together in the fall. We would get to know each other better, and I could finally call him a friend of my own, not just a friend of my friend's.

I called my dad that night just to talk about my day, and I remember telling him about Lauren. I told him how you could tell how emotionally intelligent Lauren is. He's one of those people you can share moments with via eye contact. You can look at him and know that he's right there with you, laughing along at the same joke or expressing subtle disdain for the same view.

The last meal I shared with Lauren was on Saturday, the last day anyone saw him. I had spent the morning studying with my other best friend Lindsay, and I took her to Terrace for brunch. We saw Lauren, Julia, and Julia's girlfriend Katie sitting outside on the terrace, and we joined them. Lindsay and I had studied hard that morning in preparation for the afternoon's festivities—we were going to see the Minecraft movie with a few other friends.

We told the table about our Minecraft movie plans, and we went around sharing our favorite childhood video games. Everyone at the table had played Minecraft. I asked whether people preferred creative or survival mode. I said survival because creative always felt to me like cheating. Lindsay and Lauren said they liked both modes equally. Lauren also told us that his older brother used to make him play first person shooter games but that he'd always hated it.

Julia told a story about how scared she used to be of Minecraft mobs. One time, a creeper was behind her and she got so scared that she turned off her entire PC. We joked that this had been her first real encounter with death, a joke that feels scarily ironic now.

And really, that was it. That was all I saw of alive Lauren. But those 72 hours of knowing him have made the following two weeks the most debilitating and difficult of my life. First, the search, then, the devastating loss. There is truly nothing more painful than loss like this. I have seen it on the faces of those who loved him most—his parents, his siblings, his best friends—and I have felt it in my own heart, the crushing reality that the world will never look or feel the same again.

When I catch myself minimizing the gravity of my own pain, I remind myself that the immensity of my grief after just three days with Lauren is a testament to how wonderful he was. He left an impression. He embodied kindness, and he had a gentleness in his look and demeanor that apparently society deems not masculine enough, but it is the kind that touches a person beyond words. I don't know what friendship is if not believing in someone from the get-go, laughing at jokes together, telling stories, and sharing meals.

I dedicate my blog to my friend Lauren, who I still believe will find a way to read every post. I send all my love and well wishes to his family and loved ones. May he rest in peace.