One of my best friends is dead and I didn't even get a free churro

I found out he died because it had been several weeks where he hadn't responded to my or my wife's messages. That in itself wasn't crazy, he was always the kind of guy who could go off grid at any moment. In fact he was trekking through Mongolia and Nepal and Australia alone precisely for that reason. But still, it had been several weeks and we figured he would've called us or at least let us know that he was back, especially since we'd at that point left several messages on a few different platforms. We generally talk a few times a month over discord, sometimes even a few times a week. And he was supposed to be moving back to Sonoma in September once he came back to the states. So while my wife was working on some late night PowerPoint presentation that no longer really seems to matter, I googled his name thinking wryly that if anything had happened to him someone would've written about it.

And there he was. First link on the Google. He'd been dead for two months.

I relayed all of this to the guy at the churro counter at the place on East Houston. I'm pretty sure this place belongs to the mafia or at least is involved in money laundering in some way. The counter guy must not have had the right training though, because he asked what I wanted and I told him and then I leaned in and said, knowingly, that one of my best friends died, and he responded "I'm sorry for your loss" and charged me $28 for three churros. They weren't even good. How does a churro place not have good churros when that's all they sell on the menu?

Maybe that's all too cold (much like the churros), making a joke of it all. But I think he would've appreciated the bit. He was a man with a seemingly endless repository of bits. Many of my earliest memories of him — freshman year of college, 2014 — were the bits. Some of the more enduring in jokes in our friend group came from one-off things that he said in passing, things that were so astounding in their cleverness and humor that we couldn't help but repeat them over the next decade, as if by parroting we could somehow pick up some of that genius. "That's just rice." Classic. No one can top it. It's funny, when I was trying to get in touch with him I messaged "Still alive?" He would've howled, a little bit of dark humor was his sweet spot.

I think one of my greatest regrets in life was that he asked me to be his roommate in sophomore year of college and I said no, for arcane reasons related to Columbia's lottery system that now seem entirely ridiculous. Luckily I told him that regret before he got hit by a truck, back in 2019 on a balcony at Stanford during his first year of law school. We spoke about a lot of things then, things that I got the sense he didn't ever really talk about. He was an intensely private person, even though he was quick with a joke and clearly very sharp. I think it was because he grew up too fast. His mom died from cancer when he was twelve or thirteen, and by that point his Dad was over 70 and wasn't all there. My friend was going to let the bank foreclose on the house that he grew up in, that was left behind when his dad passed. Which is why we were talking about family in the first place. Apparently the bankers just keep calling you when your name is on the will.

It's weird how when someone dies your memory of them gets all jumbled up. You immediately lose continuity, because they no longer continue. My wife said yesterday that he will forever be 29 in our heads, we're going to get older and have kids and so on but he will forever be stuck in place. (This is, on reread, the only sentence in here that consistently makes my breath catch in my throat) But that's not quite right. He's simultaneously 18 and 29 and all the years in between, because he only now exists in the neural circuits in our collective heads. Maybe if you got enough of us together we could piece together a full picture, but it's still stuck in place. I think he would've been bald when he was older, he already had a bit of a receding hairline. So I've been trying to imagine him bald, and that helps.

Before the bastard died he won the last game of civ we ever played. I'm sure wherever he is, he's laughing about that. I suppose it's a fitting bookend. He won the first game of civ we ever played too. That one was a slaughter, because I had never played the game before and he was the one who introduced me to the series when Civ VI came out. I was playing Brazil and thought that I was doing decently well on science, but it became pretty obvious that he was going to win on culture. So I did what you're supposed to do and declared war, thinking that he had forgotten to build a military. Not so. Back in the first version of Civ VI, when you deleted units, you got some cash back in return. And he had built up a little valley of great artists and writers and musicians. When the war came, he deleted all of them — at ~4k gold a pop. The next turn he had a few dozen tanks, and a few turns after that he was rolling over all my cities. I spent the next few weeks playing the game relentlessly because I wanted to beat him. I did, eventually. When he taught me the game, he said that generally it was ungentlemanly to declare war before the industrial age. But I was not a gentleman, and surprised him with an early war as Classical Era Rome.

He had that effect on me — made me want to get better at things. For as long as I knew him, he said he wanted to be prosecuting white collar crime. He could've made a killing in some corpo job doing m&a, he was way smarter and way more capable than most people I knew, lawyer or not. He grew up in a town where a significant chunk of kids never bother to take the SAT, much less make it to an ivy and then Stanford law and then the DOJ. He could've done anything he wanted to do, including make bags of cash. But he used to say that money was made to be spent anyway. I respected the hell out of that. I think that made me want to do something more than collect a paycheck too. He loved what he did and what he did was make the country a better place. We played Civ together at least once a month. During COVID we played weekly, every Friday to Sunday, for almost a year. He was on the West Coast then and I was on the East Coast, so we'd play into the early morning. I was going through a pretty hard breakup, and since we were chatting weekly he caught the brunt of that. He'd remind me that sometimes the only way out is through. So here, I suppose. I've since written several thousand words on Civ and I'll never be able to beat the guy who introduced me to the game again.

Another joke that I think he would've liked. He was the only legal witness to Mia and my court marriage. Now that he's gone, there's no one who can attest to our wedding. I didn't really have a punchline though. Normally I'd tell him the setup over a game of civ and he'd come up with something witty to say in response. "Ya it's been a weird week, the guy who witnessed Mia and my wedding just died." "Well on the bright side it means Mia can finally escape." Something like that.

Of course, even though he got me on civ, I beat him the last time we played Mario Kart Doubledash. So I'll always have a consolation prize. He was a regular at my family's house for Thanksgiving. I think he came by basically every year since 2015. Well, that's not quite right — more recently he'd been spending more time with aunts and uncles in Sonoma. There was a period of time where he didn't really know his folks in Sonoma, so I like to think that we stood in for a bit as surrogates while he was in college. After his dad passed I think he thought it was just him and his sister, so it was a pleasant surprise when he rediscovered his extended family. Whenever he did come over, though, we would fire up the Gamecube that was still attached to an old crt we kept in the basement and run through all 16 races. I didn't know him when I was 10, but I think we would have been friends then. My mom took the news of his passing pretty hard. She's still messaging our family group chat, along with my sister, about how strange it all is. To know someone for almost 11 years, and then suddenly it's all past tense. 'Knew'.

It is strange. I am still here. I don't stop existing just because something like this happened. So I have to go about doing all the things that one does by virtue of existing. I have to be in a physical place. I have to decide what to do with my hands. I have to figure out whether I want a sandwich or pizza for lunch, and think about how to respond to a slack message, and decide whether I should spend my evening playing Mario Kart or go to sleep early. I'm having this reaction now, but he's been dead for two months. To me he died yesterday, but he's already in the ground, cold and buried. Life goes on. It's strange because of how much life just keeps going on. Like, wow, time just keeps ticking at one second per second huh.

I never really considered that phrase before, "life goes on." I guess I always saw it as more of an off-the-cuff dismissal, like, "yea, this thing happened, but whatever it's no big deal." But in retrospect, it's more a statement on the inexorable requirements of existing. "Yea, this thing happened, and you still have to be even in the face of it." I've had a pretty good run. I have not had anyone really close to me die until now. My grandparents all passed away, but I never really knew them because they mostly lived in India. And while I regret not really getting to know them better, I was spared the grief of their passing. So I'm sitting here at 29 years old dealing with mortality for the first time. I'm in awe at the enormity and the finality of it. There's a part of me that wants to try and freeze everything in amber, scramble to find every photo and write down every memory and remember every joke because to forget seems worse than anything else. But also I know that's impossible and ridiculous, because life goes on.

I am grateful that he was in my life for 11 years. Not many people can claim friendships that long even in normal circumstances. Thinking about that helps too.

I've often told the people I care about that when I die I want Ecclesiastes 3 read at my funeral. I'm not particularly religious and I'm certainly not Christian, but I really love Ecclesiastes. I always thought it would provide comfort to those gathered for my passing. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it provides comfort for me now. "There is a time for everything." That's how it opens. Right now is the time to mourn. And then, not even that far in the future, it will be the time to dance. And later still it will be the time to do other things. "I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God."

I'll miss him. Beyond that, I'm not sure there's really much more to say.