My Best Friend Died Mid-Conversation
The message shows delivered; it will show delivered forever.
The last thing I ever said to my best friend was "a hotdog is absolutely a sandwich and you know it." It shows as delivered, 11:42 pm, and it will show delivered forever, because Sana died at some point in the eleven minutes between my message and the reply she never sent.
We had been having that argument since we were fifteen. Not continuously. It was a fire we kept banked and blew on whenever life got boring, the way old friends keep three or four eternal debates going the way other people keep houseplants. That night she had reopened it out of nowhere, at 11:31, with a photograph of a hotdog and the single word "discuss." I was brushing my teeth. I typed my line one-handed, hit send, saw the little word appear under the bubble. Delivered. Then I went to bed, twenty-nine years old, believing as everyone believes that delivered means arriving, means received, means she is on the other end laughing and loading her counterargument.
Her sister called me at 6:50 in the morning. I knew before she spoke... the way you know from the shape of a silence. A brain aneurysm. On her kitchen floor, sometime before midnight. Her phone was found next to her, face up, my hotdog verdict glowing on the lock screen, and I am sorry if that detail is too much, but it was too much for me too, and I have carried it alone long enough.
Here is what shock actually feels like, since the movies get it wrong. It is not screaming. I said, "Okay. Okay. Thank you for calling," like she had told me my dry cleaning was ready, and I hung up, and I put four slices of bread in a two-slice toaster, and I stood watching the toaster until it smoked.
The screaming came later, in a parked car outside a pharmacy, eight days after the funeral, triggered by nothing, triggered by a song we did not even like.
Sudden is its own species of loss. When my grandfather died there was a long hallway to walk toward it: diagnosis, decline, the gathering at the bed, the chance to say the things. With Sana there was no hallway.
There was a door slamming in the middle of a sentence.
Fifteen years of friendship and the record just stops, mid-joke, mid-argument, mid-everything, and your brain refuses the edit. For weeks some animal part of me was still waiting for her reply. I would feel the phone buzz in my pocket and know it was her... know it completely for half a second, twenty times a day. Each time, the little death of remembering. Nobody warns you that you lose a person once and then lose them again every morning for a season, in the first soft moment before memory boots up.
And the thread was still there. That was the unbearable, precious, radioactive thing. Fifteen years, migrated across four phones, every inside joke searchable.
I could not open it and I could not delete it... and I could not stop opening it. At the top, her name. Under my last bubble, that one word.
Delivered.
We think delivered means it arrived. Sometimes it only means it is waiting, and some messages wait forever.
I kept texting her. I want to say that plainly, because I thought I was losing my mind until a grief forum at 3 am showed me hundreds of people doing exactly the same thing. Three days after the funeral I typed, "you would have hated your funeral flowers," and sent it into the dark, and something in my chest unclenched half a notch.
So I kept going. Small dispatches. "Your mum wore the red coat." "I ate at our place, they still do the thing with the extra chutney." "It has been a month and I am still right about the hotdog." Every one of them: delivered. The word stopped being a knife after a while and became something else, a lit window in a house I could no longer enter but could still walk past.
Then, in the spring, her sister asked me to come help with her flat, and I found the notebooks.
Three of them, spiral-bound, hidden in plain sight on the shelf between cookbooks, filled front to back with poems. Sana. My loud, hotdog-arguing, karaoke-hijacking Sana had been writing poems for years and had never told me, never told anyone. Some were dated back to school, which means she was writing them while we sat in the same room, while I complained about my life across the same table. They were good... That is the part I still cannot get over. They were not the private scribbles you politely praise; they were sharp and funny and then suddenly not funny at all, poems about her father leaving, about hospital waiting rooms, about, in one that stopped my breath, the friend I would call if I could not call anyone, and the poem makes it clear that friend is me, and she never sent it, and it sat delivered to a notebook for nine years.
I sat on her floor and read all three notebooks straight through and understood that grief had one more trick left: you can lose someone and then meet them again afterward, a whole hidden wing of them, and mourn that too, the conversations you now know you could have had. She had a voice nobody heard.
She died with the record button on.
Her sister and I argued about what to do, the good kind of arguing, the kind Sana would have refereed with popcorn. Keep them private, honor the secrecy? Or let them out, honor the work? In the end we chose the work. I typed up the strongest ones and we shared a few in a space that features writers nobody had heard yet, which is exactly, literally, what she was. Strangers read her. Strangers quoted her lines back in comments. One poem about hospital waiting rooms found its way to a nurse who said she taped it inside her locker. Sana got readers eleven months after she stopped being able to know it, and I do not have a tidy belief system to tell you where she is, but I know her words are somewhere now besides a shelf between cookbooks.
Reading her poems is also what got me writing, because after you meet your best friend's secret voice, your own silence starts to feel like a waste. I write badly and often, mostly about her, mostly about grief and the strange guardianship of memory, the job of being the last database of fifteen years of jokes. Someone has to remember the extra chutney. Someone has to keep the argument alive.
Which I do. Every year on her birthday I open the thread, scroll past two years of one-sided dispatches, and send the photograph back to her. The same hotdog. The single word discuss.
It says delivered, every time.
And every time, for half a second, the old animal part of me waits, watching the screen glow in the dark of my kitchen, absolutely certain that somewhere the three little dots are about to appear, that she is typing, that she has been composing her counterargument for two years now and it is going to be devastating.
Take your time, Sana. I am not going anywhere. The message will wait.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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