Dr Matt Aitken was a character difficult not to notice on the campus. Hip, young and single, he possessed an extremely provocative persona, from the way he dressed to the way he conversed. In the particular science faculty where all the academic staff consisted of men—most of whom distressingly lacked dress sense as well as personality—Matt Aitken stood out like a splash of vivid colour amid stifling shades of gray. He had mocking blue eyes, a silver-tongue and he moved with the sinuous grace of a big cat.

Matt Aitken tended to attract, or perhaps even invite polarising opinions. His reputation revolved around his persona rather than his competence as an academic. People either adulated him or loathed him. I certainly found him interesting. Simone, my friend who was a statistics major, detested the man. ‘What a snob! He is an arrogant SOB!’ she vented with venom after suffering his lectures and his sarcasm for one semester. But really, I believe many girls mooned after him, and boys secretly envied him. The man knew it, and he shamelessly enjoyed his notoriety.

I studied a particular branch of applied science, which tended to attract mostly men in those days. I’m happy to say the male-female ratio in the discipline has since shifted somewhat. But back then I was often one of the five females sitting among hundreds of boys in hardcore engineering lectures. It was a rather heady experience, being in a place where female presence was revered as almost sacred. I must also admit I went out of my way to attract attention. I had my long hair frizzed, wore decidedly masculine clothes, and was busy giving off the vibe ‘I’m so not catchable.’

So perhaps it wasn’t so strange I caught Dr Aitken’s attention. Soon he was flirting with me subtly as well as openly. At times he was just plain outrageous. But then the man generally flirted with almost anything wrapped in a skirt, so that wasn’t a particularly earth-shaking event. Yet I suspected his attention towards me went beyond the level of mild intrigue. I believed he genuinely found me appealing. My great ego in those days did not allow me to think otherwise, therefore I cannot have an objective opinion on the nature of the man’s interest in me. Needless to say I was extremely flattered that Matt Aitken singled me out for his attention. Simone was most unimpressed, but not really surprised. ‘He is a smart ass,’ she said tersely. ‘He reminds me of you.’

To my friend’s great relief, nothing ever came out of it beyond some months of provocative verbal banters and titillating exchange of looks. But in all honesty I did not expect anything more. Beyond the obvious university rules, in reality I was quite gutless. My parents raised me to be a cautious person, especially about suspect men. So I had a vast reservoir of self-preservative instincts. There was a line I simply would not cross. I also suffered from a large dose of narcissism in my younger days. I was far too enamoured with myself to be genuinely interested in another human being. I delighted in contemplating my most fascinating self and analysing my own grand mind. And I loved being chased, but getting caught was never part of my equation. I had an illusion to maintain and a delusion to feed in my own universe. If this offends anyone, I can only plead the foolishness of youth. In the final analysis, well, I suspect Dr Aitken would not have crossed the line either. Despite his flamboyance and the devil-may-care attitude, there was something fundamentally decent about the man.

Last I heard of Matt Aitken before I graduated from the university, was that he’d gotten himself a girlfriend, one far too young for him. Well, that was one of the rumours I’d heard anyway. I wasn’t surprised. It curiously suited his image. Eventually I got my degree and entered the workforce, which was inevitably a male-dominated world once again. I soon discovered the world of technology was a very small place. Everybody knew everyone else. One of my former professors turned out to be a director in one of the companies I worked for, who soon became an ex-director. One technical director who hired me was my ex-manager’s former boss. One of my colleagues was a friend of my former manager and so on. Really, it was almost incestuous. And many of my superiors knew Matt Aitken on some level and talked of him with glee. They dubbed him ‘The Eternal Teenager.’ What an apt description for the man, I thought in private nostalgia and amusement.

Then at the end of my third year in the workforce, I heard the stunning news.

We all heard it—and staggered.

Matt Aitken took his own life.

He finished his lectures for the year, marked all the exams and papers, then killed himself in his house. I never got the specifics of how he did it. It didn’t matter how he did it. It just mattered that he did it! I walked around in a daze for a few days. I cried myself to sleep for the first couple of nights—which was ridiculous because I never truly knew the man. I wildly asked my director, who’d known him a little better, ‘Why? Why did he do it?’ Matt Aitken felt the world was against him, my director said, it seemed he just didn’t see the point in going on living.

Oh, God! Matt Aitken had everything to live for! Or that’s what everyone had believed. I remember the beautiful intimidating girls who openly competed for his affections, the fashionable apricot shirt and the trendy jeans he wore to his lectures, the acoustic guitar he used to strum in his office, and his cool hair cut… He was a man who could have had anyone eating out of his hands—or so I’d believed.

Then I remembered the last time I saw him, in my final year of university. He’d accidentally walked into the room where we, a small group of students, were having a prayer meeting. By this time, bored from my navel-gazing and disenchanted with the false glitters that finally did not deliver, I’d reverted back to the faith of my parents. Matt Aitken saw me. I smiled, a little embarrassed, and someone cracked a joke. His eyes rested on me for a while, then he made his usual cool elegant reply and left with a wave.

Was there a sign then of the darkness that was eventually to overtake his life? Should I have seen it? Why didn’t I at least ask how he was? Maybe he would have talked. Maybe his walking into the prayer meeting hadn’t been an accident. Maybe he was looking for answers... Oh, God. Why didn’t I see him as a real human being with real human needs, who might have wanted help, and not as some caricature of a smart ass alpha male who was there to contribute to my entertainment? Why didn’t I see the obvious isolation he was suffering from his colleagues and the faculty? Maybe he just didn’t fit in—anywhere. Perhaps his flamboyance was a guise, an attempt to mask his fears and insecurities as a man…

These are all conjectures, of course, and speculations—recriminations, which I logically knew weren’t mine to endure. But I suffered them anyway—for committing the sin of objectifying a human being into something to be used for my titillation, perhaps not as overtly as women are reduced as sex objects, but it was the same difference as far as I was concerned.

Eventually in time I got over the trauma, and my melodrama gradually subsided. But to this day, even after more than a decade I remember Matt Aitken with a faint heartache. I feel as if I had contributed in some way to what had happened to him. I can’t help but wonder, would Matt Aitken still have gone down the path of self-destruction if he had a true friend or two with whom he could be honest, who allowed him to be real—real with them, real with himself, and real in his universe? I’ll never know. I have no idea what demons might have dogged his steps. But since then I’ve come across others who on the surface looked the epitome of goodness and life, and yet hid an inner darkness and pain no words could articulate.

Over the years I’ve come to wonder if our greatest collective responsibility in the human family is to avail to each other our authentic presence—to be real and vulnerable and touchable, to reveal who we really are—and allow the other the same freedom. I ask myself if that is our only pathway to healing, even if our paths cross only briefly, even if we walk with one another just a small portion of our life’s journey. I wonder if our 'raw truth' is the greatest gift we can bestow on another person, and the greatest gift we can receive from another person.