𝕺𝖓 𝕷𝖎𝖛𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖂𝖎𝖙𝖍 𝕹𝖎𝖓𝖊 𝕸𝖊𝖓

Lucia Auerbach

I’ve never really been able to think straight around them. Going into their rooms always meant voluntarily jumping feet-first into a black hole. These rooms were not meant to be occupied by twelve people at any time: sitting on the floor, on top of trash cans, and turning twin XL beds into five-person couches. It’s a hotboxed clown car of a room with fake Persian rugs, dirty breakfast plates, and the bare minimum amount of cleaning supplies. I’ll read pages and be unable to recall any sentences. It’s an endless stream of inappropriately loud conversations, and I have trained myself to fall asleep to the chatter.

Everyone has a litmus test on first dates—mine is telling him that I live with nine men. Some find it hysterical, seeing me as some kind of pin-up doll that walks around in a sultry maid's uniform picking up after the men's mess. Others, perplexed. Why would any (seemingly) respectable young woman want to live with nine men in their twenties? They imagine me living in a frat house, which isn't too far from the truth. But then, they're accepting, trying to posit themselves as feminists who believe that women can be friends with men despite the pair of B cups on my chest. My favorite is when I know to run away—this happens when they find this situation to be implausible, that men and women fundamentally cannot live together. It's a preposterous reversal of gender roles, that they can plausibly be themselves around me.

After I drop this tidbit and assess their reactions, I then reveal the reason why. Our friend died. But that isn't the full accurate story; it is just what sounds the best. Our estranged friend had died a few months after he moved out of their housing arrangement. It was easier for me to move in so they didn't have to walk me home every night anymore or deal with a stranger. I usurped the weight of a sole female roommate and then, in a matter of weeks, filled the gap that death had highlighted.

When I wake up, I always have about one and a half to two hours where I am the only one awake. I go to the kitchen to make my latte and scrambled eggs and eat them relatively quickly. I go back to my room and change out of my pajamas with my back to the window overlooking 110th Street with the broken blinds. I never fixed them. Before I leave the only space that has a resemblance of privacy, I wrap my too-short towel and pause at the door to make sure I don’t hear anyone walking by. The bathroom door is only a skip away. By now, they are slowly rising as I put on my makeup. Pat will walk into my room for an outfit consultation when I only have one eye painted on. He never seems to notice.

Pat likes to explain things, like how THC bonds in your body or Dewey’s aesthetics. His parents are therapists, so he likes to talk a lot about emotions like they are entities you can walk in and out of to visit.

"We're so exhausted because this grief is such a complex emotion,” Pat said. “Normal grief is one thing; maybe it is even straight-forward in comparison to this layered guilt and grief and anger.”

When I truly realized that Nick had died last night, I was squatting next to the toilet seat. The nausea was only performative so I sat down to pee. I look at my inner thigh at Pat and I’s matching tattoo we got this past winter. We had both read Slaughterhouse Five over the holidays and had been struck by the main character, Billy Pilgrim’s, tombstone he sees at the end of his life. On it, the words “EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT” are inscribed. Above the words sits a cartoon cherub that is now on my thigh and Pat’s inner bicep.

Billy Pilgrim doesn’t live in a universe with linear time. It is completely out of his control that he lives with no past, present, or future; he appears at random times on his timeline. He is unstuck in time. Pat justified the tattoo based on the principles of Billy Pilgram’s unstuck in time theory. Since we are friends at this time, we have been and always will be friends, even if we are no longer in each other's chronological past and future. Billy makes it clear that being unstuck in time does not mean you are a time traveler; rather, he becomes an observer of his own life as he views various moments from his own timeline. We are just jumping around—it was once, has been, and will be.

This is what I stared at during Nick’s funeral. Some people believe in God during times like this; I believed in Vonnegut. My skirt was layered with sheer pieces of black silk chiffon, and, if positioned correctly, I could see the cherub smiling at me. The smile is all distorted because of the bend of my knee, and for a moment I almost grin. It takes a certain kind of lunacy to smile at a funeral. I’ve never known a pain like this before—I was just lying on the floor dry-heaving and felt the contractions of realization punch my stomach over and over again. But then I look at my knee, and there’s that cherub. It reminds me that maybe my time is like Billy Pilgrims; yes, I’m in pain now, but I was once happy with Nick. So maybe I can travel back to that moment and be happy with him again.

“We were once friends, so we were friends, and are friends, and always will be friends,” I repeated in my head, bouncing my left leg up and down, trying to ignore Olivia’s sobs and Debussy’s echoing “Clair de Lune.”

“I’m allowed to be here,” I added in my head. “I am supposed to be here. We were, so we always will be.”

I tried to remember the last thing I said to Nick. The last text I sent read “Eagle.” The last words I muttered were probably a mouthed “hey.”

For me, he died years ago. But he passed away in his sleep last year.

When Nick died, we hadn’t been friends for 364 days. He had already left my physical life. He pointed out one of my insecurities 364 days ago, and I have never spoken to him since. He moved out 364 days ago, and seeing him has made me freeze since. It’s been around 182 days since I knew I would move into what should have been his room and that I’d be living with nine men.

I was scared to go to bed that night, not only because of how it happened but also because I feared the morning. I was afraid of the one to two hours where I would be surrounded by silence that would now feel heavy with absence. I fell asleep with my door ajar.

We all had to wake up at the same time because a fire drill occurred at 9 a.m. They said it was important to evacuate at any time of the night so you wouldn’t burn and die in your sleep.

“Do they really need to remind us of that today?” I asked Wyatt while turning away from the pajamaed crowd and into his shoulder. There was no silent and lonely morning to wake up to today.

Maybe in the mornings I wasn’t actually hearing silence. There has never been, never is, and never will be silence.

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot … I subsist, however, and cannot help myself subsisting. I am still there with the void I have just made about me.” (John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings)

When Nick died, we weren’t greeted with a package of absence. No gaping presence at our front door. That had already happened 364 or so days ago after our screaming exchange. We had already been given ample time to grieve his absence from our lives. But he was still present, still alive. It wasn’t silence that we were initially grieving back then. It was that the conversations still occurred as I’d try to fall asleep in the other room, but his voice wasn’t present in them. The kitchen wasn’t silent because, yes, the pans banged against the sink, but now the banging was louder because his laugh wasn’t there. His infectious laugh was no longer there to make the average laugh seem meek. It was never silent when he was around. These men are not a quiet group of people. When he left us, but before he died, it had gotten quieter. Nick’s voice no longer boomed in the kitchen to dispute the idea of silence for those who hadn’t read John Cage’s lectures. But the months went by, and now it’s over a year, so everything doesn’t sound as diluted or loud.

I used to think that when I was alone, I was hearing silence. In the same way, I used to think that when people died, everything would turn quiet. But it is a loud world we live in, and grief is a surprisingly loud emotion. In this way, I now understand what Cage was getting at. Silence truly does not exist; absence is very apparent, and the world will not let you be quiet. The music never stops. Nick didn’t even get to have a year of missing the music we create in those too-small rooms. His death was loud in the sense that his absence was unmistakable.

Pat was right; this was a complex grief. But had we already gone through the process? Had we already grieved him not being in our lives anymore? Did that make it any easier? But now we have a million more phases added because we certainly weren’t healed from his initial absence. Now we’ve been graced with the loud and incessant gift of “What Ifs” and “I Wish I Hads” and “Piles of Guilt.” Grief is a complex sound. It is loud. I told you they are the loudest people I have ever met, and that used to include him too.

I question if maybe the song of his absence would’ve ended soon, and he could have been a class friend, or we could’ve talked our problems out and been close friends again (like we were, are, and will be). I wouldn’t be living where he should have been sleeping when it happened. I’d live in another building on my own, and he would’ve come over and helped me arrange my Picasso postcards on the wall. I would’ve bought the dachshund drawing one because it reminded me of him.

But what actually happened was that I saw the dachshund postcard at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona this past August and paused when I saw it because it reminded me of you. And instead of excitement over our friendship, my body was met with frustration at what you had said about me. I walked past the postcard, embittered and upset with myself. Maybe you were right, and we shouldn’t have fought in the first place. Our friendship should not have ended over a disagreement. But now we can’t forgive each other. Now, every time I see a Picasso dachshund, I will also feel grief and guilt and an intense despair towards the silence you have left in this world.

Even if Cage is right and the sounds of traffic through the kitchen window never let silence exist during my mornings, I think he missed something. I think he forgot about the sounds that never happened. Maybe the sounds that Nick was supposed to make weren’t meant to be heard in the first place; maybe there is no meant or supposed. Cage, what am I supposed to make of the sounds that should’ve happened but never did?

Lucia Auerbach is a New York City based writer originally from Los Angeles. She will graduate from Columbia University this spring with a degree in English literature and art history. From 2020-2024 she ran an independent publication for artists who identify as female called SILLY GAL. Her work has been featured there, as well as the Columbia Daily Spectator, Basta Magazine, and more.

@luciauerbach