california

Jahsiya died while I was in California after leaving my boyfriend and while grieving. LA was disorienting. The sunburns were unfailing on my winter skin, the conversational tenor hard to infiltrate. Any refraction of my grief and heartbreak could have caused my disorientation. I was practicing non-attachment and fasting so the parties, field trips, and night walks were a parading mirage, a set to wander through in numb dreaminess. If that's what we mean by LA is fake I admit I leaned into its easiness and distraction with relief. Michelle and I spent an afternoon getting high and drinking in her living room cackling through the uninsulated walls and another sunbathing on the porch with tea.

One of the last nights I was there we had a party. Boys camped out on the front lawn with beer and it was all clinky and shimmery and swelling. I got too high early in the evening so my friend and I were leaning against a car in the driveway talking and making out while I waited to come down away from social introductions and loud music. The open French doors on the back of the house spilled light onto the stone patio and the three girls standing there chatting, feet away but unaware of us obscured in shadow, were actors on the doorway stage.

There is a memorable scene in Girls (S5E7) with an interactive play inside of a multi-story house. From a window in the house, the protagonist spots her ex boyfriend leaning out of another window having a cigarette, and her best friend on a balcony across the courtyard also smoking. Their silent, intimate gazing at one another belies that they've become secret lovers. It's an agonizing scene of betrayal in friendship, and at the same time sweet: a genuinely beautiful moment between the new couple, who fought the inevitable affair and then finally succumbed. It's real love. Watching these girls on the backlit porch had a trace of that, witnessing mundane intimacies that felt beyond the reach of my life, so sweet it felt hurtful.

So began one of those unstoppable avalanches into a bad night. The libation was a multi-liquor mango juice mixture that tasted sharp and sweet and slid me down easily into a rare taxonomical category of drunkenness where an inexplicable level of consciousness is retained, just enough that you see bits -- stumbling, laughing hard, a snippet of a pop song, cigarette taste, wet tears on my cheek -- like long strobe flashes or an extremely slow frame rate, thinking in those instants of lucidity 'if I'm aware enough to see this happening, how am I not awake enough to control it?'

I came to in a near-argument with Max over the cultural importance of Lana Del Rey's music. I was crying softly, saying something as authoritatively as incoherently about violence and romance, and he was anxiously conceding whatever his counterpoint had been and moving to try to de-escalate me. There was more crying and yelling and at the end I lay in bed wondering what the hell had happened to me. There was no trigger for this catastrophe of my psyche, no key to my behavior.

I found out later that had been the night, the hours, in which Jahisya had died back in New York. For her it was the early morning; for me, the late evening. Was what I had felt a reverberation of the energy from that event, powerful rings out from the spot, meeting me in LA in thick waves. Or, was it that whichever forces swirled took her further down the hole I'd been drawn into too; slow succumbing? It made sense, though... Jahsiya was suffering from the same afflictions, trying to survive the losses of close friends, and romantic failure, and regular failure (in her own mind -- in real life she was finding success).

Jahsiya's clarity of vision was unprecedented. She wanted to be famous, to find the love of her life, and to enact personal justice, all by whatever means necessary. The second to last time I saw her we were at a bad house show. She was wearing a tight mesh dress and a maroon patent leather trench coat. We did enough ketamine that I felt like I was strapped to the top of the inside of a cube while talking to some undergraduates studying performance. Jahsiya was yelling at them about pursuing art, how there's nothing else, just art and friendship and love and loyalty. They are not abstract, but the only things that matter.

I miss her sharp, indiscriminate criticism which often broke me out of unconscious action or encouraged me into intentional action. She taught me to be angry, which I had never tried before, especially at men, and to be serious about the right things. I feel her absence and often need her to still be here. But I know that she would never leave the party early, except to find a better one.