Angel In A Sparkly Jumpsuit

December 24, 2023

My darling Verona,

I don’t know where to begin. I tried texting your number, but every time it says “delivered,” I keep thinking there’s a chance you’ll respond. 

No amount of beautiful things in the world could make the emptiness I feel without you go away. With all of the shining stars in my life, you were one of the brightest. I am devastated that I won’t be able to see you travel light-years to touch the other stars in galaxies past. 

It’s strange when grief chooses to hug you. I feel it the most in the dead of the afternoon, or right after I’ve tucked myself into bed. It’s crazy because it’s only been one day…but I’m going to have to do this every day, remembering you, for the rest of my life. 

To be honest, I hadn’t known you all that long. But something about friendships in your early 20s – there are the ones that you know will last a lifetime. Even with you gone, know that ours always will. You will be in my life forever, in this lifetime, the next, and the one after. That much I can promise you. 

It makes me sick that not even a week after I wrote a piece about my own happiness, yours was taken away from you just like that. I feel guilty for every ounce of joy I carried, and I knew you would never want that for me. If there was anything that ever brought you joy, it was making others around you smile. 

It’s a little bit different this time with you. For you, unlike Jordan, it wasn’t a choice. The afterlife did not promise you respite from this world. You didn’t choose to go. It has made me contemplate more than the mere fleeting nature of mortality. 

It isn’t fleeting. It is cruel. 

I don’t think your death will hit me until I have to go to our climbing gym again. It won’t hit me until I’m about to text you, “Hey wanna climb?” because I’ll realize that I can’t. You won’t answer. 

Your death won’t hit me until I want to invite you over to my place to catch up and decompress. You no longer live down the street from me. You no longer work on the other side of Mira Mesa Blvd to me. The next time I go to your workplace, you won’t be there, excited to see me, excited to catch up, excited to complain about the latest crazy happenings in the lab. 

Verona, we were supposed to turn 25 together next month. You were supposed to turn 25 on the second of January and then rub it in my face until mine on the 23rd. You don’t know the history of my birthday. But it doesn’t matter. You were always so happy to have me in the present with you, regardless of the date, the time, or the year. For New Years, you were going to wear the sparkly two-piece jumpsuit Robyn and I picked out for you at that one boutique in Carlsbad over a year ago. You told me you don’t dress up often, that you don’t need to, that it’s not quite your style because you never know what to shop for. 

I hope shopping with me made you glow. No matter how sparkly that jumpsuit was, you made it twinkle even more with your light. 

I hope you got to wear that denim dress for Jeff at least once. I still have the pictures of us from that one day at the winery. I have all the videos that you took of me with the winery cat, Tash. I will never delete those memories. 

I miss how much alcohol made you talk. I miss the chocolates you would bring to my house. I miss the lazy hours of the night when we would smoke and talk and forget that we had to go to work tomorrow. I miss how punctual you always were; it didn’t matter what kind of party it was, but no matter how hard you tried to be late, you could never be. 

I miss your energy so early in the morning, when I’d be a zombie and you’d be next to me, talking away and helping me wake up before a long shift. I always envied the way you talked about your family – how close you were with your mom, dad, siblings, and uncles. It made me want to reconnect with mine more. 

You died yesterday morning in a car accident on the 94W and 15N. I imagine you were driving up to see your family in the East Bay, which is not far at all from where I grew up. You were probably going to ski before wearing that sparkly jumpsuit for the new year’s party with your friends from back home. 

Here I am, blessed with breath and the chance to do what you cannot. But it breaks my heart because I can enjoy these things and you cannot. You deserve it more than I do. You loved every minute of living, and I could never even appreciate the gift of blood, flesh, and breath until now, when it’s too late to give it back to you. 

You, my dear Verona, you fucking lived. You lived with every single minute of your being, and that’s a far truth from what I’ve done up until now. I spent so many years trying to stand, trying to find meaning, trying to be more than what I was. 

Coming back home to the Bay Area has been a surreal experience. Every year, it is different, because every year, my relationship with it changes. 

I don’t hate this old rickety house quite so much. Even though it’s cluttered and my room is no longer quite mine, I finally feel a small sense of belonging because I am no longer tip-toeing around trying to erase my very existence here. 

I am sitting here, in the dead of the afternoon, unbothered and left to my own devices, which is all I’ve ever wanted. There is an idyllic laziness in the way the hours crawl by this Christmas Eve. I used to hate how slowly the time passed up here; I would literally count down the seconds until I had to leave. 

I remember talking to you about this this past New Year’s. I told you that with every passing year, it gets harder and harder to leave home behind. For once, what was supposed to be my home but never was, is slowly becoming mine once again. And for once, the change in pace, the slowing down when I come home, is starting to make sense. It is something I am starting to look forward to. 

I’m worried about you. I still don’t know where souls go when we die. How do I know you’ve made it to the other side? I wonder if there’s a way you can let me know. Someone told me that you’ve just gotten there and you’re getting settled. I hope there’s a lot of weed on the other side. I hope you’re smoking already. And knowing you and your work ethic, you’ve already started trying to send me signals.

I’ll get your flares when I’m ready to let you go. Some part of me still wishes you’ll text me back to let me know you’re okay. That you’ll still be at the gym the next time I go. That I’ll hear the doorbell ring and you’ll be standing there, holding the familiar tupperware of chocolates. 

I am no stranger to discomfort or the strange cyclic path of healing and grief. You just hit too close to home. We’re never really ready to lose the ones we love, but I never thought you would be one of the first. 

Everyone I’ve told has privately reached out to me to check in on me. There are so many people praying for you, Verona. It wasn’t just me that your light touched. Even the folks at the gym you met in passing, they remember you. They remember your voice, your brightness, your laughter. Just like I do. 

It is times of darkness like this that I am reminded so much of the love that surrounds me. It’s hard to hear everyone ask me how I’m doing, to have them check in on me because they’re worried about me. I am a recluse in my sadness, even more so of a hermit in my grief and emotional vulnerability. I have always kept such things to myself, because words like those used to mean nothing to me. I always thought those were customary things to say, that people don’t care enough afterward to see their own words through. 

But as I’ve gotten older and truly experienced the bittersweet melancholy joy that life brings, I find that we all wallow in the same pits of misery and sadness. Now, I would prefer to not have to do it alone, because I don’t have to. 

For anyone that asks me, I tell them that you wouldn’t want to see me sad. You wouldn’t want any of us to be sad that you’re gone. And your death has bolstered meaning in mine. 

For how insignificant and fleeting our lives are, they are so deeply interwoven with that of our loved ones. I can’t find you and walk with you just yet Verona. I need to gather up all the stories that I can, so that when I do find you and Jordan, we can spend hours together and have lots to talk about before our souls become attached to a new lifeline in a new lifetime. 

I can’t wait until you are reborn again. You will be the literal definition of a phoenix, rising from the ashes of the many bowls we smoked together on my couch. 

You live on in so many ways. The flowers on my phone case, which was the same as yours. The places I go. The tattoos on me even remind me of you, because we spent a lot of time sharing the meanings of ours to each other. Whenever I saw Mini Coopers and motorcycles, I thought of you. Now, I always will. 

After this new year, after your birthday, will be the first stoner chefs I host for a while. This will be the first one at this address that you will not have attended. It will be a stoner chefs to celebrate birthdays, to celebrate the new year, to celebrate love, and to celebrate life – this one in particular will celebrate yours. 

So rest assured, my darling Verona. There will be so much weed and edibles that you’ll get high on the other side too. We will have champagne and dance a little drunk to stupid songs we won’t remember the next day. And we will eat and eat and eat until we are too full to move and then we will continue to eat some more for good measure. 

I haven’t cooked in a long time. Mostly because of time, but also because I haven’t been able to bring myself to do so in the headspace I’ve been in. I stopped cooking after my housewarming, right before my psychotic episode and haven’t quite been able to pick it back up. But for you, I will start again, because you loved every single thing I made. 

I will make your favorite chicken thighs, and I will save the sauce. Just for you. 

Verona, I miss you so much already. I love you, and every time your name pops into my head, there is a tightness in my chest that I don’t know how to alleviate. I wish I could’ve told you all these things when you were alive. But I hope you knew.

I hope you knew every time I invited you out to do something. I hope you knew with every passing conversation we had, all of the conversations that we couldn’t end because we had too much to say, even after we already said bye. I hope you knew even then, when I didn’t, during the last conversation we ever had together that Thursday, in the dead of the afternoon, before I had to rush off for class.

I hope you knew how much you really meant to me. To all of us. And if you didn’t, I hope this letter finds you in the netherworld and you know now. 

I can’t quite bring myself to end this letter, because in a way, when I do, you might really be gone forever. 

I won’t sign off then. Because like we said the last time we talked, it’s just a see you later. I didn’t realize then that it’d really mean…”until next time.”

So until next time, my darling Verona. You will forever be my angel in the sparkly jumpsuit, and the spirit guardian of all the flower I smoke everyday now in honor of your life.