My Condolences
by Cameron Bocanegra
Dear Mrs. Rivera,
I don’t know anything that may give your search a lead or a forensic team a clue.
Nicole and I met in college. Between our shared part-time jobs, we swam in the local lake after sunset, where she swore that she could walk on water. The every-other-day sleepovers included orange-flavored liquor, hair dye, cigarettes, and long silences, but the silences fattened uncomfortably while our GPAs soured. I only ever chewed my nails when the drama of her lawsuit was snowballing through national media. Her paranoia was contagious. I agreed when she said her lawyers were keeping secrets, a historical institution was plotting against her, and receipts felt like being followed.
There were plenty of times I thought I’d seen her for the last time. Once I sat cross-legged on her couch. She was perched before the television, tapping her nose against the screen as the commercial whined.
She asked, “What color does this advertisement make you feel?” I shrugged. Red light pierced through her bleached hair. “Does it want us to feel red? I don’t feel red.”
She rose swiftly, drifted to her bedroom, undressed, and gazed into the mirror above her dresser drawers. She dropped her chin and explained her body as a doll with parts that twist, bend, and detach as necessary. Her eyes glazed over. Nicole temporarily exited, and only a glitching version of her remained. She was all slight curves outlining a human-shaped abyss. She was a mask on a puppet when she succumbed to a stretch of depression. During those periods, I was lonely because the world outside us felt full of cotton-filled dummies, frauds, and actors.
Our friendship began dimming when her drunken disorderly conduct got us kicked out of a concert before it started. We retreated to a friend’s house. The host unlocked a heavy-duty safe that his father bought him for hunting rifles, but he pulled a thin velvet bag from the safe, and inside was a golden ladle, an heirloom from his great-grandmother. He filled the ladle to the brim with broken-down coke. Nicole and I shoved elbows until we were bouncing with loud opinions and powdered lips. We didn’t plan on dying from drugs but from long lives and quick car crashes that weren’t our fault.
“I see the future sometimes,” she mumbled while we adjusted our appearance in the guest bathroom. She wiped her dripping nose. “There are things I don’t want to know.”
I pressed her for insight into my future, but she shook her head as if she knew better than to share a secret with me.
I rolled my eyes and snapped, “What happens next then?” She ignored me and ran her fingers through her crunchy bangs calmly. I was dizzy, overwhelmingly menial beside a woman claiming to see the future, so I stomped out. As I slammed the front door, Nicole collapsed to the floor, clutching her chest and vomiting. It was her first overdose.
The last time I saw Nicole, she arrived at the airport after spending some months on each coast. On the way back to our city, she bragged about her trip. It included a boat trip with Argentine men to a small island for an orgy and the night she watched a man jump off a bridge and never hit the river. She enjoyed a weekend in Boston, where she saw Hamilton and met the author of Gone Girl. She attended a museum of sex where she fawned over moaning robotic genitals and papier-mache sculptures of alligators having sex. She partook in a riot, punched a cop, and fled with a baton. There was a completely nude underground rave that served one drink, a hallucinogenic punch. Men catcalled her less if she was with another woman, and she never felt more entitled to wear leopard print than she did in New York City. She mentioned an impromptu trip to Seattle, giggled, and never elaborated. When her stories drifted into sighs, there was no sound except the shoddy radio station. I considered asking her what she was thinking or even feeling, but when you asked her something like that, she answered according to the weather, and that quirk had become cheap and boring.
When I heard of her disappearance, I sat at an airport sports bar watching the news and waiting for a delayed flight. A photo of her on Good Morning America made me choke on my spit when I swallowed. I forfeited my trip and went home. I left my luggage in the car and rushed into my apartment, searching for evidence that Nicole and I had filled the dark crevices of each other’s lives. I found her tie-dye t-shirt and the purple dress slip she lent me. Was she melting into someone new and starting over with a cowboy hat in a cold desert? Was I unworthy of getting the hell out of Dodge with her? Did her new name have a dangerous ring? Would that deadpan stare soften?
I listen to snippets of the podcasts and watch previews of the documentaries that seem to know her better than I ever did. I see her rarely in the corner of my eye while waiting in line to buy prepackaged sandwiches and sometimes she is in my poorly-drawn dreams before I wake up as a woman entering menopause, stained with the memory of a young woman’s painted eyes.
Perhaps she is out there in the world fulfilling her potential. There is nothing more purposeful than a creature of havoc, so feel as I feel and hope she is dead.
My condolences,
A friend
Cameron Bocanegra is a queer Latina and marketing writer who dreams vividly most nights. She's a third generation Austinite, so she enjoys voting, biking past downtown traffic, and reading The Austin Chronicle. She studied English education and journalism at Baylor University and graduated in 2020. You can find her at cambocanegra.com.