Sonia.

Today, I found out that a friend of mine passed away unexpectedly. She was 52 and she had a heart attack and she meant a lot to me. I used to give her a hard time about not watering the plants on her desk, so I would water them for her. At that time in my life, I hadn’t met a lot of people like her. She was really interested in culture, music and literature and I was always really thankful for that. I grew up in a place where people did not really want to learn a lot of new things. Sonia wanted to learn new things and she wanted to talk about them. 

One time, she asked me what I was listening to on my iPod, and I was listening to a song by Sufjan Stevens called ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’. It’s a song about a friend of his that died from cancer, someone he loved very deeply. I gave Sonia my iPod and she listened to the song and brought it back to me later. One thing stuck out in her mind from that song, and it was the line “and he takes, and he takes, and he takes.” and she said “He repeats that three times, why is that?”. I said, “Maybe because it just hurt too much. He gives and takes away, but in that moment he was just taking and it hurt a lot.” 

I remember when I first read John Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’, I thought the whole time, Sonia needs to read this, she’ll understand it. She would be able to understand the ache, the longing, the glory. She read it, but I had already gone back to school and so she wrote me and said we needed to talk about it and I couldn’t wait to see her again and talk about it, but I never saw her again. 

It feels like her life was not finished and this shouldn’t have happened. I’ve found myself thinking all day about where she is right now, what she’s seeing and what it feels like wherever she is. I hate wondering where she is or if I’ll ever see her again.