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I went to west coast swing dancing last Wednesday at a quaint church in the corner of Locust Walk. To my surprise a Big Wild song came on, the same one in this video. It's nothing like the usual music, and it's honestly a really weird song for the quiet church where this really sweet wholesome group of people gather to swing dance. Everything started to slow down, and I turn my head to see someone raise their hands in glee, like something was washing over him. I see people coupling up and begin their dance to this song that sweeps up anyone within earshot.

I stood by on my own.

Suddenly I was 19 again. Suddenly I was at a small concert venue and the lights were flashing and the beat was going to drop in a way that it never did before.  I was at a small rave with my friends with a pill that made my teeth chew too hard on that gum and is probably extremely damaging to my brain but I didn't care about that because everything was so good. The artist's name is Big Wild. Fitting because I was 19 and I thought that this was peak living. Doing it big and doing it wild. I thought that this was what it meant to be that age and that it meant something that I could attain it. My heart expanded and swelled up along with a music that felt like brassy gold, glinting and blaring the way musicians must be at a live dance hall. We were young, we were free.

I must've looked so funny last Wednesday, standing there at the sidelines of a dance floor in this church at UPenn with my head bopping a bit too hard and my heart twisted the way it is when you don't know yourself yet but you feel like there's something gnawing at you. The way a heart is tormented when you do feel grief but you don't know how to love yourself yet so you don't even know how to feel it. It was so much easier when I was 19 and I was out with my friends to this song. Now, I'm 26, and I'm standing alone on a dance floor.

It was a complicated time. A spring of too much psylocibin and too much Hegel. I was overstimulated and had no need for reality. Swarthmore college is a perfect setting for a long trip. We were at the Foundry. My boyfriend at the time, two of my friends, Tristan and Bunn and my best friend Mari and her boo at the time. What else can you ask for?

The truth is, I couldn't wrap my head around our relationship and that's why it was hard at the time to wrap my head around what this loss meant for my life that was moving so fast. We became friends fast. There was so much fun but also so much seriousness in our relationship. Bunn, Tristan and I, we came together that spring and mapped out a road to the next world. We understood our fun not just as fun, but revolutionary. We made some big plans. Absurd plans. The way you do when you're young and high and the trees tower over you and you think that the promise of more is guaranteed. We seriously believed that our friendship was cosmic. I guess it is.

"We gotta go and try ayahuasca together. We gotta throw this party to make sure everyone gets to play the way we do. We're going to become rappers. We will make flower crowns and eat vegetarian. We're going to make electronic music and rage but also we're going to work in the UN and make sure this rager is global and conscious and socially uplifting! Bunn was going to take care of the computer part and Tristan the science part and me the humanities. We planned how we would live together in a year. We're going to do it, we're going to do it. It all made so much sense."

We just vibed. At first I was a bit weirded out by them honestly. But they warmed up to me. Bunn was the first person I ever tried freestyling with. It was in the basement of Wharton, and I remembered feeling embarrassed and then free and so excited. It was with Tristan and Bunn that we could talk about consciousness, and where I found the beginnings of my philosophy in aesthetics. But there was always a tinge of something dark. Something about my intuition and the drugs and the spirits of the trees  and it was always there. There was a lot of yang but there was a lot of yin. That darkness was a current that swam underneath all that excitement, an eel waiting for the write time to pulse and snap.

And it did when it did. He tried to kiss me first. The darkness did reveal itself; and I did tell Bunn that one night that he was going to transform. My spirit overcame me, "This is all about you, Bunn, this party, this Sync Up, it's your transformation ceremony." The eel swam up. The thread that stitched the shadow so neatly underneath the feet began to fray.

When he told me the truth about himself, we cried. We were in the amphitheater stage, I remember it so clearly. Tristan had told me to come, come soon, it was Worthstock and I was at Worth Courtyard -- the largest party at Swarthmore of the year -- but I said okay, I'll come. It seemed pressing.

I remember how we sat there. He was facing out towards the steps, with his glasses, jacket with the stripe and his red flower hat and I sat facing the forest. I remember his face when he told me flat out.

And then we cried. I've never had tears like that before, my heart thumped so quick like a rock in the water and I don't think I will ever have it like that again. It's the kind you can only have with a bond so strong that you suddenly understand all the years of misery, all the moments of self-hatred, all the torment of someone else. Those tears felt clean. Felt forgiving.

That's the thing though, we never articulated this forgiveness. Did we forgive? Did I forgive? Did Tristan and Maddy forgive Bunn? Did Bunn forgive himself? It wasn't clear then. And only now do I think I do. That I did. That he did. That it was all in those tears.

But you see, this is why it was so complicated.  I knew he was going to transform, my spirit told me. I thought his confession to the crime was his transformation. I was about to take a semester off and he said he wanted to do it too. It made sense for him, and I was a huge advocate. Your transformation is going to be so big, I said, so it makes sense. I remember thinking that I was proud of him for changing. On messenger when he was about to go to his semester off I said "Lmk if you need anything" he said "fosho, thanks nessa" and I said "Dope :) I'm so excited! It's going to be good I can feel it. Good and hard."

I remember very exactly when Tristan told me the news. He called me on FB messenger when I was alone in Indonesia.  I had just left Danau Tauba where I had just done shrooms for the first time with my friend Venus. It's so fresh there because it's legal. Still tripping.

He died next to his mother in Thailand in a car crash. He hadn't seen his mother in years before that.

That night I went for a swim in the ocean. It was impulsive, I was at one of those picturesque airbnb's that a white man made in Aceh, Indonesia. Houses built on stilts that stuck out from the ocean. There were these rocks that anchored the stilts and I, stupidly and impulsively, climbed out the rocks and into the ocean. It was sharp and dangerous and the current pulled me farther than I realized. I think I wanted to feel something like tears all around me. When I tried to swim back I flailed for so long there was a moment where I realized that no one was with me and no one saw me come in and I remember looking up and seeing nothing but the horizon line. It's a strange feeling that sticks, a kind of calm panic. I kept getting pushed and pulled and finally when I got closer to the rocks I crashed into such a sharp piece of coral I still have the scar.

I was 20 and I guess this was how I dealt with my emotions. The next day I met some guy and he told me he would show me bioluminescent plankton because I was pretty. I said sure. The day after that I went scuba diving with some people because I helped pretend to be a struggling diver so they could practice CPR on me. Sure.

I made this video a few months after. I wrote a poem. I journaled art. I went back to school. I kept dating the same guy. I kept doing school. Had to keep thinking about my own future.

And I was really depressed, and utterly scared of myself. I was scared that I was a cause. Should I have not told him he was going to transform? Would it all have been okay if I didn't make the party about him? If he didn't take his gap semester to go see his mom again? Why did I know that he was going to transform? Who's talking through me and why? "Good and hard" I had said. Well, shit.

And there was so many loose ends to the story too. Did he end up getting to give his money to the families that he hurt? That's what he wanted. Did his dad know that he understood this? Why did he ask me about whether or not gay men were open in Thailand? At the same time I had to finish college. I had to get my internship. I pushed myself to do well in school. Finish my two thesis. Win awards.

Now, I think about how now my heart feels like it's trapped in a trail of glass shards. How I'm alone on a dance floor and wonder how my life got to this way.

My last message to Bunn was this: 

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And I don't even remember what the story I wanted to tell him is. I can't believe I don't remember it. I'm sitting here crying now and I know that I've kept it in for so long because I didn't think I was allowed to cry about this because it was so complicated. I felt responsible for so long. Then I felt like I released him. Like I helped him on his journey before he left. But to be honest, I never let myself feel like someone who just lost a friend. I regret not just telling him that story then and there. I do.

Now I remind myself to talk to the people I love now, anything can happen.

I keep searching my brain now. What's the story that he would love? What's the story I wanted to tell him? Why couldn't I tell him "rn"?

It really is all fun and games until someone you love dies like that.

Now I'm 26 and I have so much heartache to catch up on. I know this is a good thing for me. I know I want to keep dancing. I know that this is part of the story why my heart is so tormented.

I don't remember that story from 2017 but I know a story he would love now though:

Bunn, I'm writing my first rap now. The first line is about you.

"I got homies in the dust

that's why I need a love that doesn't rust. "

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