"So it goes." 🪠

two years ago, i was at my uni's library pretty late. i was studying with some actuarial types since i was gonna take a huge financial math exam in a few weeks. i ended up leaving early to catch the last normal bus that night.

i was feeling on edge at my stop. it wasn't just finals stress, everything was out of order that day, so i called my best friend briana.

she was just back at her apartment from work, and she wanted to talk with me about some emotional confusion too.

when she asked me what i was up to, i mentioned my math stuff, a godless insurance job i got that summer, installing linux for the first time haha. very boring, but even in high school i could talk to her about orwell essays or esperanto vocabulary i liked, and she would think i was teenage sage.

i brought up my idea that spring break for a party celebrating (hopefully) passing my actuarial exam / the end of my school's trimester / my half birthday party. that last excuse got her laughing, and she said she'd love to attend.

then she told me her plans. she was taking a gap year between graduating that may and med school. she was gonna visit friends in england and nyc that summer. i took her to my ancestral village mexico a year before to visit my family, and she was going even further than me in such a short time.

by this point, i was in my bus, and it was packed, too loud to say more than a word or two back. she knew i couldn't talk back, so she monologued about the gap year more and more. about how she'd be so close by to my city now and come to visit me and all our friends and her vague bf way more often instead of having this pesky two hour drive to visit us every few weeks (or the even less frequent trips i made up.)

she sounded so excited, so emotional, and she closed it out saying "i love you so much angel. you don't have to say it back, but i want you to know just how much you mean to me. you're the most amazing person i know and it's not even close for second."

i wanted to say it back so bad, but unmuting my mic would've just filled her ears with babel, so i texted back:

á: i love you so much briana.

á: and i don't even care that the nsa can read this¹.

b: omg

those were the last texts i ever sent to her.

two weeks later, i was procrastinating my finals learning shell when her dad called me and said that she died in a car crash that afternoon.

it was the worst thing to ever happened to me.

i had to tell her close friends that same night, my parents, everyone that loved her too, i broke the worst news imaginable to all of them.

my life was thrown into complete anomie, and there was very little to guide it besides studying annuities and awk(1) (i really wish i was joking.)

it was so hard getting out of the habit of wanting to call her or text her whenever there was something funny that was happening. the reason i missed her was selfish. you see, so many idiosyncrasies i had built up, so much of my arrogance and isolation i made with myself were cause of her believing in me.

my first language was spanish, growing up for me was not being understood cause of my lack of language or anglo culture that every other kid had. my kid-best friend was an authentic polish kid that didn't speak english that well either.

she was the first person i knew that genuinely loved to learn my culture. she would come over to all my family fiestas, she'd love hearing about my ramblings on the metamorphosis and don quixote when i was sixteen, and she made me fearless in following my heart with anything stupid haha.

my confidence was downstream from her. it's so easy for me to be dismissing of other people, ones that i can tell have passions but have been cowed out of follow them. okay, maybe that confidence was more of a tsunami, but i was in such a lucky place with her where she was a sincere, supportive audience for me to be myself. i could live however i wanted knowing that there was someone as amazing as briana to always back me up.

so me learning how to code or reading the german modernists was just following muscle memory, doing things i would've wanted to do anyways but lacking the heart to deal with the isolation any neurotic person knows all too well.

later that year, my great uncle gero was sick. i was home for the weekend, and my mom asked me if i wanted to visit him. i had some actuarial homework to do, so i said no.

he died before i got to see him again. they had a huge funeral for him along with three nights of rosary readings. it was the following friday night when i came home again to go to one of the rosarios. my parents were bringing along three huge silver pots filled with burning hot atole.

i didn't think there could be enough people to drink it all. when we showed up, it looked like a typical get together out front, but i hadn't been downstairs yet.

instead of the typical toy filled basement my cousins and i played in as kids, it was filled with rows and rows of decorated chairs like an improvised church service for a wedding.

and at the very front was a huge ofrenda made by my great aunt, his children, and grandchildren.

it was such a beautiful moment for me down there. i was sitting in the back with my dad next to a young family that was somehow related to me, but none of us knew how. they had four kids the oldest maybe six with the youngest a newborn baby. all of the siblings were playing together while we were roteing off our ave marías one bead at a time.

it was bittersweet though. i had this thought in my head that what i was seeing here, mexican peasant society playing out in the suburbs of northern illinois was just a historical artifact. within a generation, the severance from our culture and those little kids would be complete.

we'd end up like the italians or polacks clinging to the sopranos and portillo's for their culture. we'd be like the germans in my home state that are so culturally extinct that they can't even pronounce their own towns correctly anymore. the march of time was forcing me into the amnesiac fog: the boring, beige unculture of being American™.

i sang "las mañanitas" every birthday for her. she visited my tiny village where my family's been squatting since cortés. she met all my tiny cousins that kept saying we were married. it felt like such a waste attaching myself to anything so fragile.

but i still held on.

i read her favorite book this summer: slaughterhouse five by kurt vonnegut. it's a beautifully written book that talks so much about despair. we see just how people build up as shells around them during trauma. or the selective fatalism that governments instill in us with massacres they justify². or its old protestant adages that once helped people accept their predestination:

GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,

COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,

AND WISDOM ALWAYS TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.

poor billy pilgrim was as much a victim of calvinism as he was of war.

it really is the perfect neurotic book for grief. each random memory in your life all of a sudden carries this weight of meaning being connected together (non-linearly, of course.) there's little details in the text like the blue and grey feet our protagonist has walking towards his extraterrestrial abduction being the exact same description used for the dead soldiers outside their camp later on – or rather earlier on during the war (non-linear, as stated before.)

it's double meanings like these that make you "unstick" from our fourth dimension seeking meaning anywhere, any-when. all the while nothing is actually happening. you notice the decay around you, but you're powerless to do anything to stop it.

vonnegut condenses this feeling (and the title of this article) into an immortal phrase, stated only after death: "So it goes."

but all of this was so exhausting.

it's so lame having to quote another book for this, but i had a visit from my ghost of christmas yet to come this january. that is, i saw a peek of where i'd end up if i stay depressed, lonely, remorseful, absent from so many people that need me.

i don't want to give up on another tío gero, and i still have time to make the best out of a bad situation for people that have already given me so much in life.

so i talked to her family for the first time in a year and a half. i made peace with them. i talked with her best friends for her deathday, and we planned out a party for her remembrance.

i invited a critical mass of her friends from our hometown, her college, some teachers, mentors, coworkers, etc (she was very popular.) i flew in her college best friend here for catholic ramadan³. my family helped me set up a fiesta on her behalf.

and i made briana the ofrenda that she would've wanted.

she always joined us for our traditions. even in her death, i know she would've loved being part of them now.

even when she was alive with us, she had this incredible power to make everyone's "adultness" melt away. it was like we were in 2012 again!! that we really could be friends with each other despite marriages, trips to india, the income tax, whatever else people let get in the way of friendship.

we put on a neutral milk hotel vinyl, we shared all of our favorite stories with her, we ate her favorite foods, and all of that time and love she had given us after so many years came pouring out again, like an old battery still holding charge when you needed it most.

it was really amazing. i can't overstate the redemptive power that this party gave me, and i've been connected with so many people since.

i'm not sure what comes after this, but i'll write about anything fun here.

before i go, i wanna acknowledge the courage that has been granted to me in the form of people around me:

• my lebanese friend for showing me that i was not alone
• my film friend for being a lighthouse of art and inspiration
• my texan friend for sharing their amazing books and ideas with me
• my two welsh friends for teaching me the value of poetry and manual transmissions
• her last bf and bff for showing me just why she loved them
• my two little siblings for being little siblings to her all those years
• my parents for loving my friends as much as i did
• her parents, grandma, siblings, all the rest that welcomed me as one of their own
• el resto de mi familia por dandome mi cultura autentica⁴
• my teachers and professors for inspiring me every day
• my peers, penpals, random friends, etc for sticking with me and knowing that something as beautiful as calculus is built upon tangential connections…